BREAKING THE PATHWAY TO

VIOLENCE

Dr. Keri Nixon & DCI Brian Roberts

BACKGROUND

Home Office Reducing Violent Crime Murder of Rhys JonesGun CrimeKnife crimeViolent Offender Management Unit (VOMU) Referral criteria: Violent index offence (s20 and above, affray, robbery) or• 3 or more previous convictions of violence or• Known member of a gang and/or associates with known

organised criminals or• Known to carry/use firearms and/or knives

Work with VOMU as a condition of their order

RESEARCH AIM

• To understand the pathways to violence amongst serious violent offenders and OCG groups in order to intervene to break these pathways.

• To investigate whether the characteristics of violent offenders reflect 3 distinct background themes (based on previous research)

• To determine if violent offenders can be assigned predominantly to a background theme

• To examine the relationship between weapon use and background characteristics of violent offenders

LITERATURE

Complete literature review conducted on violent offenders, risk factors and models of offending behaviour

Research on youths who sexually abuse: Abuse, Delinquency, Impairment

Risk factors identified: Historical, Clinical, Contextual

DATA

105 offenders – gun crime nominals (40), random sample of MAPPA and YOS violent offenders

From the 10 SOC headings mainly engaged in – drug activity, organised acquisitive crime, sexual offences, specialist money laundering, violent criminal activity

Form part of the North West OCG picture Data gathered from offenders’ case files, police

systems, YOS files, probation files, interviews with police officers, case managers and from data gathered through interviews with offenders

DESCRIPTIVE RESULTS

• Mean age: 26.8 • 103 – male• 93% of the sample White British 3% - Black Caribbean 2% - Other 1% - Black African 1% - White/Black Caribbean

ANALYSIS• SSA – Smallest Space Analysis (MDS)

• Based on the assumption that any underlying structure will be most readily appreciated by examining the relationship every variable has with every other variable (Canter, 1995)

• Calculates correlation between every variable

• Jaccards co-efficient used as this measure of association does not take account of joint non-occurrences

• SSA non-metric therefore correlates are rank ordered to enable SSA to represent the characteristics in the smallest possible dimensionality.

• Underlying structure of background characteristics examined allowing any themes to be identified.

• Higher the correlation between 2 variables the closer they are on the plot (Guttman, 1968)

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WEAPON USE AND BACKGROUND THEME

• Although all these offenders are deemed to be high risk serious violent offenders, some are at a higher risk, we would argue, of endangering lives due to their willingness to use either a knife and/or a firearm.

• Tested using Mann Whitney U

• Offenders who used/carried a knife were found to have significantly higher number of Vulnerable (U=1299.5, N1=44, N2=60, p=.013) and Antisocial characteristics (U=957.5, N1=45, N2=60, p=.016) than offenders who did not use/carry a knife.

• Offenders who used/carried a firearm were found to have significantly higher number of Antisocial variables (U=366, N1=35, N2=70, p<.001) than offenders who did not use/carry a firearm.

DISTRIBUTION OF GUN CRIME NOMINALS ACROSS THEMES

CLASSIFICATION OF OFFENDERS

• 67.6% dominant theme *• 41.9% anti-social• 17% abuse• 10% vulnerable• 18% hybrid (17% anti-social/abuse, 1% anti-social/vulnerable)

* Using established method to determine whether offenders could be assigned to a dominant theme – To be assigned to a theme the % occurrence of variables in that theme had to be greater than the sum of the scores for the other themes. To be classified as a hybrid 2 themes had very similar % occurrence of over 33%. If all regions were of similar % occurrence they were unclassifiable (either very low or very high)

• 14% unclassifiable (7.6% low number of variables, 6.7% high number in each theme)

DOMINANT THEME AND USE OF WEAPON

• Due to the small frequency in some of the cells Chi squares failed to show significant findings for all the analyses even using Fishers exact.

• More data is required in order to test these results significantly. • Despite the low cell frequencies Abuse offenders were found to be significantly less likely to use

knives or firearms than the Vulnerable (Х²=6.45, df=1, p=.011), Abuse-Anti social (Х²=4.86, df=1, p=.028) and Antisocial (Х²=4.7, df=1, p=.03) offenders.

• Abuse offenders were also found to be significantly less likely to use firearms than the Abuse-Anti social (Х²=6.44, df=1, p=.028), Antisocial (Х²=10.51, df=1, p=.001) and Unclassifiable High (two tailed-Fishers exact p=.005) offenders.

LOW

ABUSE

VULNERABLE

ABUSE/ANTI-SOCIAL

ANTI-SOCIAL

HIGH

TOP 10 OFFENDERS

4 of VOMU offenders5 sets of brothersAll known to Merseyside Police as prolific and

dangerous offendersInfluence of family and associates

RISK IDENTIFICATION PRO-FORMA

Pro-forma designed based on analysesThus, aim NOT to determine risk but identify at risk of

what and what particular issues the offender has and what interventions needed

Future – use with young people The 2nd P – PREVENT (Pursue, Prevent, Protect,

Prepare)Early intervention