Most of what you believe about crime is wrong.
This platform is designed to set the record straight. It promotes public understanding of crime, of the factors, conditions and contexts which may impact community safety, and of successful strategies aimed at primary prevention.
The first rule of criminological inquiry is that things are almost never what they initially seem. The second rule is that this insight does not make you popular.
Only about a third of crime is ever reported to police. For sexual assault, it is closer to one in twenty.
What the numbers show is not what happened. It is what surfaced.
The official crime rate measures reported crime, not crime. A 2019 Statistics Canada study put the share of crime reported to police at about one third, and for sexual assault at roughly six per cent. This is the dark figure, and it is the reason a community can be under sustained attack while the statistics stay quiet. It is why victims of extortion who never come forward do not appear in any number at all.
Closing the gap between the evidence and the story.
This is public criminology, written for the public, not the academy. It is the work of a practising criminologist. The aim is simple: close the gap between what the evidence shows about crime and what the public has been told.
The site has two core purposes. The first is to explain what criminology actually is: not criminal justice, not true crime entertainment, not police procedurals, but the study of crime, its constitution through law, its character and causes, the contexts and consequences of its commission, and the social responses it provokes. The second is to examine what I call the received view: the collection of assumptions about crime that most people carry around without realizing where they came from.
This is public criminology in the sense the sociologist Michael Burawoy gave the term: knowledge carried back to the publics it came from. These are not abstract concerns. Bad criminology leads to bad policy, wasted money, and real harm to real people. Good criminology is rare, but it exists, and it has something to say about the problems we actually face.
Why are you here?
Serial criminology means sustained engagement, not headline-chasing: one focus at a time, pursued in depth, until events shift where the work is most needed. Start where your question is.