Fewer victims by better targeting Peter Neyroud Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge

Summary 1.All crimes are not created equal 2.Many crimes are generated by investigation 3. The concept of “crime” rate lacks meaning 4. A Crime Harm Index (CHI) should replace the “crime” count 5. The Index would measure what matters—giving --more weight to death and serious injury --less weight to small property loss 6. CHI would also guide sentencing

Increasing interest in Crime Harm… Sellin and Wolfgang (1964): seminal study that created a weighting for youth offending Wolfgang et al. (1985) created a weighted index for all crimes in the USA Pease (1988) and Brand and Price (2000) focused on crime seriousness and costs of crime

….Austerity has provided renewed stimulus “Assessment of Harm framework”: Paoli and Greenfield (2013) “Court records approach”: Canadian Severity Index/NZ severity index/Francis et al. (2005) “Crime victim survey approach”: Pease and Ignatans (2016) “Sentencing Gravity Score”: Ratcliffe (2015)

Common themes Agreement that treating all crimes as “equal” is a problem There is a need to differentiate between low volume, high harm and high volume, low harm crimes A harm approach has a potential to change the funding, targeting and evaluation of policing

Differences and debates about CHI A debate about the best ways to assess harm Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud (2016) argues that we need a 3 pronged approach to assess best approach for use in field: – Democracy test – Reliability test – Cost test

Harm v quantity A powerful illustration of the potential of CHI is provided by the contrast between – Hotspots, which use the volume data – Harmspots, which weight the volume of crimes by using the CHI* *Hotspot and Harmspot maps from Weinborn (2016)

Hotspots Weinborn, C. (2016)

Harmspots Weinborn, C. (2016)

Targeting, Testing and Tracking a strategy for offender management Triaging Offenders – Low, Medium and High Targeting treatments to offenders’ harm and Evaluating reoffending severity by using the crime harm index (CHI)

High Risk (2%) Neither High nor Low Risk (38%) Low Risk (60%) Triaging offender harm

All Offenders are not equal If we can succeed in developing and testing a custody triage tool, we can target treatments better based on harm: – Low Harm: Turning Point, Checkpoint and CR+/CC+ models – Medium and High Harm: IoM models underpinned by the best evidence

2016: Evidence in progress Turning Point results Checkpoint RCT testing the offender triage tool MoJ evaluation of the 3 force pilots of CR+ and CC+

THANK YOU! Peter Neyroud