Recent Papers

Two papers have recently been published which illustrate the breadth of the research being conducted at the Centre for Criminology.

The first, 'Monopolizing Force? Police Legitimacy and Public Attitudes Toward the Acceptability of Violence', publishd by Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, was co-authored by Ben Bradford with colleagues Jonathan Jackson, Aziz Huq and Tom Tyler and examines the potential links between police legitimacy and individual's willingness to use violence to solve problems. The abstract is reproduced below.

Why do people believe that violence is acceptable? In this article, the authors study people’s normative beliefs about the acceptability of violence to achieve social control (as a substitute for the police, for self-protection and the resolution of disputes) and social change (through violent protests and acts to achieve political goals). Addressing attitudes toward violence among young men from various ethnic minority communities in London, the authors find that procedural justice is strongly correlated with police legitimacy, and that positive judgments about police legitimacy are associated with more negative views about the use of violence. They conclude with the idea that police legitimacy has an additional, hitherto unrecognized, empirical property—by constituting the belief that the police monopolise rightful force in society, legitimacy has a “crowding out” effect on positive views of private violence.

The second paper, written by visiting scholar Johan Boucht and published in the European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, is entitled 'Extended Confiscation and the Proposed Directive on Freezing and Confiscation of Criminal Proceeds in the EU: On Striking a Balance between Efficiency, Fairness and Legal Certainty'. The abstract reads:

This article consists of a principled analysis of extended confiscation as a legal phenomenon according to Article 4 of the Proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the freezing and confiscation of proceeds of crime in the European Union (COM (2012) 85 final). The analysis aims at creating a theoretical framework by which the legitimacy of schemes on extended confiscation can be assessed, both at EU level and at national level. This model utilises three parameters of assessment: the target area of extended confiscation, procedural safeguards and fairness (proportionality). The Commission proposal is set against these parameters and a suggestion is made for how the provision in the proposal could be revised in order to better fulfil the conditions put forward.