No, I think we were happy with the discipline. It’s just that Clarivate are a law unto themselves and Springer aren’t a very well organised publisher.

Getting an impact factor is a very long process, involving the journal publisher doing quite a lot of lobbying of Clarivate. Crime Science is currently listed in Clarivate’s emerging sources index, with an impact factor of 2.6. Eventually that will translate into an entry in Clarivate’s main index.

The methods are definitely different, but I keep coming back to another question: when everyone finds papers via online searches and all journals are equally searchable, for what purposes are journal rankings useful?

(Except for US academics looking for tenure)

UCL before it was @ucl.ac.uk

I couldn’t agree more!

Good point!

And apparently they still sell loads of the traditional paper London A to Z map. When I moved to London absolutely everyone owned one, but I’d assumed it had gone the way of the dodo.

Why buy it? Studying it is required to pass The Knowledge, the test drivers must pass to get a London taxi licence.

Who among us has not let a project spend slightly too long on the back burner?

No, all the types of investigations I’ve mentioned are criminal investigations that are prosecuted by those agencies (or CPS on their behalf) in the magistrates’ or Crown Court.

I appreciate you may have previously been unaware that non-police agencies do criminal investigations, but they do.

Most of these agencies will lead investigations that sometimes do require police involvement, but that is the exception rather than the rule. And even when police are involved, if it’s an investigation of specialist crimes (e.g. waste crime) it’s still lead by the non-police agency.

The organisations doing the most investigations/prosecutions without police involvement are TV Licensing (about 30,000 criminal prosecutions last year) and RSCPA. Most of the other agencies (eg HMRC and DWP) deal with most cases by issuing administrative penalties and only prosecute occasionally.

That’s not correct. The Environment Agency and several other agencies (HMRC, DWP, HSE, etc.) all do their own investigations and prosecutions (sometimes involving CPS), largely without police involvement.

You can see some HSE examples at press.hse.gov.uk/category/pro...

Is it really your view that police performance is worse than HM Prison and Probation Service, special needs education, children's social services, NHS mental health treatment, or adult social care? The police clearly have performance issues, but sadly there are many other services that are worse.

You can see this in other types of environmental crime, e.g. illegal sewage dumping.

But I don't think the answer is to give responsibility for investigating waste crime to an already over-burdened police service that doesn't have the necessary specialist skills.

Sadly there are many public services that don't provide a very effective service because they've been underfunded for years. There's also the added issue with the Environment Agency and other regulators having been repeatedly discouraged from action in the name of reducing burdens on business.

I do think there's a role for the recycling industry itself here – I wonder if quite so much waste could have been dumped without rumours circulating within the industry locally. But I appreciate that passing on information requires good operators to trust the EA to treat them fairly.

I don't think waste crime (or environmental crime more generally) gets anywhere near the investigative attention it deserves. But then under austerity in public services that's true for an increasing number of other crime types with an organised element (e.g. phone theft), too.

It’s not unusual for agencies other than the police to be responsible for investigating specialist crimes. Other examples include tax evasion (HMRC), benefit fraud (DWP), smuggling of goods (Border Force/HMRC), workplace safety offences (HSE), environmental health offences (local councils), etc.

The Environment Agency does its own enforcement for waste crime: environmentagencycareers.co.uk/enforcement-...

I’m not saying police are never involved (eg when the same offenders are also committing other crimes) but they’re not responsible for investigating waste crime.