By Holly Bird, Jodie Bradshaw, Roger Grimshaw, Habib Kadiri and Helen Mills

Serious Violence Reduction Orders (SVROs), introduced under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, allow for suspicion-less stop and search of individuals previously convicted of certain knife-related offences. The pilot began in April 2023, in four areas across England.

The briefing finds attempting to track the use of SVROs is hindered by restricted data access. It argues that this lack of transparency undermines public accountability. Helen Mills, Head of Programmes at the Centre and co-author of the briefing, said:

The lack of openness about how SVROs are being used makes it impossible to answer basic questions about how an important new measure has been implemented. Violence reduction is too important an ambition for governments not to match the attention-grabbing claims with which new powers are introduced with transparency about what actually happens next.

With limited information from the pilot, researchers identified through annual stop and search figures, data that showed only 66 searches took place under SVRO powers in the first year of the pilot - significantly fewer than the 1,800 searches anticipated by the Home Office. None of these searches led to the discovery of weapons.

The briefing advocates for a more evidence-based approach to reducing violence. It recommends prioritising place-based investment, interventions for individuals affected by violence, and tackling damaged trust in policing.

Stressing the urgency of the government shifting focus, the briefing concludes:

The fundamental policy choice facing the government on reducing serious violence is clear. Does it develop stronger strategic programmes, based on the well-established evidence, and deliver the reductions in violence we all wish to see. Or does it continue with measures that, while giving the impression of being decisive, ultimately fall very short.

London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2024. 18p.

By Kaitlyn Rines

This report summarizes law enforcement reports of sexual assault offenses for the State of Ohio during the years 2016-2023. We also summarize characteristics of crime incidents, victims and suspects. We provide sexual assault rates throughout this report, and it is important to understand how we calculated them and what they mean. First, we calculate offense totals by counting the number of sexual assault victimizations documented within each law enforcement incident report. Sexual assault victim totals do not necessarily represent unique victims. For example, law enforcement could report that a suspect sexually assaulted an individual more than once during a single incident. Further, a suspect could assault the same individual during a different incident. Therefore, it is almost certain that the sexual assault offense total is larger than the number of individuals who were victims of sexual assaults. Next, we calculate the rate of sexual assault by dividing the sexual assault total by the population total and then multiplying the resulting number (the quotient) by 100,000. This yields a sexual assault crime rate per 100,000 persons. We provide Ohio’s overall sexual assault crime rates over time, and we also compare rates of sexual assault for Ohio’s standard demographic groups (e.g., age, sex, race). Rates can vary significantly depending on how many victimizations a group experienced as well as the size of one group versus another. For example, the sexual assault crime rate is much higher for female Ohioans than males, largely because the number of female sexual assaults is much larger than male. Further, most sexual assault victims are White females because most of Ohio is White. However, Black females have the highest victimization rate because their sexual assault total is large while their overall population size is small.

Columbus:; Ohio Department of Public Safety, Office of Criminal Justice Services. 2024. 62p.

By Jacob Kaplan · Aaron Chalfn

Observational evidence suggests that better ambient lighting leads people to feel safer when spending time outdoors in their community. We subject this finding to greater scrutiny and elaborate on the extent to which improvements in street lighting affect routine activities during nighttime hours. We report evidence from a survey experiment that examines individual's' perceptions of safety under two different intensities of nighttime ambient lighting. Brighter street lighting leads individuals to feel safer and over half of survey respondents are willing to pay an additional $400 per year in taxes in order to finance a hypothetical program which would replace dim yellow street lights with brighter LED lights. However, poor lighting does not change people’s willingness to spend time outdoors or to engage in behaviors which mitigate risk. Results suggest that street lighting is a means through which policymakers can both control crime and improve community well-being.

Security Journal (2022) 35:694–724