What Did Criminology Ever Do for Police Officers?

This post was written by Jason Roach and Ken Pease.

According to their conference website, the organizers of the British Society of Criminology (BSC) 2024 annual conference claim that "BSC 2024 will showcase creative, critical research taking place in British criminology and explore what is next for the discipline." The primary aim of the conference is to encourage debate about "Criminology in Times of Transition: What is criminology? Who is criminology for?" This aspiration serves to illustrate that many academics involved with research and teaching in criminology consider it to be at a crossroads, and in need of choosing a future path for the discipline.

With this post, we play Devil’s Advocates and suggest that maybe criminology has no future, with a vast majority of criminological theory, research, and teaching (90%+ of all criminology really) being of little use to front-line police officers and other criminal justice personnel. For example, we doubt very much whether a police officer called to a house burglary is thinking about how Foucault might explain it, or how labeling theory has led the perpetrator to break into peoples’ homes to steal their possessions. We are not suggesting that there is no merit in criminological theory, just that most of the time it does little to help police officers do their jobs. It is more concerned with the macro than micro, more policy than practice, and for that criminology has arguably done little for police.

Although there is little doubt that in the past few decades, at least, criminology as a discipline has enjoyed student recruitment success in universities compared with some other social sciences, such as politics, with an increased population of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. That said, many of us teaching in the criminology field have witnessed a decline in popularity in recent years, due primarily to the introduction of new policing-related degrees, necessitated by the requirement now that all UK police officers should have, or be studying for, a policing degree (UK College of Policing).

If criminology is therefore indeed at a "crossroads" we argue that going blindly along the same path is not an option. It must learn from the last few decades if it is to survive as a discipline in its own right and not be subsumed by, for example, psychology. There is an argument that criminology was the progeny of law and sociology, hence the preoccupation with why people offend and deterrence theories. That said some people, generally from a psychology background, have invented their own brand of criminology, born out of a frustration with traditional criminology’s lack of practical relevance for police and others charged with reducing crime.

In the UK and US, legends such as Ron Clarke, Marcus Felson, Nick Tilley, Paul Ekblom and Gloria Laycock, asked the question decades ago, "What use is traditional criminology to day-to-day crime prevention?" Their disappointment lay in how the lack of practical criminology was primarily a result of criminology’s obsession with "why" people commit crime, which had led to neglect of how, when, where, and what, crime occurs. They all concluded that the situations and contexts that give rise to "criminal opportunities" are more important—that is, which situations and contexts facilitate crime and disorder most and what can be done about them quickly and with least effort—since those motivated to offend are always likely to do so. Consequently, they broke from mainstream criminology in favour of Situational Crime Prevention (Clarke), Crime Pattern Analysis, rational Choice Theory, and the Routine Activities Theory (Cohen and Felson). All but one are psychologists (one was a sociologist by trade), not criminologists, with Environmental Criminology arguably just an application of behavioral psychology to criminal events. Some have gone further and invented the discipline of "Crime Science," where all academic disciplines are applied to crime and policing, including computing, engineering, and architecture, to name a few, and where more traditional criminology is relegated to the background.

The answer to the question in the title of this piece is arguably, "not a lot." If criminology is to survive as a discipline, then it needs to be more useful to police and others (with environmental design leading the way), eschewing the path more traveled, where it serves (badly) policy and policymakers and not police and those seeking to reduce crime in the real world. The very real possibility is that criminology may become "neither use nor ornament," studied only in top universities and not by police and practitioners.

We both consider ourselves to still be psychologists, albeit who work in crime and policing, so we would say that, wouldn’t we.