Abstract
Research QuestionHow concentrated is the total harm of offences with detected offenders (identified suspects) among the complete list of all detected offenders in a given year in an English police agency, and how consistent is the list of highest-harm “felonious few” offenders from one year to the next?DataCharacteristics of 327,566 crimes and 39,545 unique offenders as recorded by Northamptonshire Police in 7 years from 2010 to 2016 provide the basis for this analysis.MethodsCrime and offender records were matched to harm weightings derived from the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (Sherman et al. 2016a; Sherman et al., Policing, 10(3), 171–183, 2016b). Descriptive statistics summarize a concentration of harm identifying the felonious few, changes over time in membership of the “few”, offender typologies and tests for escalation of severity, frequency and intermittency across repeated offences.FindingsCrime harm is much more concentrated among offenders than crime volume: 80% of crime harm that is identified to an offender is linked to a felonious few of just 7% of all detected offenders. While chronic repeat offenders are the majority contributors to harm totals of this group, those with the most general range of offence types contribute the most harm. Individual members of the felonious few rarely maintain that position year on year; over 95% of each year’s list is composed of individuals not present in previous years. Within individual crime histories, we observe a pattern of de-escalation in crime harm per offence over time. “One-time” offenders, those with just one crime record, typically made up a third of the felonious few in both number and harm contribution.ConclusionsThese findings demonstrate the potential to target a small number of repeat offenders for harm reduction strategies using a metric of total crime severity, not just volume, despite a substantial portion of crime harm caused by one-time offenders that may be largely unpredictable.
Highlights
Like most police forces in England and Wales, Northamptonshire Police have traditionally been place-based in most of its crime analyses, focusing on the profiling of demand and resources by jurisdictional boundaries
The recent development of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CCHI) afforded an opportunity to examine this issue from the perspective of the total harmfulness of each offender and not just the frequency of their offending (Sherman et al 2016b)
Our findings demonstrate that the use of a severity metric such as the CCHI can provide important additional information for targeting police investments
Summary
Like most police forces in England and Wales, Northamptonshire Police have traditionally been place-based in most of its crime analyses, focusing on the profiling of demand and resources by jurisdictional boundaries. In 2017, the national police inspectorate (HMICFRS) recommended that police forces rethink their approach to offender management, with particular regard to the most prolific and dangerous offenders. Up to this point, these programmes had been primarily driven by considerations of crime volume. The recent development of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CCHI) afforded an opportunity to examine this issue from the perspective of the total harmfulness of each offender and not just the frequency of their offending (Sherman et al 2016b). This article reports on the first application of the CCHI to a population of detected offenders over a multi-year period.
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