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Last updated 18th April 2024

Michelle is Senior Lecturer and Associate Director at the Applied Criminology and Policing Centre. She joined the university in 1998 from the Data Archive at the University of Essex. She completed a BA in Sociology at Durham University and an MSc in Social Research Methods at the University of Surrey.

Her PhD research applied innovative computer-aided textual analysis techniques to free text MO descriptions of robbery and theft from the person offences (n~30,000). The analysis identified clear patterns in offence commission and related these to the situational conditions in which the offences took place. The thesis demonstrated that MO fields contain a potential source of intelligence relevant to both practical crime prevention and research, and that it is possible to extract this information despite the challenges inherent in analysing free text.

Michelle’s research interests include the interactions between crime, fear of crime and quality of life, hate crime and offender management and desistance. Michelle has expertise in the statistical analysis of both police recorded crime data and large scale surveys such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales. Michelle has published on subjects including situational crime prevention, fear of crime and quality of life and the analysis of crime and repeat victimisation.