SECReT 2010 PhD projects
- Metal oxide semiconductor gas sensors as an electronic nose for the detection of microbial agents
- What are the factors that make communities vulnerable to, or resistant against, the emergence of radicalising settings?
- Covert taggant nanoparticle inks - discovery, process and product development, and analysis for sustainability and efficiency
- Diffusion processes of political violence: The role of information
- Engineering IT risk awareness, education and training
- Three-dimentional imaging of baggage for security applications.
- Understanding the traffic-driven epidemic spreading in scale-free networks
- Optimal search and detection of targets in an uncertain environment using unmanned aerial vehicle
- Explosive residue: Evaluation and optimisation of detection and sampling procedures
- Forecasting adversary’s scenarios: Systemic competitive red teaming
- Secure digital archive and web search using a Probably Approximately Correct architecture
- Mobilising community resilience through techno-social innovation
- Numerical modelling/empirical analysis of civil conflict
- Landmine, IED, UXO Detection using Ground Penetrating Radar from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
- Towards a usable and less disruptive security in the workplace
- Securing from exploits using information theoretical techniques
- Crime drop in Chile: Searching for causes and mechanisms
- Inferring user behaviour despite wireless network encryption
- The Chain of Evidence - a critical appraisal of the applicability and validity of forensic research and the usability of forensic evidence
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Crime drop in Chile: Searching for causes and mechanisms
7 March 2012
This research is being funded by the Chilean government. Since the first victimisation survey was carried out in 2003, a steady decline in victimisation rates has been seen in Chile. Between 2003 and 2009, the proportion of households in which any member had been the victim of offences during a 12 months period fell by nearly 22%. Concerning specific offences, there were even greater declines: robbery fell by 33.7%, snatching 35.6%, burglary 34.6% and non-violent stealing by 29.5%, according to the Chilean national crime survey – ENUSC.
Despite the sharp drop in Chilean victimization rates, there are not explanations for that phenomenon. Most of Chilean criminological researches focus on “the causes of criminality”, and their links with drugs consumption or their spatial distribution around some critical neighborhoods, while the rest are attempts of assessing and improving the justice system effectiveness.
In this context, my doctoral research will approach Chilean victimization trends and will aim test feasible hypothesis to explain the victimization drop. My main theoretical framework for analyzing data will be the environmental criminology, routine activity and rational choice theories as well as situational crime prevention perspective. Particularly, I am interested on gauge the validity for Chilean context of Security Hypothesis (Farrell et. al.,2008) which has been formulated to explain crime drop in industrialised countries. My MRes project has already found evidence to support the validity of Security Hypothesis to analysing car crime in Chile.
