No description available.

This thesis examines public attitude towards police services and, more particularly, police misconduct. It contextualises and explains the current complaints system, especially whether it satisfies the complainant and endears public confidence. It shows how aberrant police behaviour exposes some of the sociological issues such as black over- representation in complaints statistics, alleged black provocation in situational street incidents, substantiation rates and the likely outcome of black and Asian complaints. Analysis of the main sociological texts on the police suggest a continuing problem with the vexed issue of constabulary independence. The autonomous nature of this principle has helped to create partiality in terms of complaints that favour the police against the citizen. In the eyes of some citizens this has tended to reduce the legitimacy of the complaints process. The main analysis suggests that certain policing practices have a greater impact on diverse sections of the public which, when coupled with under-use of the complaints process tends to put a stopper in the bottle of fermenting discontent. To restore confidence and involve those who are socially excluded, the dysfunctional effects of inaccessibility, complication and inequality should give way to easy access, simplification and informality. The thesis addresses these problems by suggesting a move to more utilitarian ideals designed to be more customer focused. The model of 'good practice' is prescriptive and ensures an independent lay element to complaints investigation and resolution. The principle of civil libertarian ideals prevails in the proposed model and this seeks to redress the balance where justice must not only be done but also be seen to be done.

This thesis aims to describe and explain how drug use and offending are linked over the teenage years. This research was conducted in association with the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, a longitudinal study. I carried out secondary analysis of six sweeps of annual self-report questionnaire data, from age 12 to 17. I also conducted in-depth interviews with 27 cohort members at age 18 to 19. Findings suggest that the relationship between drug use and offending is stronger earlier (as opposed to later) in the teenage years. The social meaning of drug use changes over this period. Early onset drug users described having ‘nothing to do’ and engaged in drug use and offending in street-based peer groups. Those who did not begin using other drugs until later in their teens portrayed their drug use as a legitimate life experience, quite separate from offending. Young people’s drug use and offending can be explained with reference to differential levels of informal social control and peer group interactions. Differential opportunity structures, which change over the course of the teenage years, are shaped by socio-structural positions and informal social controls. It is within the context of peer group interactions that the social acceptability of behaviours may be defined, drug use and offending opportunities occur and decisions are made. Involvement in offending weakens social bonds and deepens involvement in deviant contexts, leading to drug use or further offending. However, ‘turning points’ such as starting one’s own family, gaining employment or changing friendship group facilitate the reduction of involvement in offending and drug use.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

A core issue in criminology is to examine why humans engage in dishonest acts. The subject of this study is an examination of a situational motivation to offend which is detached from opportunity, thus having a focus on intrinsic situational offender motivation. This study hypothesises that employees who perceive their employer of treating staff unfairly hold more tolerant attitudes towards staff dishonesty. Consequently, this hypothesis implies that staff dishonesty can become an employee’s perceived justified means to even the score against an employer who is perceived of acting unfairly, which is referred to as corrective justice in this thesis. The thesis begins with an examination of the core concepts, staff dishonesty and injustice perceptions. With reference to staff dishonesty, property deviance, production deviance and the willingness to engage in whistle-blowing are focussed on. In order to conceptualise injustice perceptions of employees, this thesis will derive the dimensions of distributive injustice, procedural injustice and interactional injustice from the literature and conceptualise a further dimension of moral injustice. With the aim to test the research hypothesis, a self-completion online questionnaire was published in a large European company in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector - and answered by 463 respondents in the research setting. The first half of the questionnaire items measured perceptions of unfair treatment in the four injustice dimensions, while the second half of the questionnaire measured tolerance levels towards staff dishonesty. The findings of the subsequent statistical analysis show that up to 11.8 % of rises in tolerant attitudes towards staff dishonesty result from perceived unfair treatment in the course of reorganisations. This proven existence of a corrective justice effect is finally discussed with reference to its implications for business and criminological theory.

Set within the context of a late modern world where crime is both controlled and commodified, this thesis explores young people’s crime concerns and their opinions on the cultural representation of crime. Following a reconceptualisation and widening of the notion of fear of crime, crime concern is employed to investigate young people’s concerns regarding crime prevalence, crime management and crime representation. Encompassing a cultural criminological approach and an interpretive phenomenological attitude, this thesis utilises performative drama alongside focus groups to explore how crime concerns and the cultural representation of crime interact to inform everyday lived experience. The thesis finds that the young people in the study demonstrate an acute awareness of the processes which shape their understandings of crime. Such awareness is rooted in their sense of agency and embedded in a resistance towards the dominant discourse of problematic and risky youth. The crime concerns that the participants expressed were primarily regarding the representation and management of crime. Varying concerns around crime prevalence were identified. The findings reveal that gendered implications play a key role in shaping crime concern and forming opinions on the cultural representation of crime. The thesis concludes by reflecting upon the research process and pointing towards future directions for criminology.

In a large scale, complex social system, many features of the system will be, by their very nature, quite beyond the scope of individual personal experience; these are the ‘macro-social' parameters of the society in question; the rates, proportions, tendencies and trends whose dynamics, development and manifestations inevitably must be extremely difficult for the individual to grasp and comprehend, purely in terms of the direct experience available to him. Thus, we might assume, certain agencies may be seen as intervening between the individual and the large scale complex social reality that contains him, agencies offering the kinds of information and the kinds of perspective that might allow him to conceptualize many of these macro aspects of social reality, and to formulate attitudes, opinions, and orientations in relation to them. Looming large among such agencies are the so-called ‘mass-media', and the interest of this study will be focused largely upon the way in which the media of mass communication provide information about a particular large-scale feature of contemporary society (namely the crime rate, and the nature of crime and the criminal), as well as, explicitly and implicitly, offering a conceptual and normative framework within which the material they provide may be organised.

This research contributes to understanding those factors associated with solving difficult murder cases and elucidating the decision-making processes of Senior Investigating Officers (SIOs). Relatively little has been written within this field and the present thesis argues that aspects of the murder itself, police investigative procedures and the management style of the SIOs, contributes to the solving of cases. Natural Decision-making provided the theoretical framework for this research with studies designed to flesh out the knowledge required and reasoning skills needed by the SIOs. The thesis explores the decision-making processes underpinning successful resolution of murder cases. The research used a mixed method approach combining qualitative accounts from 31 experienced detectives and quantitative analyses of their 166 murder cases, together with documentary analyses of historic cases to map the evolution of modern investigative practice. The practical outcomes of this research are its contribution to systematising police murder investigations. Study One explores the lessons learnt from previous murder enquiries and charts how mistakes have contributed to developing techniques and refining the methods of murder investigations. Study Two explores current practice in major inquiries within the Metropolitan Police Service and presents a flowchart of the key phases. The management style of SIOs was elucidated in Study Three and the concepts of starburst, phasing and investigative thinking were found helpful concepts in describing the investigative process. Seven broad themes were identified as solving strategies from which 41 individual factors were established. Study Four involved the secondary analysis of 166 archived cases stored in the Home Office Major Enquiry System (Holmes). Regression analyses of a combined data set showed statistically significant factors associated with both the solving of cases (i.e. number of police investigative tactics used and features of the murder) and the time taken to solve a murder (i.e. type of investigative tactics and style of the SIO). The discussion chapter outlines the necessary investigative processes related to different types of murder whilst the final chapter draws some conclusions and makes recommendations for good practice.