Topic description and stories

Medieval Murder Maps: homicidal Oxford students in the 14th century

28 Sep 2023

A project mapping medieval England’s known murder cases has now added Oxford and York to its street plan of London’s 14th century slayings.

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Police line in Chicago, Illinois, USA

US gun violence: half of people from Chicago witness a shooting by age 40, study suggests

09 May 2023

Study following thousands of Chicagoans from across the city over a 25-year period found that 50% of the study participants had seen a shooting...

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Illustration showing networks across the globe

UK-US Summit for Democracy announces Cambridge team as joint winners of challenge to detect financial crime

31 Mar 2023

A Cambridge team has been announced as one of the winners of a prize to drive ‘innovation in privacy-enhancing technologies that reinforce democratic...

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Black Ned Kelly? The truth about an infamous Australian bandit

14 Nov 2022

Historian Dr Meg Foster shatters the myth that “Black Douglas” murdered a white woman and tells the story of an intelligent survivor

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Hooded figure using a laptop computer

Opinion: I spent three years in a paedophile hunting team – here’s what I learned

12 May 2022

Professor Mark de Rond from Cambridge Judge Business School discusses his three years embedded with one of the UK's most prolific paedophile hunting...

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Arrest warrant executed in West Bromwich, UK

Co-offenders likely to violently turn on one another, UK crime gang study shows

12 Apr 2022

Researchers use over a decade of data from Thames Valley Police to reveal 'mechanisms' that generate and sustain violence within networks of...

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Law books and justice statue

Autistic defendants are being failed by the criminal justice system

15 Mar 2022

The criminal justice system (CJS) is failing autistic people, argue researchers at the Autism Research Centre, University of Cambridge, after a...

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Urban crime fell by over a third around the world during COVID-19 shutdowns

02 Jun 2021

Study finds crimes such as theft and robbery almost halved on average in major cities.

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Ethnic minorities at much higher risk of homicide in England and Wales

17 Nov 2020

Calculations now familiar from coronavirus coverage – cases per 100,000 people – applied to ethnicity and homicide victimisation in the UK for the...

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A cannabis setup inside a residential premises in the West Midlands. Image: West Midlands Police.

Cannabis farms are a modern slavery 'blind spot' for UK police, study suggests

15 Sep 2020

Migrants arrested for tending plants in the flats, houses and attics where cannabis is grown in bulk are often victims of trafficking and 'debt...

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A baker, a plumber, and a... swan taker

10 Aug 2020

Cambridge University Library's joint project with the Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Family History Society, continues to reveal the secrets of...

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Passengers at a London Underground station

Police platform patrols create ‘phantom effect’ that cuts crime in Tube stations

16 Jan 2020

A major experiment introducing proactive policing to Underground platforms finds that short bursts of patrolling create a 'phantom effect': 97% of...

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