Abstract
In the criminological field, reflexivity in statistics often appears as a methodological problem. Most of the problems emanate from questions of ‘measurement’and are mainly addressed in terms of ‘reliability’, ‘bias’, and ‘error’. There is however another way of discussing quantification in social sciences, but it is rarely used in criminology: the sociology of quantification that invites a particular form of reflexivity. The basic premise of this sociology is that the statistic is not a simple realistic measurement operation, a reflection of reality, but a temporary adaptation to new ‘ways of thinking about society and how to act on it’ (Desrosières 2014). The interpretative framework proposed by this sociology may be summarized in two lines: to analyse the convention underlying the quantification of the social; and, simultaneously, to observe the uses of statistics and networks of actors linked to it. Thus, a sociology of social quantification must lie at the interface of scientific research practices and public policy issues. To prove and to govern (Desrosières, Ibid.) can be seen as two sides of the same operation: quantification.
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Notes
- 1.
Incidence relates to the number of cases of victimization in a population over a specified period. Prevalence corresponds to the number of individuals who said they had been victims (at least once) during the observation period. Hence, the ratio of incidence over prevalence provides an indicator of the concentration of victimization in the population.
- 2.
‘Mixed state’ is a term used by statisticians for a combination of probabilities.
- 3.
The heterogeneity route was not however ignored completely, especially in Ken Pease’s collaborations with Andromache Tseloni (see Pease and Tseloni 2014).
- 4.
On the origins of the spatial-temporal analysis of repeat victimization, see the article by Johnson et al. (1997).
- 5.
Because of their interest in promoting ‘problem-oriented policing’ based on situational and repeat victimisation prevention as a means of improving the effectiveness of policing in the UK, the JDICS researchers found themselves in competition with proponents of ‘hotspots policing’ based on the idea of increasing the deterrent effect of police patrols at known spatial clusters of crime. In particular, the appointment of Lawrence Sherman as Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge had brought to Britain an energetic enthusiast not only for hotspot policing but also in using ‘classic’ prediction and experimental research methods to support it. This statistical orientation stood in marked contrast to the approach adopted by PROMAP.
- 6.
In its most rudimentary development phase, PROMAP enabled the police to patrol strategically and thus to optimize the deployment of increasingly scarce resources in the public service. But as ingenious and innovative as it may be, PROMAP was not given the funding needed to develop it, even though two police forces in England had tested the tool under local crime reduction programmes (Fielding and Jones 2012; Rowley 2013). By contrast, the PREDPOL software, of which the algorithm is very similar to that of PROMAP, but uses a nonparametric method, was immensely successful worldwide. In the USA, predictive policing has become a research field that has been abundantly funded by government over the past ten years (Perry et al. 2013).
- 7.
What Tim Hope called ‘social prevention’ can refer equally to the ‘community research’ tradition, as well as to a sociological analysis of the contexts of implementation of security technologies. From this perspective, in the late-1980s he conducted a quasi-experimental evaluation of the effect of making neighbourhoods safe, under a programme for improving the living environment—the Priority Estates Project Evaluation Study (Foster and Hope 1993). The differences of approach taken by this study compared to the Kirkholt Project directly mirrored the divergence within government policymaking during the period from the early 1980s to the early 1990s; between crime prevention through ‘community development’ on the one hand, and situational crime prevention on the other.
- 8.
Tim Hope and Sandra Walklate, critical analysts of victimology, delivered a paper at the 1995 British Criminology Conference, in which they laid the foundations of a programme of deconstruction of the notion of repeat victimization. The same period also witnessed the critique of James Lynch and his colleagues who, based on longitudinal data from victimization survey in the USA, broadly challenged the boost hypothesis (Lynch et al. 1998).
- 9.
Hope and Lab (2001) also identified two other modal ways in which people sought to make themselves safer in public places.
- 10.
Analysis was carried out on data sets derived from historic sweeps of the BCS and the Scottish Crime Victimization Survey (SCVS) (Hope and Norris 2012).
- 11.
Statistics textbooks describe LCA as a particular class of Bayesian networks because it represents relations of dependency in the group of variables studied (categories of crime and victim characteristics) in relation to a distribution of conditional probabilities associated with each variable.
- 12.
Private discussion with Tim Hope in September 2014.
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Benbouzid, B. (2017). Reflexivity in Statistics as Sociology of Quantification: The Case of Repeat Victimization Modelling. In: Armstrong, S., Blaustein, J., Henry, A. (eds) Reflexivity and Criminal Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54642-5_6
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