Using social network analysis to understand offending and victimisation

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) aims to keep London safe for everyone. One element is to make the most of the insights that can be gained from data and digital technologies to support ethical and effective crime prevention practices.

Existing research highlights the importance of analysing crime and offender networks, for example to better understand vulnerability to violent crime victimization [1], of child sex trafficking [2] and knife crime [3]. This project will explore connections between offenders and other agents. The aim of this project is to develop techniques that use social networking analysis to target enforcement and preventative action to reduce violence. The candidate will work with MPS data holdings (e.g. arrest data, police intelligence) and open source data (e.g. social media) to understand how can we connect known offenders in ways that inform how offending or victimisation may trigger or manifest.
Topics might include determining pre-existing relationships between offenders, how offenders are connected to each other, and the strength, frequency and influence of these connections. These measures can be integrated within existing machine learning forecasting models, or utilised in other ways to inform effective and ethical targeting of police resources.