Criminology Editing and Proofreading Services

Recorded crime went up by eleven per cent. This may mean more crime happened, or that more was reported, or that a force changed how it records, or that a campaign encouraged victims to come forward — and in the case of some offences all four are happening at once. A criminology paper that treats a recorded figure as a measure of offending has not started its analysis.

We edit what criminologists write — analyses using recorded crime and survey data, source description and limitation sections, evaluation of interventions and their designs, qualitative work with offenders, victims and practitioners, sentencing and court data analysis, policy and Home Office style reporting, systematic and narrative reviews, ethics documentation for sensitive fieldwork, and thesis chapters and grant applications. Our editors work on the data source and what it can support.

The treatment of the crime measure is what separates criminology from crime commentary, and its failure is a trend reported without its recording context. A figure from police data is a record of an institutional process as much as of behaviour. We work through these so the source is named with what it counts and when it changed, since recording standards, counting rules and force practice all move and every one of those movements looks like crime; so the direction of any bias is stated rather than the existence of bias acknowledged, because "these data have limitations" is a hedge and "changes in recording practice from 2019 would inflate this series" is an argument; so victimisation survey evidence is used alongside police data where it exists, given that the two together distinguish reporting from offending in a way neither does alone; so offences with known reporting dynamics are treated separately, as the same percentage change means different things for domestic abuse, bicycle theft and homicide; so the denominator is stated with the population it uses and whether it is resident, daytime or exposed; so any comparison across forces or countries names the definitional differences before the numbers; and so the paper states what would have to be true for the trend to be an artefact. Papers written this way are cited by people who understand the data.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished analyses, fieldwork material and sensitive data. We are editors rather than criminologists or statisticians, and we offer no view on crime trends, data quality or policy. What we can do is make the source's limits part of the argument.