MITO Y TIPO 1.

The current research has been made possible by a data sharing agreement between the

International Research Centre for Investigative Psychology (IRCIP) and the Greater Manchester

Police (GMP). As part of this agreement, law enforcement data pertaining to crime incidents was

extracted and shared for research purposes. The data itself represents a static cross-section view

of the crime condition from a sub-section of the Greater Manchester area. As far as can be

determined after-the-fact, data manipulations on behalf of GMP were minimal: sensitive data

such as specific individual’s names were removed but very little else was done prior to data being handed off. Finally it should be noted that data was accessed in accordance with IRCIP

and university guidelines and that the research itself was approved by the ethics panel (SREP).

The data itself covered a wide range of criminal activity for the period: it was not limited

to only solved crimes for example; nor was it limited to only specific crime sub-types. This both

opened many interesting lines of inquiry while also introducing several important challenges that

needed to be addressed. First, as the design philosophy has a distinct focus on predictive

outcomes, then it was paramount to identify the subset of records for which the responsible party

of structured outcomes including: charged, undetected, identified by non-charged among others.

For the current research, only charged crimes were considered as these were thought to hold the

highest burden of proof for attribution within the available data set. It is very important to note,

however, that a police charge does not itself constitute a guilty verdict. From the data that was

made available it was not always possible to determine with certainty that a given crime event

could be attributed to the individual indicated within the data. This represents a fundamental

limitation within the data.

Limitations such as these are common when working with second-hand data sources as is

the case here. Contrary to data from classical laboratory experiments, ‘real world’ data are often saddled with a number of issues. First it must be understood that often secondary data are being

used to investigate questions it was not initially collected for which in turn can cause a host of

problems. Law enforcement records, for example, are often simply a log of events: what

happened, where it happened, what did witnesses say, etc. The information that is collected as

part of on-going casework is inherently biased towards achieving a given agency’s goals which

may or may not align with subsequent research questions down the road.

At a more practical level, law-enforcement officers typically do not sign-up because of

their love of forms and paper work. Record keeping is often a secondary concern behind

resolving active incidents and ensuring public safety in general. Thus records may be recorded

well after-the-fact and data contained therein may not always be as specific or accurate as

possible. These challenges are not themselves new or unique to the current research presented

here, nearly all researchers working with secondary data – and crime data specifically –

Youngs, 2009 for a general discussion and Woodhams & Bennell, 2015 for a more targeted

discussion within crime linkage analysis).

Fundamentally, all of these concerns stem from the fact that researchers consuming data

second-hand were not present for data collection and may not be aware of the various ‘quirks’ –

that is business rules – that have impacted how said data was collected in the first place. A

primary example of this is how crime events are recorded which often results in duplicated or

inflated incidence numbers. For example, consider a burglar breaks into student housing, and in

so doing gains access to a number of unlocked rooms. This one criminal event could lead to

many individual crime records. The business rules for collecting such complaint data may dictate

one record be generated for every victim. From the law-enforcement perspective this makes

sense: one offender committed a string of acts that impacted multiple people. However, from the

researcher’s perspective, the fact that there were multiple victims may be the result of

circumstance and that that one evening’s set of events should not be more heavily weighted than another where the same perp only victimized one individual.

The key question for the current research and researchers in general is how to rectify law-

enforcement’s representation of criminal events and what they may or may not represent for their perpetrator. For this particular example, such incidents were generally aggregated into a singular

event in the current research. The rational for doing so is that the number of rooms that were

actually unlocked is a matter of circumstance and was not believed to be the result of any

specific action taken on behalf of the offender. Further methodological reasons for dropping such

‘duplicate’ events are covered in more detail in later chapters. A general discussion of the data made available to the current research follows which is intended to provide context for all