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Homicide: A short problem-solving guide for policing

Brennan, I (2022). Homicide: A short problem solving guide for policing. College of Policing.

Published onJul 31, 2024
Homicide: A short problem-solving guide for policing
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Abstract

England and Wales benefits from one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. Nonetheless, when homicides do occur, the damage they do is incalculable. Consequently, every effort should be made to prevent these crimes. A great deal of policing resources goes into preventing and investigating homicide.
It was surprising to learn that a problem-solving guide for homicide did not exist. Perhaps this was by design: homicide is a relatively rare crime that is diverse in its antecedents and its modus operandi, meaning that a concise and universal set of guidelines on how to approach and prevent it is not forthcoming. In addition, homicide is implicitly accounted for in several problem-solving guides that address more frequent forms of violence. Nonetheless, there is enough similarity in the process of understanding and responding to homicide to warrant a short collection of guidance on how a police force, officer, analyst or team might begin to address a homicide problem in their area.
Problem-solving or problem-oriented policing is one of several techniques that may be taken to address a policing problem. It provides a structure through which any crime or disorder problem can be identified, understood and effectively responded to and it involves four stages. It is based on a logic that addressing a crime problem is dependent on a clear identification and definition of that problem (Scanning), a rigorous and critical intelligence-driven determination of the main drivers of that problem (Analysis), the implementation of a response or responses that tackle those drivers (Response) and a robust evaluation of the effectiveness of the response (Assessment).
This short guide will provide readers with an entry point to problem-solving with a focus on homicide. It uses examples from the homicide literature and discusses many of the important things to consider when thinking about these rare, diverse and emotive incidents.

This document is a draft of ‘Homicide: A short problem-solving guide for policing’ that was created by the author on behalf of the College of Policing. Much of the text has appeared in public in this online resource: https://www.college.police.uk/guidance/homicide-problem-solving-guide

This document remains the property of the author and does not reflect the views of the College of Policing.

It is available for reuse with attribution under a CC BY 4.0 license.

About this guide

England and Wales benefits from one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. Nonetheless, when homicides do occur, the damage they do is incalculable. Consequently, every effort should be made to prevent these crimes.

A great deal of policing resources goes into preventing and investigating homicide. Consequently, it was surprising to learn that a problem-solving guide for homicide did not exist. Perhaps this was by design: homicide is a relatively rare crime that is diverse in its antecedents and its modus operandi, meaning that a concise and universal set of guidelines on how to approach and prevent it is not forthcoming. In addition, homicide is implicitly accounted for in several problem-solving guides that address more frequent forms of violence. Nonetheless, there is enough similarity in the process of understanding and responding to homicide to warrant a short collection of guidance on how a police force, officer, analyst or team might begin to address a homicide problem in their area.

Problem-solving or problem-oriented policing is one of several techniques that may be taken to address a policing problem. It provides a structure through which any crime or disorder problem can be identified, understood and effectively responded to and it involves four stages. It is based on a logic that addressing a crime problem is dependent on a clear identification and definition of that problem (Scanning), a rigorous and critical intelligence-driven determination of the main drivers of that problem (Analysis), the implementation of a response or responses that tackle those drivers (Response) and a robust evaluation of the effectiveness of the response (Assessment).

This short guide will provide readers with an entry point to problem-solving with a focus on homicide. It uses examples from the homicide literature and discusses many of the important things to consider when thinking about these rare, diverse and emotive incidents.

Overview

Compared to many countries, Homicide in England and Wales is rare. In the past sixty years, the rate of homicide has fluctuated between a low of 6.8 per million in 1969 and 17.9 per million in 2003. The rate for 2021 was 9.9 homicides per million population. In simpler terms, around one in every 100,000 people is murdered each year in England and Wales.

In 2018, the most recent year for good comparison, within the 36 countries of Europe the homicide rate in the UK (11.2) was 19th – almost exactly the median (11.3). Russia was first with a rate of 82 per million and Norway in 36th, had a rate of 4.6 per million. Globally, the country with the lowest homicide rate in the world is Japan (approximately 2 homicides per million) and the highest is El Salvador (approximately 62 homicides per million). In Japan, around one in every 400,000 people is murdered each year while in El Salvador, that statistic is approximately one in every 2,000.

Despite its relatively infrequent nature, the societal cost of homicide is extremely high, with incalculable emotional costs for victims’ families as well as costing millions in medical expenses, investigation, punishment and lost economic output. Extrapolating from 2018 figures, the estimated societal cost of homicides in 2021 was around £2bn.

Policing and homicide

Killing another human is regarded across societies as the most heinous and universally prohibited of acts. Accordingly, it is also the crime that attracts the most serious punishment. Preventing murder, as part of routine law enforcement and public order maintenance has been within the remit of policing and its progenitors for centuries. The focus of this prevention was traditionally towards the more proximate causes of homicide, i.e. being in the right place at the right time to intervene before a fatal blow is struck. It is only in more recent years that the police role in the prevention of homicide has taken a longer-term view with a broader range of activities. This widening of remit has increased the opportunities for prevention, but has also changed the nature of prevention strategy, taking in a wider range of potential causal factors and mechanisms including early intervention, educational messaging and actuarial risk assessment. This wider range of causal factors and mechanisms necessitates a wider range of skills and resources that are not within the traditional toolkit of policing.

In addition to being a crime, homicide is widely considered to be a “disease”, in that it fatally harms the wellbeing of another person and reduces lifespan. It is also an act relevant to welfare and education in that it can deprive a child of a parent, giving it implications beyond the event itself. Homicide also has cultural impacts that are less tangible, but still significant nonetheless. Homicide, for example, is a kind of ‘signal crime’ that changes the way that communities understands themselves and impacts on feelings of safety, social cohesion and quality of life.

Despite the consequences of homicide extending far beyond law-breaking and law enforcement, responsibility for preventing homicide often falls on the police. However, an examination of the causes and drivers of homicide indicate that opportunities for intervention are often some time before individual offenders or victims come to the attention of the police.

Causes of homicide

Homicide as a rare event

Homicide, as a victim or perpetrator, is the most extreme moment in an often extreme life. It is very rare. Predicting rare – sometimes called ‘Black Swan’ – events is notoriously difficult, even in prolific offenders or frequent victims (see Box – Predicting homicide). Accordingly, a strategy that seeks to intervene with individuals to prevent involvement in homicide will have a great many false positives. Although the value of saving a life cannot be quantified, reducing the number of activities that do not have direct benefit should be a goal of an effective strategy. In practice, this means moving as far forward in the causal chain as possible to affect the greatest number of potential incidents using the fewest resources.

The drivers of homicide

The 2021 Home Office report, ‘Trends and Drivers of Homicide’ summarises the latest research literature on patterns in homicide and the factors that are associated with these trends. It discusses the extent to which variables are correlated with homicide. The review is limited by what is quantifiable on a large scale. For example, attitudes towards women were not discussed in this report, but misogynistic attitudes are likely to be a common feature in most perpetrators of domestic homicide. Limitations aside, the report and its annex is a remarkably detailed review of six key drivers of homicide: alcohol, drugs, the effectiveness of the Criminal Justice System, opportunity, character and profit.

Long-term

The consistency in homicide patterns across high-income countries indicates that there are common causes of homicide internationally. Whatever these are, they are most likely to be structural in nature, such as changing demographic distributions or socioeconomic factors that may interact. For example, as the population continues to age, it is likely that homicide rates will continue to fall, although the slope of this decrease is likely to be steeper for more affluent areas than more deprived.

Other factors that are likely to contribute to changes in homicide rates include variations in cohort alcohol consumption (e.g. younger adults drinking less than the generation before) and reduced access to firearms and knives. While weapons and alcohol may be causal factors in the occurrence of homicide, the evidence for the effect of legislative interventions on homicide is limited. For example, the introduction of minimum unit pricing and an associated reduction in alcohol consumption appears to have had little effect on violence in Scotland) and restrictions on firearms in Australia or the UK did not affect homicide rates.

Regardless of their potential effect on homicide, these cohort or legislative changes on homicide are beyond the reach of policing. More achievable but much more modest in their potential impact is the suite of activities and practice that police can adopt as part of their routine work to affect the shorter-term and community-level and individual-level drivers of homicide.

Short-term drivers

The Home Office report identifies three major drivers of short-term increases in homicide as fluctuations in illicit drugs markets, conflicts between street gangs or organised crime groups and crises in the legitimacy of policing or trust in the state generally. While these are probably more strongly linked to patterns in non-domestic homicide than domestic homicide, they are good indicators of the types of short-term drivers that are within the potential of policing to change. While these are underlying causes of short-term patterns, the focus of interventions may be more precise.

BOX: The causes of homicide – conditioning on the ‘dependent’

Because it is such an extreme form of violence, it is tempting to focus analysis on the causes of homicide independent of other serious violence. However, this approach can lead to conclusion that are spurious and even the reverse of the true relationship. Firstly, doing so places too much emphasis on the ‘outcome’ of serious violence rather than the behaviour: it is really the act of serious violence that we seek to prevent. There are too many factors beyond the control of policing that cause an act of serious violence to be fatal. Secondly, focusing on the causes of homicide risks what researchers call ‘conditioning on the dependent’ or ‘endogenous selection bias’, which can have some unexpected and confusing consequences. For example, the graph below uses randomly generated data on the number of violent incidents in an area and the number of petrol stations (we can assume there is no real relationship – illustrated by the left graph). Restricting the set of random data to homicides can create the illusion that petrol station availability might be causing serious violence when in fact there is no true relationship.

Figure 1 Spurious relationships in random data caused by selecting homicides only

A less obvious problem of selecting only fatal violent incidents is when our phenomenon of interest, such as the proportion of violence that is alcohol-related in an area, also affects the chances that someone might survive a serious violent incident (e.g. if there is better paramedic coverage in night time economies). By restricting to fatal violence only, we introduce lots of potential confusion to our understanding of how violence and alcohol consumption are really related.

There is a growing literature on how seemingly straightforward choices in data analysis can introduce significant bias to our intelligence analysis that are beyond the scope of this guide. A simple rule is, frame your analysis question around the criminal behaviour rather than the outcome of that behaviour. In the case of homicide, consider including ‘near-miss’ homicides as well (see ‘Data and intelligence to understand a homicide problem’ below).

BOX: Predicting who will become a murderer

Often data is seen as the key to identifying who will be a perpetrator of crime or predicting where and when a crime is likely to happen, but even a wealth of data can fail when the event we are trying to predict is rare. For example, in 2005, Rolf Loeber and colleagues published a paper that described risk factors for perpetrating serious violence and homicide using data collected between early childhood and adulthood from a group of 1,577 boys in Pennsylvania. This data set was more detailed than anything police and other agencies typically hold on individuals. The study included detailed information about personality traits, psychological disorders, criminal behaviours, maternal factors, parental child-rearing behaviours, peer delinquency as well as school and neighbourhood characteristics. It is one of the most comprehensive sets of data about the emergence of delinquency ever created. The study also contained information about offending including serious violence and homicide and used this information to identify risk factors for involvement in serious violence, such as a diagnosis of conduct disorder, selling drugs and involvement in gang violence. Limiting the analysis just to boys who perpetrated violence, those who had four or more risk factors were around 14 times more likely to be convicted of homicide. However, because homicide is so rare – 2% in this sample, much higher than in the general population – the risk factors were relatively common, the chance that someone with four or more risk factors actually committing murder was around 2%, or out of 50 people identified as being at high risk of committing murder, 49 would not do so. Machine learning is beginning to offer some improvements in predicting the location of homicides, but the performance of these models still falls short of being useful for operational purposes. Taking the logic of this example further, an intervention that addresses even very common features of murderers is likely to target a very high proportion of people who would never have committed murder – an important but often overlooked consideration for commissioning interventions.

Problem-solving for homicide

Developed by Herman Goldstein in the US in the 1970s, the problem-solving approach to crime prevention is one of the most effective ways to understand and respond to a crime problem. It has been applied to dozens of different crime types and offers a simple but effective method that will take the user from observing a new trend or problem through to developing a response and determining its effectiveness. Problem-solving emerged as a response to a reactive model of policing that was failing to address common crime problems resulting in an inefficient use of public resources that was having little public protection benefit. A recent review of the evidence on the effectiveness of problem-oriented approaches to policing across diverse offence types has shown its value in the policing toolkit.

The problem-solving approach shifts the focus of policing from reactive to proactive: using the intelligence, skills and networks of policing and its partners to understand and respond to persistent, common crime problems. It consists of four stages that should be undertaken in sequence, although it is advisable to move backwards and forwards within the process as new information comes to light and new ideas emerge. These stages are: Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment.

The remainder of this document provides a brief overview of a problem-solving approach to homicide. The aim is to help police officers and analysts to think about homicide in small homogeneous units rather than the complex and multifaceted crime phenomenon it is. In doing so, it attempts to reconcile the remit of problem-solving to deal with more common events and the rare nature of homicide. To undertake a robust analysis of causes and patterns in homicide, it may require a problem-solver to go back several years in their data to have a sufficient sample of homicides. Alternatively, as discussed later, casting a wider net, for example by including ‘near-miss’ homicides’, may be a sensible approach that will allow a good understanding of a clearly-defined group of homicides. From this first simple step, officers and analysts can work through the problem solving stages that follow and use them to design new and better innovations in homicide prevention.

Scanning

Scanning typically involves three steps.

  1. Selecting and refining a homicide problem

  2. Identifying relevant data and information that can help you to understand the homicide problem

  3. Analyse the data to provide a detailed description of the selected homicide problem’s key features

Selecting and refining a homicide problem

A common starting point for problem-solving is the identification of a broad category of crime problem that has become more common in your area or that has been a long-standing and serious issue. Homicide may fall into either category.

When we talk about crime problems, we rarely talk about them with the level of precision that is required to inform an effective problem-solving strategy. This is particularly true if a problem, like homicide, is relatively rare. However, broad categories, such as homicide, are less useful if we plan to understand the causes of specific, localised problems and identify a feasible strategy of intervention.

The process of scanning will help you to identify common types of homicide within an area. This might include homicides broken down by relationships between the people involved. Examples might include:

  • Homicide of one partner by another

  • Homicide of a gang member by a member of another gang

  • Homicide of one acquaintance by another in a night-time economy setting

  • Homicide of a child by a parent

  • Homicide of a parent by an adult offspring

  • Homicide of a stranger in a terrorism-related event

While this is a useful starting point, even this list (which is not exhaustive) is insufficiently precise for a problem-solving strategy. To home in on a meaningful target, we might cross-reference these categories with the circumstances of the event. Examples might include:

  • Use of a weapon

  • Specific location type

  • Timing of incident

  • Involvement of alcohol or drugs

  • Dynamic relationship between perpetrator and victim

Another category to think about is influencing factors, which can be fixed characteristics or may reflect more dynamic and short-term features. Examples of these include:

  • Spontaneous altercation

  • Domestic abuse

  • Alcohol related

  • Mental health

  • Drug use

  • Monetary/property gain

  • Inadvertent/collateral harm

  • Murder-suicide

  • Revenge/retribution

  • Gang-related

  • Night time economy

  • County lines

  • Politically/ideologically motivated

  • Corporate

Combining two or more of these categories, we might identify, for example, domestic homicide shortly after separation, serious violence involving knives in or around a local park or violence following conflict via social media.

Not all combinations of categories will yield a meaningful and actionable problem, but this is a useful exercise to begin thinking about the next stage of Scanning.

Identifying relevant data and information that can help you to understand the homicide problem

Once you have identified and clearly defined your local homicide problem, it is important to look at how the selected problem is patterned. Problem solving draws heavily on the principle that crime is highly concentrated: a small number of people and places experience a large proportion of all crime. Targeting preventive efforts at crime concentrations is a core plank of police problem solving and has repeatedly been shown to be an effective and efficient use of resources.

Once you have precisely defined the type of homicide you want to focus on, you should look to understand patterns in its occurrence, such as who, when and where and how have the patterns changed over time. Patterns to examine include:

Repeat offenders: Although repeat homicide is unlikely, studies have repeatedly shown that seriousness of violence can escalate within an individual – are there individuals showing worrying trends in their violence relating to this problem?

Repeat groups: Certain types of homicide might reflect conflicts within a community: is your homicide problem clustered within certain populations or groups?

Repeat victimisation: Repeat homicide victimisation is not possible, but homicide reviews have demonstrated escalating severity of violent victimisation as an indicator of increased risk of homicide: are there vulnerable groups relevant to your problem that have shown signs of escalating victimisation?

Hot weapons: Has there been an increase in the detection of certain types of weapons, such as knives or firearms in your area?

Locations: Do types of homicide cluster in areas over time? Are these places associated with any drivers of violent crime, such as the night time economy, drug markets or are types of homicide clustered in particular neighbourhoods?

Data and intelligence to understand a homicide problem

Compared to other crime types, homicide is rare, so it is important to exercise caution in reading patterns in the data that may be statistical anomalies. This problem – where we draw conclusions about an issue based on a small sample of information – is sometimes known as the ‘Law of Small Numbers’ or the ‘Black Swan fallacy’. For example, two domestic homicides within an affluent community over a short space of time may seem like a pattern, but may also reflect random variation. It is also important not to reach too far back into the data: while the macro-level drivers of homicide, such as demographics and inequality change slowly, meso-level factors such as an age group’s alcohol consumption or micro-level factors, such as gang activity, change more quickly. As a rule of thumb, around three years should be enough to reflect current serious violence activity in most police forces while overcoming the problem of rare events. However, local intelligence and knowledge is crucial in deciding if a new emergent problem warrants a more concise period to examine. An additional consideration is whether forces that are experiencing similar types of homicide might consider pooling their data

An additional data question is, what counts as a homicide? At first glance, this is nonsensical – either it was fatal, or it wasn’t – but we need to remember that we are more interested in the act of doing fatal violence than the outcome. If, for example, a shooter’s gun jams, a stabbing just misses the heart or a passer-by is an experienced paramedic, incidents that most likely would have been homicides became non-fatal violence. We should be just as interested in preventing these incidents as preventing fatalities. One solution to this when scanning homicide is to include ‘near-miss’ homicides. Not only is this approach logical in terms of preventing lethally violent behaviour, it also boosts the number of incidents (by around a factor of three) that we can use to understand our homicide problem. Defining a crime as ‘near-miss’ is subjective and may be dependent on individual circumstances, but as a guide, the following crimes may be considered as homicide and near-miss homicide:

Homicide

  • 001/01 Murder age over 1

  • 001/02 Murder age under 1

  • 004/01 Manslaughter

  • 004/10 Corporate manslaughter

  • 004/02 Infanticide

Near-miss

  • 002/00 Attempted murder

  • 004/07 Cause/allow death or serious physical harm to child or vulnerable person

  • 003/02 Conspiracy to murder

  • 005/01 Wounding with intent to go GBH

  • 008/01 Malicious wounding or inflicting GBH

  • 056/01 Arson endangering life

  • 5E (all sub-categories) Endangering life (all sub-categories)

Although the rarity of homicide makes its analysis vulnerable to inaccurate conclusions about patterns, problem solving for homicide is rich in data at the case-level. Therefore, a problem-solver can obtain information about an incident at a level of detail not usually possible for less serious crimes. In addition to much police data on homicide, data from other sources, such as social services, coroners and health services is usually more readily available. Although the insights gleaned from multi-agency homicide reviews comes too late to prevent the incident, piecing together multi-agency data can help construct a detailed problem analysis which might inform future prevention efforts. For example, data on non-fatal serious violence might suggest that gang-related crime is increasing, but a coroner’s report might identify a particular type of knife or firearm that can be linked to past crimes and offenders.

Example of data that might be used to better understand homicide problems include:

  • Emergency call logs

  • Police crime data

  • Police case files

  • Police intelligence reports

  • Health data

  • Local authority data

  • Homicide and safeguarding reviews (including child death reviews, adult safeguarding reviews, domestic homicide reviews, child safeguarding practice reviews, mental health homicide investigations and (forthcoming) offensive weapon homicide reviews)

  • Coroner’s reports

These records are often known as secondary data in that they were not collected for the purposes of problem-solving. An example of primary data, however, would be data that is collected (not retrieved) as part of the problem-solving process. This might include interviewing witnesses or investigating officers or visiting areas where violence is known to concentrate.

Once you are confident that your homicide problem is clearly defined and that there are clear meaningful patterns linking these homicides, you can move on to the next stage of problem solving, Analysis.

Analysis

Having identified a narrow set of homicides with common characteristics, the next activity is to use the available data to identify the causes and circumstances that are generating your problem, or at least maintaining it. In simpler terms: to understand the causes of the problem.

As noted earlier, there are many causes of homicide existing at macro, meso and micro levels. It is often not feasible for the police to influence long-term macro level drivers of homicide, such as demographics or inequality. Significantly affecting meso-level factors are also often outside the reach of normal policing, but intervening in many of the short-term micro-level factors often sits squarely within the police remit. In setting your Analysis goals, it is therefore useful to aim for micro-level factors, which tend to manifest at the individual, interpersonal and community levels. A common term in the problem-solving literature is identifying ‘pinch points’ and your Analysis is aiming to identify these.

A ’pinch point’ is a causal factor in homicide that can reasonably be addressed through policing practice. Often it is a common event or circumstance that is present in or precedes most of these incidents. This might be an event that increases an individual’s vulnerability or a predictable/scheduled removal of a safeguard or a failure of that system.

The Problem Analysis triangle

A useful way to think about the identification of ‘pinch points’ is to use the Problem Analysis triangle. Three things must be present for a homicide to occur: a person who is motivated to commit a homicide, an accessible victim and these two coming together in a place and at a time where capable guardians are absent. In the case of industrial homicide, the perpetrator of the homicide need not be present, but the mechanism by which the homicide occurs, such as a fire, must be present to fatally affect the victim. Capable guardianship can be any person or thing that can prevent the homicide from occurring. Examples of this include police, security guards and even bullet-proof glass, for guardianship does not have to be physical. The sound of a child in a home may prevent a domestic abuse incident from becoming fatal or witnesses may be able to deescalate a violent situation simply by their presence.

The middle layer of the problem analysis triangle reminds us to look at actors beyond the immediate homicide event that might be able to deter or pre-empt the homicide. These are those who might be ‘guarding’ a victim, ‘handling’ perpetrators or ‘managing’ locations where homicide is a possibility. Examples of ‘guards’ include police domestic abuse liaison officers or child welfare officers; ‘handlers’ might include probation officers or family members of a perpetrator; ‘managers’ might include nightclub security staff or housing officers.

When victims have already come to the attention of the police and allied services, as is often the case with homicide, this layer of the triangle is an essential part of the causal pathway to homicide and a crucial component for Response. At this level, data sharing is important. Homicide reviews have repeatedly identified that a lack of joined-up data sharing between services who ‘guard’ victims and services who ‘handle’ perpetrators have failed to share information that could have been central to identifying and managing risk of homicide earlier.

The outer layer of the triangle is ‘super controllers’ who can influence the activity of the actors in the middle layer. This might be a local authority who increase the availability of domestic abuse shelter facilities, legislators who support or prohibit data-sharing.

A careful analysis of a specific crime problem using the Problem Analysis triangle can be an enlightening experience in the process of developing a Response. The triangle emphasises that there are many levers that might profitably be pulled and actors engaged in the interests of preventing homicide. The important point to bear in mind is that not all causes of your local homicide can (or need to) be addressed at once. Good problem-solving might examine an issue from several perspectives and result in the implementation of a range of interventions that targets different outputs of the Analysis.

Figure 2 Problem analysis triangle

Crime scripts and trajectories

Homicides are events about which we often have unusually detailed information. Case files and homicide reviews will often provide timelines of events as well as contextual and background information. Working on the assumption that there is at least some consistency across specific types of homicide, a problem-solver may be able to construct an event ‘script’ for that the homicide type they have chosen. Naturally, when dealing with small numbers of incidents, even when homicide types are closely matched, there will be some random variation. A problem-solver seeking a ‘pinch point’ must be able to find the common ‘signal’ within the noise of the data. For example, in post-separation domestic homicide, was there a trigger event that preceded perpetrators returning to the family home? If there has been a spate of knife crime homicides involving machetes, did the perpetrators access their knives through a local underground market? The challenge here, as noted earlier, is to avoid the ‘Black Swan’ fallacy of extrapolating from one rare event to another. Thinking critically about the relative importance of ‘signals’ you have identified and seeking independent advice are important if your Response is to be effective.

BOX: Multi-agency responsibility for a multi-agency problem

The evidence on the ‘cycle of violence’ and the impact of ‘adverse childhood experience’ on later violent behaviour is compelling. It seems beyond doubt that much of today’s violence has its origins in the childhood experiences of ten and fifteen years ago. This link is not just about street violence; it seems to endure across types: witnessing domestic abuse as a child is strongly associated with both domestic abuse perpetration and victimisation as an adult.

The levers available for police to pull tend to be based on consequence/punishment and incapacitation and, by extension, rely on rational decision-making and awareness of consequences. On their own, these are a poor match for what is known to divert from or to change extreme behaviour in the short-term and interventions that aim to reduce homicide must acknowledge these limitations.

A police problem will result in police solutions which are likely to cost policing and have relatively little community benefit. If the levers available to police are not likely to be effective in isolation, a problem-solving approach to homicide must look beyond policing. Even when police think beyond their usual constraints to develop creative solutions, police may not be the best organisation to deliver the intervention: having trusted community and statutory partners to be the public face of interventions can greatly affect how they are received by the public.

It is also important to remember that partnership working has its limits. Services have different cultures and priorities that are sometimes incompatible; if partnership activities are too broadly defined, wide initial enthusiasm will result in weakening commitment from many partners; and organisational commitment is vulnerable to changes in personnel (not least policing). In establishing partnerships for a specific intervention, try to keep the partner membership as lean as possible, involve partners thoroughly in the design of the intervention, try to ensure full written organisational commitment and consider a ‘sunset clause’ for the partnership so that they do not outlast their value.

BOX: Recommendations for safe, predictable childhoods

  • Although future homicide offenders cannot be reliability identified from their childhood experiences, safe, predictable childhoods should be the mantra of all services involved in violence prevention

  • Responsibility for the prevention of serious violence must truly be shared across services

  • Input from community leaders, voluntary sector organisations and young people is vital for planning interventions, ensuring that they ‘land well’ and have legitimacy in communities

  • Police levers tend to be based on consequence/punishment and incapacitation and, by extension, rely on rational decision-making and awareness of consequences. These are a poor match for what is known to divert from or to change extreme behaviour

  • Early intervention must be at the first point of police contact or earlier and formal criminal processing should only be used once all other options have been exhausted

  • For support services to be seen as effective, all services must be seen as trustworthy, reliable and impartial

  • The principles of procedural justice – voice, neutrality, respect and trustworthiness – are essential in any communication and decision-making that involves people at risk of violence and their communities

  • Gender roles and misogyny must be taken seriously as a cause of domestic homicide

  • Victims of domestic abuse are often unwilling to engage with the police and may feel shame at their situation which can result in seemingly helpless or contradictory behaviour

BOX: Data sharing for homicide prevention

  • Clear guidance on data protection and GDPR rules are required for all agencies involved in homicide prevention. Concerns over culpability in the instance of data loss outweigh the potential value of data sharing for prevention

  • Prevention efforts would benefit from a coordinated, multi-agency national data sharing infrastructure

  • Crime analysts would benefit from guidance on use of data to determine risk and identify patterns

  • Analysts involved in homicide problem-solving should have a working knowledge of common logical fallacies in interpreting data and causal inference, such as the law of small numbers, the base rate fallacy and the ‘table 2’ fallacy

Response

Once you have identified plausible causes of your specific homicide problem, you can begin to think about what an effective response might be. This is the point where problem-solving and evidence-based policing begin to intersect (there is further overlap in the Assessment section).

Evidence-based approaches to homicide

The number of activities that police could deploy to combat homicide is limitless, but the number that have been evaluated rigorously is small and the number that have been shown credibly to affect serious violence is smaller again.

The field of evidence-based policing seeks to identify ‘what works’ in policing and preventing crime. Several toolkits have been developed in recent years that provide good overviews of the evidence base for preventing a range of different crimes.

The College of Policing hosts the ‘Crime Reduction Toolkit’ which details interventions designed to tackle many different crime problems and can be filtered depending on the crime (Problem), target group (Population), nature of the intervention (Focus) or driver (Factor). In addition to describing these interventions, it provides an assessment of how effective an intervention type is thought to be (Impact). Beyond effects on a crime problem, the toolkit also describes how the intervention is thought to work (Mechanism), conditions where it works best (Moderator), how to get it working (Implementation) and what it will costs (Economic costs). At present, it lists twenty-one interventions for violence, nine of which are specific to domestic abuse, four of which focused on gangs and eight that address alcohol or drug-related problems.

The Youth Endowment Fund toolkit has the similar aim of succinctly describing the evidence on what is effective but with a more precise focus on youth violence. The set of interventions can be broken down by the experience of the target group (Prevention types), the place in which the intervention might be delivered (Settings) and what aspect of violence it might be expected to affect (Outcomes).

The interventions described in the Crime Reduction Toolkit or the Youth Endowment Fund toolkit often stretch beyond the policing context. They certainly can involve policing – often essential to delivery – but often include other partners, such as health, social, education and children’s services as well as the community and voluntary sector. The importance of this cannot be overstated as it reflects the origins of violence and homicide as being beyond the immediate crime situation both in terms of causes, responsibility and solutions (see boxes ‘Multi-agency responsibility for a multi-agency problem’, ‘Safe predictable childhoods’, ‘Data sharing’ above).

As these toolkits draw on the same literature base, it is unsurprising that they draw similar conclusions about what works to prevent violence. Strategies detailed in these toolkits that have shown promise in reducing violence include ‘focused deterrence’, cognitive behavioural therapy, hotspot policing, mentoring, pre-court diversion and social skills training. It is noteworthy that in many of these interventions – cognitive behavioural therapy, mentoring and social skills training – police are not a main delivery partner but can still play a role in the selection of individuals for intervention. Only in hotspot policing is the intervention delivered exclusively by police while the role of police in focused deterrence can vary depending on the chosen ‘flavour’ of focused deterrence for an area. These observations should highlight the crucial role of partnership in violence prevention. Furthermore, although the interventions described above have been evaluated independently, there is no reason why several intervention types cannot be integrated within a problem-solving framework.

A further noteworthy observation is the lack of specialisation in the evidence base according to homicide type. In particular, domestic abuse, which is a major source of female violent victimisation, is not well represented within the review literature. However, there is a growing collection of evidence evaluating domestic abuse interventions, such as perpetrator programmes.

It is useful to note an important omission from the outcomes or problems addressed in these toolkits: none discuss homicide specifically. The low frequency of homicide makes it a challenging issue to evaluate rigorously, which in turn limits the base of evidence on what works to prevention homicide. A practical and sensible solution to this, which also overcomes the law of small numbers problem described earlier and places greater emphasis on the behaviour – violence – than its outcome (homicide), is to cast the outcome net wider and to include other serious violent offending or incidents as the indicator of a programme’s effectiveness.

The few studies that have used homicide as a problem/outcome are often interventions to reduce the availability or accessibility of firearms, which is less relevant to a low firearm jurisdiction such as England and Wales. However, policy makers in low firearm areas should not be complacent: there can be little doubt that, regardless of homicide type, firearm availability is one of the major facilitators of homicide worldwide and any changes in the legal or illegal availability of firearms should be strongly resisted. Although less effective in turning a violent incident into a murder, the availability and accessibility of other types of weapons, such as knives, in violence is also a significant causal factor in homicides. A problem-solving guide that focuses specifically on knife use in violence is available here. This guide describes a selection of promising interventions that, while not focused on homicide, may reduce homicide through their effect on reducing weapon use in violence.

BOX: Replicability in policing interventions: a note of caution

As with most research on interventions, it is almost certain that even those published studies shown to have effects do not and there is likely to be a significant amount of unpublished research that contradicts evidence of effectiveness. Researchers are under a great deal of pressure to publish research findings and research that demonstrates positive results – or evidence of effectiveness – is more likely to be accepted for publication in prestigious journals than evidence that a programme or intervention has little or no impact. A direct consequence of this pressure and this favouritism towards effectiveness is that evaluations showing no impact are more likely to be seen as unexciting by authors and, if they are written up at all, the unpublished manuscript gathers dust in a file drawer. An additional consequence of this pressure are incentives on researchers to adjust their analyses to yield more positive results. Examples of this might be switching mid-analysis from a binary measure of reoffending to a count of crimes committed or some other continuous measure of crime. Fields such as psychology have made progress in identifying and rectifying these threats to the integrity of their research such as the use of pre-registered reports that describe the analysis before it takes place and the sharing of data with reviewers and the public. Unfortunately, policing and criminology research lags far behind in this open research practice. Until these issues are rectified, even the evidence surrounding promising interventions must be read sceptically.

Developing and describing new homicide initiatives

A careful reading of the What Works and YEF toolkits will reveal that few interventions directed at homicide have a strong evidence base. This may be disappointing for an enthusiastic problem-solver who is keen to implement an evidence-based response. But it is important to recognise that many of the interventions in these toolkits have only been developed and evaluated in the past twenty to thirty years. You may also note that the focus of these interventions is rarely as precise as the homicide problem you have developed. That means that there is a lot of opportunity to create innovative solutions and responses to specific crime problems.

This section provides an overview of considerations you should make in designing your own intervention. It also provides some of the language that is valuable in describing and disseminating your response to senior officers and potential funders. After this guidance, you can find a worked example of an intervention that follows this approach.

Guiding principles for developing a homicide Response

Homicide is the quintessential intersection between public health and policing. The language and approaches of public health have gradually entered discourse around serious violence and there is much that policing can learn from public health response to acute health issues and epidemics. The following is a set of guiding principles for the development and deployment of epidemiological interventions during public health emergencies from the Centers for Disease Contor and Prevention’s Field Epidemiology manual (2019). It has been adapted here to apply to homicide, but surprisingly little has been changed.

  • As soon as a homicide problem is identified, a responsibility and societal expectation exist to intervene as soon as possible to minimise preventable harm.

  • Homicide interventions should be scientifically driven on the basis of established facts and data, current investigation findings, and knowledge from previous investigations and studies. Although salient socio-political forces (e.g., public fear or political outcry) might create pressures for rapid intervention, the interventions must be based on evidence. However, adapting certain intervention components might be necessary to make them more acceptable and responsive to the needs of the affected community, potentially affected persons, elected officials, and the media

  • For any given homicide problem, the type(s) and number of interventions to be implemented will vary, depending on the nature of the homicide problem, including its cause and other factors.

  • The type(s) and number of interventions used might evolve as a function of incremental gains in information developed during the investigation.

  • Most homicide interventions demand – and even might be potentiated by – open, two-way communication between involved agencies and the public

In thinking about the focus of your Response, the history of problem-solving provides a useful set of starting points from which to develop a solution. These ’25 techniques of situational crime prevention’ are described in the Ronald Clarke and John Eck’s seminal ‘Becoming a Problem Solving Crime Analyst’ (2003).

Increase the effort

Homicide example

Harden targets

Stab-proof vests

Control access to facilities

Domestic Violence Prevention Orders

Screen exits

Knife arches

Deflect offenders

Coordinate bookings of sports facilities by rival groups

Control tools/weapons

Audit security protocols in knife retailers

Increase the risks

Extend guardianship

Duress alarms for domestic abuse victims

Assist natural surveillance

Incentivise community use of public parks

Reduce anonymity

Geo-location tags for domestic abuse perpetrators

Utilise place managers

Night time economy security

Strengthen formal surveillance

Police patrolling of violence hot spots

Reduce the rewards

Conceal targets

Urge caution and awareness after using ATMs

Remove targets

Reduce outdoor activity following social media disputes

Identify property

Device locator software

Disrupt markets

Police crackdown on drug markets to punish and deter group violence

Deny benefits

Remote locking devices and bank cards

Reduce provocations

Reduce frustrations and stress

Cognitive behavioural therapy

Avoid disputes

Taxi marshals in night time economies

Reduce emotional arousal

‘Cooling-off’ areas in night time economies

Neutralise peer pressure

Reduce weapon-carrying within groups

Discourage imitation

Limit availability of weapons

Remove excuses

Set rules

Enforce consequences for violation of domestic abuse orders

Post instructions

Clearly communicate consequences of group violence

Alert conscience

Use community leaders to describe consequences of group violence

Assist compliance

Ensure public services are fit for purpose and signpost their availability

Control drugs and alcohol

Enforce responsible serving practices

Table 1 Twenty-five techniques of situational crime prevention (adapted from Clarke and Eck, 2003)

Figure 3 Twenty-five techniques of situational crime prevention (Clarke and Eck, 2003)

A note on mechanism

Situational crime prevention is one of the most important developments in modern crime prevention. By changing the focus of intervention to the place and away from the offender, this approach gives more control to the problem-solver and more potential to affect crime. Situational crime prevention works by making crime less possible by reducing opportunity to commit a crime effectively and less appealing by reducing the potential rewards and increasing the potential consequences. For most crimes, this works well: opportunity and the appeal are important factors that influence perpetrator decision-making. A limitation of applying this approach to homicide, however, is that, as noted earlier, it is an extreme event where the normal reasoning thought process may not be working. Therefore, a problem-solver may want to combine interventions that both decrease the attractiveness of an offence (which is affected in part by rational calculation) and increase capable guardianship or reduce opportunity.

Logic models and theories of change

When developing an intervention, it is tempting to just focus on activities as these are the parts of a response that are easiest to imagine and most familiar to policing. However, careful thought about the resources that need to be in place before the response is implemented (inputs/resources) can help you to avoid implementing a response that is not sustainable. It is also useful to think about what the response should produce (outputs) and ‘what success looks like’ (outcomes). The Medical Research Council identifies four components of a logic model that should be considered in framing a response/intervention:

  • Implementation: how and what an intervention delivers

  • Mechanism: the way in which the intervention creates changes in the recipients

  • Outcomes: a measure of what the intervention ultimately aims to change

  • Context: external factors that might affect the implementation or the mechanism

Developing a logic model has many benefits for someone aiming to effect change in a problem or issue. Perhaps most importantly, it challenges the response team to think clearly about what their intervention is and is not. Many intervention teams have gone back to the drawing board when asked to express their intervention as a logic model. In general, this is a good thing as few interventions will be able to maintain their integrity if the delivery team cannot identify what activity is and is not part of their response. In addition, a poorly defined intervention can almost never be evaluated, which limits the potential for the intervention to be rolled out beyond a pilot phase.

Before beginning a response, a problem-solver must consider what is required to deliver the intervention effectively. These inputs can be a range of factors including shift changes, intelligence and data analysis, multi-agency collaboration of the purchasing of equipment. They are the essential prerequisites for the intervention activity to take place and to work as intended. Present at the same time but often outside the control of the intervention team is the context. In homicide, this might be a strong history of collaboration between social services and police in tackling County Lines child exploitation, high levels of trust in the police or community dissatisfaction with group violence. Whatever the contextual factor, it is important to understand this as it will have implications for all aspects of the response.

The response activity is the most important feature of the intervention to define. Sometimes this can be difficult to separate from routine police work and can require a collaborative effort to refine it, particularly if the intervention involves multi-agency collaboration. In homicide response, activities are highly varied but could include enhanced surveillance of domestic abuse perpetrators, hot spot policing or interception of weapons shipments.

The next benefit of producing a logic model is that is requires the problem-solver to think about the mechanism: how the intervention will create change. In homicide prevention, we might use our knowledge of behaviour change, such as deterrence or diversion towards support services to describe the mechanism or we could use the language of situational crime prevention to describe how an intervention that reduces the opportunity to offend. Whatever the mechanism we identify, we must discuss how the activity causes change. The mechanism does not have to be explained in great theoretical depth, but it should be plausible and based on evidence about effective behaviour change.

A mechanism does not have to affect the outcome directly and solely. In many interventions, the activity leads first to outputs. These are direct consequences of the activity. In homicide, for example, an activity such as knife sweeps in a local park would not directly reduce homicide but would reduce the accessibility of knives in the event of a conflict. This reduced accessibility may, in turn, affect the outcome, homicides with knives in public places. This may seem like an unnecessary complication, but it is an important one: if we cannot show that the activity produced an output, the causal link between activity and outcome cannot be made and we will not be confident that the intervention caused any change we see in this type of homicide. It is also important to note that, as with the other components of the response, we can have more than one output or outcome.

You may hear the terms ‘logic model’ and ‘theory of change’ used in the same context. They are very similar, the key difference being that a logic model describes what change you would expect from an intervention while a theory of change describes how this change should occur. Because a theory of change is more focused on change, it has a greater emphasis on causal pathways and how, for example, inputs lead to activities then outputs and outcomes.

The final consideration for designing a response is to consider unintended, often undesirable consequences of a response. These might be realised at the individual level but also at the community level. For example, perceived excessive use of stop and search powers in an area can undermine an individual’s belief that police are trustworthy and competent (output), which in turn make them less willing to report crime or to cooperate with police investigations (outcome). Similarly, heavy deployment of focused deterrence in an area that has poor relationships with the police could create further division between the police and the community (output) and undermine the relationship between the community and service providers (outputs), potentially resulting in more violence in that community. As far as possible, mitigation should be in place to reduce the likelihood of unintended outputs and outcomes and these should be carefully monitored.

Having refined your theory of change, you are ready to deliver the intervention. However, it is important to return to the theory of change at regular intervals. Police interventions, particularly when they involve external partners are ‘soft systems’ that operate alongside and must co-exist with other interventions and activities. Occasionally these systems clash practically or theoretically and it is important to refer back to and to possibly adapt the theory of change to accommodate these clashes. For example, a focused deterrence (carrot and stick) intervention whereby police provide enhanced enforcement while local services provide enhanced support requires both sets of partners to collaborate slightly outside of their traditional roles. This may not be problematic at first, but once the novelty of the intervention wears off or the urgency of the problem wanes, the intervention system may change. Do not be afraid to refer back to the theory of change model to reassert the programme goals nor be afraid to adapt the theory of change if a more sustainable model can be found.

Worked example: A combined deterrence and monitoring response to prevent post-separation domestic homicide

What is the problem?

Domestic homicide in the six months after separation

Problem background

Police force A (population 1.2 million) had eight domestic homicides in 2021/22. This is a 10% increase on 2020/21. In 2021/22, these were exclusively male perpetrated offences against female partners. In five of the eight cases, the perpetrator and the victim had separated in the past six months and the perpetrator was no longer living with the victim. In three of the five cases, there was a history of police-recorded domestic abuse and all three perpetrators had been subject to some form of domestic abuse notice or order.

Evidence

Domestic homicide reviews have shown that, in abusive relationships, the weeks after a separation are particularly high-risk time for homicide.

Script: How does the homicide problem unfold?

Perpetrators have been banned from the home but know where a victim is likely to be (accessible victim)

Perpetrators living away from home may increase their alcohol consumption and increase rumination and grievance thinking, which can impair communication and reasoning and increase potential for them to return to the home (motivated offender)

Returning to the home increases the potential for a physical dispute (place)

Where are the ‘pinch points’?

1. Perpetrators may reason that they can commit an offence in the home undetected (absence of capable guardian – rational and susceptible to deterrence/attractiveness)

2. Perpetrators may not be reasoning about an offence or may be using faulty reasoning (potentially irrational – situational/opportunity intervention)

Activities

1. Provide perpetrators with a message/letter that there is a panic alarm in the home that is linked directly to the police control room and that constantly records audio in the home, which can be used as evidence for prosecution

2. Provide the victim with a domestic abuse alarm that has a panic alarm linked directly to police control room and that constantly records audio in the home and

Inputs - actors

1. Victim who has recently separated from an abusive partner

2. An abusive partner who has recently been forced to leave the relationship/family home and is subject to a domestic violence order not to contact the victim

3. Police domestic abuse coordinators/victim liaisons, force control room staff, response officers

4. Third-party monitoring company engineers, control room staff

Inputs - resources

1. Purchase of alarms and monitoring support

2. Information sharing agreement between police and third party

Mechanism

The intervention combines rationally-driven deterrence with increased situational prevention and formal surveillance. The perpetrator is made aware of the certainty of punishment through a victimless prosecution. In addition to the deterrent, the presence of a duress alarm in the home increases the capable guardianship by ensuring a rapid police response.

Unintended consequences

The installation of a device may anger the perpetrator, triggering a return to the home. A mitigation for this is to ensure that the perpetrator is made aware that the device was installed at the request of the police and not the victim.

Domestic abuse homicide intervention logic model

Assessment

The final step of the SARA problem-solving approach is Assessment. The primary aims of assessment are (1) to determine if the response has had a causal impact on the selected problem, i.e. has the outcome been affected in the way you anticipated, (2) to document your learning to inform the continued delivery or adaptation of the response, (3) to inform your future problem-solving activity in a new context and shared with the wider homicide prevention community.

The procedures for assessment can be complicated and this aspect of problem-solving is the basis of an entire field: evidence-based policing. Proving that an intervention actually changed something as rare as homicide is a considerable challenge that may well require years of intervention or the rolling out of the intervention in multiple sites. By way of illustration, an intervention where young people at high risk of perpetrating violence were given intensive multisystemic therapy was simulated using criminal record data. The simulation found that to be able to detect a 25% reduction in risk of serious violent offending in this group, between 700 and 1300 young people would need to be treated. Therefore, it may be pragmatic to select other, less rare outcomes that would feasibly lead to reduced homicide down the line. Alternatively, the integration of police records through new administrative data sets means that large multi-site collaborations are now feasible and effects of rarer outcomes may be detected. Even if a multi-site roll-out is beyond your reach, police analysts are becoming increasingly skilled in evaluation and external researchers are often willing to collaborate.

Although determining the effectiveness of a homicide intervention in a formal evaluation may seem daunting, there are things that an individual officer, analyst or force can do to understand if a homicide intervention is moving in the right direction. These involve measuring a combination of process, outputs and outcomes. Wherever possible, these changes should be compared to a similar period of time to see if there have been changes beyond what you would expect if the intervention was ineffective. For example, comparing violence in August to violence in September will almost always show a reduction because of changes in the weather and people’s activities. Calendar months can also have four or five weekends, which can make invalidate comparisons for a night time economy intervention. Similarly, if possible you should also include a comparison area or group of individuals who have not been targeted to help add another dimension to your assessment.

Firstly, in line with the theory of change you have developed, carefully record what activity was done: did the actual activity match the planned activity – to what extent and for how long? If there were deviations – and there almost always are – what impact might these have had on the target of the intervention?

Secondly, if changes homicide and near-miss homicide are too rare to identify over the short-term, what ‘intermediate’ outcomes can you use? These might include the precursors of homicide, such as strangulation in domestic abuse incidents or incidents of violence in a night-time economy.

Thirdly, can you observe positive changes in the behaviour or characteristics of the targets? Have there been fewer reported fights between rival groups? If these fights have become less frequent, have there been changes in the number of fights elsewhere – commonly known as ‘displacement’?

These measures will not provide a definitive answer about the effectiveness of an intervention – and beware anyone who claims otherwise – but they are achievable and vital pieces of information upon which you can build your homicide response strategy.

Recommended readings and resources

Homicide

Bates, L., Hoeger, K., Stoneman, M.J. & Whitaker, A. (2021). Domestic Homicides and Suspected Victim Suicides During the Covid-19 Pandemic 2020-2021. Home Office.

Office for National Statistics (2022). Homicide in England and Wales, year ending March 2021. Office for National Statistics.

Social Care Institute for Excellence (2020). Analysis of statutory reviews of homicides and violent incidents. SCIE.

Sutherland A, Brunton-Smith I, Hutt O and Bradford B. (2020). Violent crime in London: Trends, trajectories and neighbourhoods. College of Policing.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2019). Global Study on homicide. UNODC

Wieshmann, H., Davies, M, Sugg, O., Davis, S. and Ruda, S. (2020). Violence in London: what we know and how to respond. Behavioural Insights Team.

Problem solving

Braga A. (2008). ‘Problem-oriented policing and crime prevention’. 2nd ed. Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Clarke RV and Eck J. (2003). Become a problem-solving crime analyst: In 55 small steps. Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science.

Eck JE. (2017). Assessing responses to problems: Did it work? An introduction for police problem-solvers (2nd ed). Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Goldstein H. (1990). ‘Problem-oriented policing’. Temple University Press.

Goldstein H. (2018). On problem-oriented policing: The Stockholm

lecture. Crime Science, 7(13), pp 1–9.

Ratcliffe, J. (2022). Evidence-based policing: The basics. Routledge.

Sampson, R (2006). Domestic Violence. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Sidebottom A, Bullock K, Ashby M, Kirby S, Armitage R, Laycock G and Tilley N. (2020). Successful police problem-solving: A practice guide. Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science. London: University College London.

Sidebottom A, Kirby S, Tilley N, Armitage R, Ashby M, Bullock K and Laycock G. (2020). Implementing and sustaining problem-oriented policing: A guide. Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science. London: University College London.

Web resources

Center for Problem-Oriented Policing – An extensive library of problem guides, tools and resources relating to problem-oriented policing.

Crime Reduction Toolkit – Hosted by the College of Policing, this toolkit rates and summarises evidence relating to a wide range of crime prevention interventions. It can be filtered to focused on outcome (e.g. violence).

Fingertips – Dashboard for violent crime and violent injury in England, maintained by Public Health England.

Knowledge Hub – The Knowledge Hub is an online forum for the police and partners. Groups exist on both problem-solving as an approach and knife crime.

The Policing Evaluation Toolkit – Hosted by the College of Policing, this toolkit provides advice on how to effectively evaluate the impact of policing and crime prevention interventions.

Youth Endowment Fund Evidence and Gap Map – A comprehensive collection of evidence and knowledge gaps about the effectiveness of interventions to reduce youth violence. The site also includes the Youth Endowment Fund Toolkit which provide a user-friendly overview of intervention effectiveness.

Relevant problem-solving guides

Braga, A. (2003). Gun violence among serious young offenders. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Dedel, K. (2010). Child abuse and neglect in the home. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Dedel, K. (2011). Sexual assault of women by strangers. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Freilich, J.D. & Chermak, S.M. (2013). Hate crimes. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Klofas, J., Altheimer, I. & Petitti, N. (2019). Retaliatory Violent Disputes. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Mandensen, T.D. & Eck, J.E. (2008). Spectator violence in stadiums. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

National Center for Victims of Crime (2004). Stalking. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Payne, B.K. (2013). Physical and emotional abuse of the elderly. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Sampson, R. (2006). Domestic violence. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Scott, M & Dedel, K. (2006). Assaults in and around bars 2nd Ed. Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

Sidebottom A, Brennan I, Agar I, Ashby M, Bullock K, Hales G and Tilley N. (2021). Knife crime: A problem solving guide. College of Policing.

References cited in this guide (in order of appearance)

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2022). Victims of Intentional Homicide data base. UNODC. https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims

Heeks, M., Reed, S. Tafsiri, M. & Prince, S. (2018). The Economic and Social Costs of Crime, Second Edition. Home Office. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/732110/the-economic-and-social-costs-of-crime-horr99.pdf

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2022). The Public Health Approach to Violence. CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/about/publichealthapproach.html

Innes, M. (2014). Signal Crimes: Social Reactions to Crime, Disorder, and Control. Oxford University Press. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199684465.001.0001/acprof-9780199684465

Morgan, N., Shaw, O., Mailley, J., Channing, R., Sweiry, A., Kruithof, K., et al. (2020). Trends and Drivers of Homicide: Main Findings. Home Office.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trends-and-drivers-of-homicide-main-findings

Renno Santos, M., Testa, A., Porter, L.C. & Lynch, J.P. (2019). The contribution of age structure to the international homicide decline. PLoS ONE, 14(10): e0222996. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0222996

McVie, S., Norris, P. & Pillinger, R. (2020). Increasing inequality in experience of victimization during the crime drop: Analysing patterns of victimization in Scotland from 1993 to 2014–15, British Journal of Criminology, 60(3), 782-802.  https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azy044

Public Health Scotland (2021). Evaluating the impact of minimum unit pricing (MUP) on sales-based alcohol consumption in Scotland: Controlled interrupted time series analyses – briefing paper. https://www.healthscotland.scot/media/3332/evaluating-the-impact-of-mup-on-sales-based-alcohol-consumption-in-scotland-controlled-interrupted-time-series-analyses-briefing-updated-march-2021.pdf

Krzemieniewska-Nandwani, K., Bannister, J., Ellison, M. & Adepeju, M. (2021). Evaluation of the impact of alcohol minimum unit pricing (MUP) on crime and disorder, public safety and public nuisance. Manchester Metropolitan University. https://www.publichealthscotland.scot/media/9627/evaluation-of-the-impact-of-alcohol-minimum-unit-pricing-mup-on-crime-and-disorder-public-safety-and-public-nuisance-report.pdf

McPhedran, S. (2016). A systematic review of quantitative evidence about the impacts of Australian legislative reform on firearm homicide. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 28(1), 64-72. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178916300258?casa_token=_MJZfT9o6EAAAAA:SzhCl7jOUft1oDHinLAHvnRRauxrqHCgDraqzLYF5MUKPGq_nZfT1Lq1sjUGQP4wYHVNe_wB

Baker, J. & McPhedran, S. (2007). Gun laws and sudden death: Did the Australian firearms legislation of 1996 make a difference? British Journal of Criminology, 47(3), 455-69. https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/47/3/455/566026

Loeber R, Pardini D, Homish DL, Wei EH, Crawford AM, Farrington DP, et al. (2005). The prediction of violence and homicide in young men. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 73(6), 1074-88. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16392981/

Hinkle, J.C., Weisburd, D., Telep, C.W., Petersen, K. (2020). Problem-oriented policing for reducing crime and disorder: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis (2020). Campbell Systematic Reviews; 16:e1089. https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1089

Fox, B., Perez, N., Cass, E., Baglivio, M.T. & Epps, N. (2015). Trauma changes everything: Examining the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and serious, violent and chronic juvenile offenders, Child Abuse & Neglect, 46, 163-173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2015.01.011.

Butler, N., Quigg, Z. & Bellis, M.A. (2020). Cycles of violence in England and Wales: The contribution of childhood abuse to risk of violence revictimisation in adulthood. BMC Medicine, 18, 325. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-020-01788-3

College of Policing (2022). Crime Reduction Toolkit. College of Policing. https://www.college.police.uk/research/crime-reduction-toolkit

Youth Endowment Fund (2022). YEF Toolkit. Youth Endowment Fund. https://youthendowmentfund.org.uk/toolkit/

Sidebottom A, Brennan I, Agar I, Ashby M, Bullock K, Hales G and Tilley N. (2021). Knife crime: A problem solving guide. College of Policing.

https://assets.college.police.uk/s3fs-public/2021-11/Knife-crime-a-problem-solving-guide.pdf

Hadler, J.L., Varma, J.K., Vugia, D.J. & Goodman, R.A. (2018). The CDC Field Epidemiology Manual. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/eis/field-epi-manual/chapters/Interventions.html

Public Health England (2018). Creating a logic model for an intervention: Evaluation in health and wellbeing. Public Health England https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/evaluation-in-health-and-well-being-overview/introduction-to-logic-models

Saxton, M. D., Jaffe, P. G. & Olszowy, L. (2022). The police role in domestic homicide prevention: Lessons from a domestic violence death review committee. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 37(3–4), 1886-1907. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520933030

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Rebecca Teers, Nigel Brookes, Fiona McLean, Nerys Thomas and Aiden Sidebottom for support, guidance and advice in the production of this guide.

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