This paper describes an initiative in Huddersfield that aimed to assess the scope for offender targeting through self-selection. It considers in particular the practice of illegally parking in disabled bays. Illegal parking in disabled bays is considered as a kind of offender self-selection, the hypothesis being that such parking will disproportionately be a practice of active offenders. An over-simple way of describing the idea on which this paper is based is that people who are the most committed criminals are also the most versatile, and will not willingly be bound by law or convention of any kind. Thus the most versatile criminal is also the person who jumps queues and parks on double yellow lines. Most of those who park on double yellow lines are not versatile criminals, but a sufficiently high proportion may be to justify gathering information which reveals this at the same time as dealing with the initial infraction. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting