Crime watch with ‘Miami Weis’

Prof. David Weisburd, a leading criminologist, believes people have decreasing confidence in the police, and are thus not reporting incidents of crime.

While crime may often seem as if it is spiraling out of control, that is far from being the case, according to Prof. David Weisburd, one of the country’s leading criminologists.

The American-born Weisburd, who in June was awarded the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his work on “hot-spots policing” explains that crime is in fact down, but cautions that this may be the result of a decline in the reporting of criminal incidents because of a lack of confidence in the police.

“I know a lot of people who don’t report because they are so disgusted with the kind of response they get,” he says.

“So a more service-oriented police may actually initially increase the crime rate.”

Weisburd is critical of many aspects of the police’s work, in particular what he describes as its failure to become an evidence- based institution adopting the findings of academic research, including his own work, but he is also at pains not to give the impression that he sees the Israel Police as some kind of backward institution.

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