The police practice that reduced knife injuries and murders in London

According to the first of today's Five Studies About+: Policing

Welcome to The Art of Explaining Crime, the independent newsletter that helps you think and write about crime.

Two editions of Five Studies About are published each week: Five Studies About (free) and Five Studies About+ (paid, more in-depth). Each is a tip sheet where I curate recent crime and justice studies related to one topic. Today’s topic is policing.

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Photo by David Stewart, credit to homegets.com, CC BY 2.0. Modified by Aaron Jacklin in Canva.

These new crime studies related to policing were recently published by journals I monitor. Each of the following study listings include two quotations from the study’s abstract. The first quote discusses what they set out to find and the second describes what they found. I may also offer my own thoughts from time to time.

1. Did More Stop and Search by Police Cause Less Knife Injury in London? Evidence from 2008–2023 [Journal of Quantitative Criminology]

What they sought: “While prior research has studied SSE [stop and search encounter] impact on crime in general, we focus specifically on SSE relations to weapon-related injuries and deaths: whether conducting more SSEs over time has reduced such crimes.”

What they found: “Specifically, if SSEs were conducted at the 2008–2011 rate of 45,000 per month, there would be an estimated 30 fewer knife murders per year. Additionally, changes in SSE frequency were associated with notable crime rate shifts. A 66% reduction in SSEs from May 2014 led to 44 more knife murders and 1276 more injuries than expected. Conversely, a 55% increase in SSEs in January 2018 resulted in 27 fewer knife injuries per month.”