Technology, crime, and the people it touches
My research examines how technology facilitates, shapes, and can be used to prevent crime. I work across cybercrime victimisation, policing technology, tourism and crime, and the measurement problems that sit underneath all of these — using Bayesian methods, pre-registered experiments, and bibliometric audits.
Cyber abuse and online guardianship
A substantial part of my research over the past decade has looked at cyber abuse — who becomes a target, who intervenes on their behalf, and what ordinary users do to protect themselves. I've extended routine activity and lifestyle exposure theories into online contexts, examined the role of "guardians" in cyberspace, and used Bayesian profile regression to identify distinct clusters of victims and pathways of harm.
More recent work in this stream, funded by an ARC DECRA, explores how we can harness the behaviour of ordinary internet users to help prevent cyber abuse.
Ransomware and cyber-extortion
With collaborators including Claudio Mezzetti, Zachary Breig, Rajeev Gundur, Volkan Topali and Michael Levi, I am investigating ransomware as a form of online financial crime. This work spans the emotional dynamics of victim decision-making under coercive threat (a pre-registered factorial experiment with a U.S. national sample), the commercialisation of ransomware as it has moved from spray-and-pray to big-game hunting, and the emerging market for ransomware insurance.
Police technology & domestic and family violence
Together with Mary Iliadis, Bridget Harris, Danielle Tyson, Asher Flynn, and Delanie Woodlock, I have led a national study examining how police body-worn cameras are used in responses to domestic and family violence. The project looks both at officer perceptions and victim-survivor experiences — and the mismatches between them — and at how BWC footage can facilitate misidentification of the primary aggressor. This work received the Australia and New Zealand Society of Criminology's Outstanding Policing Research prize in 2022.
A related stream, with Ross Hendy, uses long-run historical data to examine whether the routine arming of Australian police officers affects rates of officer-involved shootings.
Tourism and crime
With Rob Mawby, Nicola Helps, Clair Alston-Knox, and Mine Özaşçılar I've written on the criminal geography of tourism: burglary from tourist accommodation, the victimisation of visitors, and how holiday routines create criminal opportunities. This work connects environmental criminology and routine activity theory to a setting that is economically important but often under-examined.
Method, measurement & meta-science
Several of my projects are explicitly methodological. With Clair Alston-Knox I have written on the use and abuse of p-values in logistic regression, and on Bayesian profile regression for identifying victim sub-groups. More recently, I have begun a programme of bibliometric work — auditing cross-citation patterns across intellectual traditions in criminology, examining the gender citation gap, and studying how terminology shapes public support for crime-affected people.
Open-source projects
I maintain public repositories for selected research projects. These include data, code, and supplementary materials to support transparency and reproducibility.
More projects on my GitHub profile.
Funding
Selected grants, 2015–present. Full list in my CV.
Service
Associate Editor & Editorial Board member, Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal (2024 – present).
Regular peer reviewer for Crime and Delinquency, Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Family Violence, Journal of Criminology, Security Journal, Violence Against Women, Asian Journal of Criminology, Journal of Mixed Methods Research, Nordic Journal of Criminology, International Journal of Cybercriminology, and others.
Honours
Outstanding Policing Research Prize, Australia & New Zealand Society of Criminology (Policing Thematic Group), 2022 — for "The merits and risks of body-worn camera footage in domestic and family violence incidents and legal proceedings".
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, United Kingdom (2021).
Collaborating
If you have data from a real incident-response setting, or want to work together on cybercrime, policing technology, or computational criminology more broadly, please get in touch.