Matt Ashby
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Matt Ashby
@mattashby.com
1.6K followers 330 following 1.3K posts
I help people use data to reduce crime. Associate Professor, Crime Science, UCL. Former police officer.

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A frozen Derwentwater just before sunset today. A very nice way to end the holidays.
At sunset, a calm lake reflects bands of gold, pink, and blue light beneath a soft, cloud-streaked sky. In the foreground, four small human silhouettes stand near the water’s edge, one person crouching, all facing the view. Most of the lake is frozen except for a thin strip of open water. Beyond the water, dense winter trees line the shore, rising into broad, rounded hills and higher mountains. A winding footpath traces the slope of the left hill, while distant peaks fade into cool shadow, creating a peaceful, expansive landscape.
January 4, 2026 at 6:09 PM
mattashby.com
🙄 the government is again raising penalties (this time for worrying livestock) “as a deterrent”. This will have zero deterrent effect because there’s almost no chance of prosecution if your dog attacks a sheep.

📢 Increasing the likelihood of punishment can deter, increasing severity probably won’t.
The maximum penalty for an offence will be increased from a fine of up to £1,000 to an “unlimited” fine, to act as a deterrent.
December 26, 2025 at 6:14 PM
mattashby.com
A lovely Christmas Day walk in some amazing light.
Sunlight breaks through heavy clouds over a mountainous landscape, casting dramatic golden rays across a lake and forested hills below. The lake is Ullswater in the English Lake District.
December 25, 2025 at 7:28 PM
mattashby.com
Happy Christmas!

(This picture is actually from January this year, but we can still dream of a white Christmas.)
A fir tree covered in snow with a snow-covered mountain in the background. Taken in Whinlatter Forest in the Lake District in January 2025.
December 24, 2025 at 3:00 PM
mattashby.com
Citizens (🇬🇧) greatly overestimate the frequency of bribery in UK businesses: 43% of people think bribery in UK business happens ‘very/fairly often’ but only 3% of businesses were asked for or gave a bribe in the past year.

www.gov.uk/government/p...
Bar chart titled “Figure 4: How often respondents thought UK businesses engage in giving bribes across public, private, domestic and international contexts.” The chart presents perceptions of UK adults (n=2,293, aged 16+) on how frequently UK businesses give bribes in four scenarios: to someone from an overseas business, another UK business, a UK politician or public sector employee, and an overseas politician or public sector employee. Each horizontal bar is divided into five colored segments indicating responses: “Very/fairly often” (dark blue), “Occasionally” (teal), “Rarely/never” (purple), “Don’t know” (orange), and “Prefer not to say” (gray, barely visible). Top to bottom: • Someone from an overseas business: 44% believe bribes happen very/fairly often, 20% occasionally, 17% rarely/never, 18% don’t know, 1% prefer not to say. • Someone from another UK business: 43% very/fairly often, 21% occasionally, 18% rarely/never, 18% don’t know. • A UK politician or public sector employee: 43% very/fairly often, 20% occasionally, 21% rarely/never, 17% don’t know. • An overseas politician or public sector employee: 41% very/fairly often, 20% occasionally, 20% rarely/never, 18% don’t know, 1% prefer not to say. The chart suggests a widespread public perception that UK businesses engage in bribery across both domestic and international contexts.
December 18, 2025 at 3:03 PM
mattashby.com
Not, perhaps, London Underground’s most useful train arrivals board.
An electronic train arrivals board which just shows the word “mins” instead of how many minutes until each train arrives.
December 6, 2025 at 3:30 PM
mattashby.com
I've banged this drum before, but …

Academics, I beg you: please write article titles/abstracts in plain English so people beyond your sub-discipline understand them. Especially if the article is about harm caused by exclusionary language!

(📷 original vs ChatGPT re-write)
Epistemic Harm: On Zemiology and Epistemic Injustice Zemiology challenges narrow criminological frames in providing frameworks through which social harm can be understood beyond that which is criminalised. It has, though, been relatively inattentive to harms at the epistemic level. Engaging and developing Miranda Fricker’s scholarship, this conceptual/theoretical article produces a concept of epistemic harm, thereby promoting conceptual expansion and theoretical reformulation of zemiology. In turn, this feeds into criminological-zemiological debates regarding central categories for enquiry and their abilities to render social problems recognizable. The applicability of the conceptualization developed in this article is discussed in relation to examples drawing on race, gender, religion and disability. Through this, the substantive remit of zemiology is expanded: engagement with epistemic harm opens zemiology to a broader arena than it tends to consider currently. Zemiology is also … The Hidden Damage Caused by Ignoring People’s Voices The article argues that some types of harm are caused not by physical injury or financial loss, but by the ways people are ignored, misunderstood, or not taken seriously when they share their experiences. The author calls this “epistemic harm,” meaning harm that arises from unfairness in how knowledge is listened to, valued or shared. The paper explains two main ways this can happen. The first is when someone’s account of what happened to them is dismissed or doubted because of prejudice. For example, people may not be believed because of their race, gender or disability. The second is when people struggle to explain their experiences because society lacks the concepts or language to make sense of them. When this happens, their suffering is harder to express and harder for others to recognise. The author argues that these problems can cause very real harm, such as damaging a person’s confidence, dignity or sense of identity. The
December 3, 2025 at 3:02 PM
mattashby.com
I think London Underground might be trying to tell us something about the state of the world:
A poster inside a London Underground train showing an excerpt from the poem Epitaph on a Tyrant by WH Auden, with the text: Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
November 24, 2025 at 8:18 PM
mattashby.com
Ah, ok. It may be a problem with the fonts installed on your computer. Do you see a pair of empty brackets?

I use flag emojis in these posts about new research because of character limits here and on Twitter.

Here's what it should look like, for reference:
A screenshot of the first post in this thread, showing text beginning "One in ten girls aged 12 in a sample of schools ([England flag emoji]) …".
November 24, 2025 at 4:24 PM
mattashby.com
UCL before it was @ucl.ac.uk
A map of the Bloomsbury area of London before any streets north of Great Ormand St were laid out, and when the UCL campus was nothing but fields.
November 18, 2025 at 8:47 PM
mattashby.com
I couldn’t agree more!
A man standing in front of a large screen with ‘map everything! written on it
November 18, 2025 at 8:24 PM
mattashby.com
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.
November 18, 2025 at 7:56 PM
mattashby.com
I’m being especially nerdy this evening at Mapping London, an event organised by the great @stanfordstravel.bsky.social travel and map bookshop. 🗺️ 🤓
November 18, 2025 at 7:49 PM
mattashby.com
Look at the paragraph above that one:
Children living in families In 2024, 42.3% of families contained one or more dependent children, 15.4% had only adult children living with them and 42.2% had no children living with them. Of families with dependent children living with them, 44.3% contained one dependent child, 40.8% contained two and 14.8% contained three or more.
November 11, 2025 at 7:27 PM
mattashby.com
This is a slide I use quite a lot when doing POP training for police. Even when an agency or individual wants to follow SARA properly, there are so many institutional pressures on them to skip steps.
How not to do SARA Ignore the problem Try to respond without defining or understanding the problem Define the problem, but don’t take time to understand it Don’t assess whether or not the problem has been solved
November 5, 2025 at 10:58 PM
mattashby.com
I’m afraid at @waterstones.bsky.social Nottingham it’s even worse – it’s even upside down on the poster.
Reserve your copy now! THIS WAY UP Map Men Based on hit Youtube edutainment mini-series Map Men, This Way Up finds Foreman and Cooper-Jones taking a hilarious look at cartography's biggest blunders. 'A gloriously entertaining look at how maps can get things - sometimes very big things - badly wrong' Charlie Higson Published: 23/10/2025
October 31, 2025 at 12:36 PM
mattashby.com
Great afternoon talking with Durham Constabulary leaders about how to make police problem solving really work.

If you’d like me to come and talk about making problem-oriented policing effective and sustainable, I don’t charge for talks to police forces. So please get in touch!
Flowchart illustrating the importance of both short-term and long-term responses. The process begins with a leftward arrow labeled “scanning,” leading to two parallel arrows: “short-term response” above and “analysis” below. A red stop sign appears at the end of the short-term response path, indicating its limit. Analysis continues forward into a third arrow labeled “long-term response.” The upper caption reads, “Have a short-term and a long-term response.” “Priority: rapid implementation” is noted above the short-term response, while “Priority: sustainability” appears below the long-term response, emphasizing the balance between urgency and lasting solutions.
October 13, 2025 at 2:21 PM
mattashby.com
The rise in pedestrian fatalities in recent years seems to be specific to the United States – in other developed countries, pedestrian fatalities of either continued to fall or have flatlined.

usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/10/e...
Bar chart showing cyclist fatality rates per 100 million km biked in five countries across three periods (2000–2002, 2008–2010, 2016–2018). The U.S. shows the highest fatality rates in all years and is the only country where fatalities rose in the latest period, increasing from 4.5 to 6. All other countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, the U.K., and Denmark, show steady declines or flat rates over time.
October 10, 2025 at 7:05 PM
mattashby.com
Two weeks after seeing last year’s graduates collect their degrees, tomorrow we start it all again with Welcome Week for our new undergraduates.

Going to uni is a daunting experience for many students, so we’ll be doing lots of work this week to help them get up to speed before teaching starts!
The skyline of the City of London has seen from Waterloo Bridge on a sunny afternoon. In the foreground are the waters of the river Thames. On the left is St Paul’s Cathedral and then across the rest of the skyline are the skyscrapers of the financial district.
September 21, 2025 at 5:03 PM
mattashby.com
It’s great to be spending the evening seeing this year’s cohort of BSc Crime and Security Science students graduate at the Royal Festival Hall.  it’s always so nice to be able to congratulate them individually afterwards, and to meet their proud families. 🎓👏
A university graduation ceremony in a large concert hall. The image is looking from the back of the stage. In the foreground a group of academics are sat with their backs to the cameras and wearing colourful academic robes. In the background are rows of new graduates in black formal academic dress. Sat behind them are their friends and relatives.
September 9, 2025 at 8:35 PM
mattashby.com
Today I spoke at #EuroCrim2025 about how to forecast the frequency of crime to support strategic decision making in policing.

Slides: lesscrime.info/slides/esc-2...

Working paper: doi.org/p4vn

Please get in touch if you’d like more information!
Conclusion Reasonably accurate forecasting is possible A combination of forecasts from multiple methods is typically most accurate Some specific methods (e.g. FASSTER) are wildly often inaccurate Remember: Forecasts are only useful as long as there is structural stability
September 6, 2025 at 5:23 PM
mattashby.com
Very nice #EuroCrim2025 presentation by @stijnruiter.bsky.social showing how burglars are much much more likely to offend on streets that they routinely travel on when moving between places they have some attachment to (eg home, friends’ houses, etc.)
A man pointing at a presentation slide showing a map showing how burglars move between places they know and offend on the way
September 4, 2025 at 3:06 PM
mattashby.com
Very engaging presentation at #EuroCrim2025 by @clanfear.bsky.social showing how homicide offenders during the 2021 homicide spike in the 🇺🇸 were very different to the offenders who killed during the homicide peak of the 1990s, with lots of policy implications.
A man pointing at a presentation slide that shows two charts. The left-hand chart shows that in 1995 a large proportion of homicide offenders in the US were adolescents, while in the 2021 homicide spike a much larger proportion of offenders were adults.
September 4, 2025 at 11:54 AM
mattashby.com
A reminder to my colleagues attending #EuroCrim2025: **a question is a single sentence that ends with a question mark**.

When invited to ask a question in a session, that is not an invitation to give your own talk on an unrelated topic.
The 'bad boyfriend' meme with a man looking at a pretty woman passing by on the street, while his girlfriend looks on in disgust. The man is marked 'random guy at a conference', the pretty woman is marked 'making a comment' and the girlfriend is marked 'asking a question'.
September 4, 2025 at 8:59 AM
mattashby.com
Fortunately the Aegean was like a lake – inside the ship you could hardly tell it was moving.
A view from the side of a large passenger ferry, showing a calm sea with rocks in the background. On the left is the end of the ship’s bridge, with a crew member silhouetted against the sunset.
August 30, 2025 at 10:08 PM