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University of Waikato
Te Puna Haumaru New Zealand Institute for Security & Crime Science
Founding Member, CrimRxiv Consortium
Te Puna Haumaru New Zealand Institute for Security & Crime Science (NZISCS) was established at the University of Waikato in 2017. The primary research partner for the New Zealand Police, their research aims to reduce crime and increase security through multi-disciplinary, evidence-based research. Their Māori name represents the Institute as a wellspring of sanctuary, through which flows the promotion, with appropriate support systems, of a safe and secure environment. Follow them on Twitter @nziscs.
Published: Aug 19, 2024
Academic literature widely assumes that extremist-housing online forums, like 4chan, uniformly celebrate acts of right-wing terrorism (e.g. via “sainthood memes”), such as those committed by Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant. Aside from a handful of exceptions, this body of ...
Published: Aug 14, 2024
The association between 4chan and online extremist subcultures has seen increasing academic scrutiny—particularly following the 2019 Christchurch attack by a right-wing terrorist who frequented the anonymous forums. Gender-based extremism features as one (of many) critical ...
Published: Aug 05, 2024
Online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a growing problem. Prevention charities, such as Stop It Now! UK, use online messaging to dissuade users from viewing CSAM and to encourage them to consider anonymous therapeutic interventions. This experiment used a honeypot ...
Published: Jul 26, 2024
The presumption that family violence will repeat and escalate is embedded in practices including risk assessment and case management. However, there is limited evidence that further episodes are inevitable, or that subsequent episodes will increase in severity. Therefore, we ...
Published: Jul 24, 2024
Most research examining the consumption of online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has focused on offenders' demographic and psychological characteristics. While such research may assist in the development of therapeutic interventions with known offenders, it has little to ...
Published: Jul 10, 2024
Conventional police databases contain much information on cybercrime, but extracting it remains a practical challenge. This is because these databases rarely contain labels that could be used to automatically retrieve all cybercrime incidents. In this article, we present a ...
Published: Jul 03, 2024
We used a hidden Markov model to estimate the latent (i.e., unmeasurable) states behind the information reported to police, and modeled aggressors’ movement between those states over time.
Published: May 28, 2024
Multi-agency initiatives as a response to complex crimes, such as stalking, pose conceptual and operational challenges for practitioners and evaluators. This study addresses these challenges, by combining a theory of change driven approach with the realist-inspired EMMIE ...
Published: Apr 27, 2024
Although increasingly deployed worldwide, human trafficking hotlines are sorely under-researched. Situated within a complex systems framework, we conceptualise such helplines as both a product of and an influence on broader anti-trafficking ecosystems. Taking the UK as a case ...
Published: Apr 12, 2024
The aim of our research was to explore peoples’ experiences of dissociative violence, including the circumstances in which it occurred, the nature of the violence perpetrated and peoples’ understanding of their use of violence in this context. Because we are in the process of ...
Published: Apr 08, 2024
This paper examines the recently theorized roles of the reliability and relevance of offenders’ knowledge of locations in their crime location choices. Using discrete choice models, we analyzed offenders’ pre-offense activity locations from police data (home addresses, family ...
Published: Mar 25, 2024
Testing police practice is the essence of evidence-based policing, and great strides have been made in past decades assessing myriad police activities through impact evaluation. But policing initiatives often suffer from a lack of clarity about how the changes in police ...
Published: Mar 19, 2024
This project evaluated the reThink Chatbot, which was deployed on the Pornhub website in the United Kingdom in March 2022. The chatbot was designed to direct individuals attempting to search for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on Pornhub in the UK to support services ...
Published: Jan 26, 2024
Adversarial Risk Analysis (ARA) allows for much more realistic modeling of game theoretic decision problems than Bayesian game theory. While ARA solutions for various applications have been discussed in the literature, we have not encountered a manuscript that assesses ARA in ...
Published: Nov 30, 2023
Due to the emergence of data-driven technologies in Aotearoa New Zealand that use Māori data,there is a need for values-based frameworks to guide thinking around balancing the tension betweenthe opportunities these create, and the inherent risks that these technologies can ...
Published: Nov 01, 2023
To support service provision, we sought to advance the existing evidence base about the characteristics of—and potential predictors of reported revictimization for—women identified as being at high risk of experiencing ongoing intimate partner violence (IPV).
Published: Oct 19, 2023
A strong organisational cybersecurity culture (CSC) is critical to the success of any cybersecurity effort, and understanding and measuring CSC is essential if it is to succeed. To facilitate the framing and measurement of CSC we conducted a rapid evidence assessment (REA) to ...
Published: Oct 08, 2023
Police administrative data systems are an increasingly accessible and varied source of crime data. This chapter outlines the many human and technological intricacies of working with police crime data as a researcher–which are often learnt as tricks of the trade over many ...
Published: Sep 19, 2023
Prison violence is a major safety issue for people in prison and staff. In Aotearoa New Zealand, all prison incidents are recorded on the Department of Corrections (Ara Poutama Aotearoa) COBRA database. An analysis of prison violence at the unit level is applied using machine ...
Published: Aug 23, 2023
Much of the literature on eyewitness identification neglects the social context in which identifications are made.As the number of cognitive psychologists conducting eyewitness research increased so did the use of signal detection theory and ROC analyses. With the resulting ...
Published: Aug 23, 2023
In this review article, we critically analyze the relationship between change in dynamic risk (i.e., intraindividual change) and recidivism. We start by reviewing the empirical evidence, which indicates intraindividual change is associated with recidivism. However, we ...
Published: Jul 14, 2023
This article introduces a new method for eliciting prior distributions from experts. The method modelsan expert decision-making process to infer a prior probability distribution for a rare event A. Morespecifically, assuming there exists a decision-making process closely ...
Published: Jun 30, 2023
Multi agency initiatives as a response to complex crimes and social problems pose several challenges for practitioners and evaluators, in conceptual and operational terms. Challenges for practitioners include working out input requirements to achieve specified interim and ...
Published: Jun 07, 2023
In relationships characterised by current or previous intimate partner violence (IPV), partner stalking is a commonly occurring phenomenon. In this study, we examined police-recorded partner stalking in IPV episode reports across 1150 cases to (a) consider the overlap between ...
Published: May 29, 2023
In correctional practice, acute and stable dynamic risk factors are conceptually distinct. This distinction, however, has limited empirical support. We suggest that when compared with stable factors, change in acute risk factors over short time periods should demonstrate a ...
Published: Mar 23, 2023
Online CSAM offending is a challenge for law enforcement, policymakers and child welfare organisations alike. The use of online warning messages to prevent or deter an individual when they actively search for CSAM is gaining traction as a response to some types of CSAM ...
Published: Mar 01, 2023
Objectives: To investigate the effects of selection and group socialisation on support of human rights, moral reasoning and prejudice in police officers in Taiwan. Methods: We used a longitudinal quasi-experimental design ...and a
Published: Mar 01, 2023
Training is a fundamental part of policing, one which consumes a significant amount of time and resources. Training is widely seen as a central mechanism through which to generate improvements in policing, and for ‘achieving the ethical and professional standards required ...
Published: Dec 05, 2022
Memory experts are sometimes asked to evaluate the validity of accounts of witnesses, victims, or suspects. In some of these cases, they are asked what effect alcohol has on the validity of such accounts. In this article, we offer a guide on what expert witnesses can reliably ...
Published: Aug 02, 2022
Understanding the relationships between individual offenders’ crime locations and their prior activity locations is important to enable individual level predictions to support crime prevention and investigation strategies. This study examined a wider range of crimes and ...
Published: Jul 14, 2022
In most countries, employers have a responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of their employees, including those who work in hazardous occupations. Policing can be a hazardous occupation and officers can face physical threats to life. Yet in the police service, ...
Published: Mar 30, 2022
This paper estimates the effect of changes in street lighting at night on levels of crime at street-level. Analyses investigate spatial and temporal displacement of crime into adjacent streets. Offense data (burglaries, robberies, theft of and theft from vehicles, and violent ...
Published: Mar 19, 2022
The Multi-Agency Stalking Intervention Programme (MASIP), piloted in three police forces in England, delivered a range of risk management interventions, including bespoke psychological treatment to a subset of convicted stalkers. The interim aim was to equip offenders with ...
Published: Feb 28, 2022
This study developed and tested a new geographic profiling method for automating suspect prioritisation in crime investigations. The Geographic Profiling Suspect Mapping And Ranking Technique (GP-SMART) maps suspects' activity locations available in police records—such as ...
Published: Feb 02, 2022
This interactive evidence gap map was commissioned by New Zealand Police and created by a research team led by Dr Lisa Tompson at Te Puna Haumaru (NZ Institute for Security and Crime Science). It aims to provide coverage of the international research evidence on disparities ...
Published: Oct 10, 2021
To support the New Zealand Police Understanding Policing Delivery (UPD) project, we were tasked with completing an academic literature review on bias in policing. However, the vastness and complexity of the relevant research, and the short timeframe for completion meant that ...
Published: Aug 05, 2021
Cybersecurity appears to be the ultimate paradox: while cybersecurity budgets are increased every year, and a vast array of new security products and services appear in the market, cyber attacks have been increasing in scale and scope every year. 2020 will perhaps be ...
