Public Protection Data Programme

Globally, law enforcement agencies (LEAs) continue to face significant capacity and resource constraints and often rely on knowledge, tools, and infrastructure that fails to keep pace with the rapidly evolving nature of crime (which is increasingly technologically enabled).

Allied to this are pressures to recruit, train and retain staff with the necessary skills and expertise to prevent, investigate and respond to these new and emerging threats (e.g., in the investigation of sexual offences and cyber-enabled crime).

There is an urgent need to develop a better understanding of the nature and scale of this offending by sharing, harnessing and exploiting the wealth of data held worldwide to improve our understanding of the problem and to formulate effective prevention and enforcement responses. This would enable government, LEAs and others to more accurately quantify the harms associated with different types of crime and prioritise both preventative and enforcement responses accordingly.

Examples of our ongoing work under this workstream are:

• Sexual and violent offending: understanding ‘what works’ in the effective supervision of sexual and violent offenders and exploring links between child sexual abuse (CSA) and other types of offending.
• 'Real time' research into online CSA: identifying how offenders access child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and their victims, the tactics employed to engage with children online, the dialogue used to elicit compliance with sexual requests, and the impact of different types of ‘deterrence messaging’ to inform more effective prevention work.
• Adult pornography and violence against women and girls (VAWG): exploring links between consumption of adult pornography and VAWG, establishing the extent to which use of legal pornography serves as a conduit to CSAM, and identifying the risk and protective factors associated with such a transition.
• Generating new insights using administrative and other sensitive datasets: working with external stakeholders from industry, law enforcement, and civil society to facilitate and enable cutting edge research using sensitive datasets that would not otherwise be accessible to academic researchers – exploiting opportunities created by initiatives like the Data First programme and the National Crime and Justice Laboratory, to better understand the characteristics, risks, needs, journeys and outcomes for different offender populations across criminal, family, and civil court systems in England and Wales.