‘Super-connected' teenagers key to tackling violent crime, study suggests

Young people with the most connections to other suspected offenders of any age are almost five times more likely to carry knives than the average youth suspect, according to a new analysis of more than 200,000 UK police records. 

This top 5% of “super-connected” children aged 10-18 are almost three times more likely to commit violent crime, seven times more likely to commit robberies and nine times more likely to be involved in organised crime than the wider youth suspect population.   

The research by the University of Cambridge’s Violence Research Centre, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, also found that super-connected young people were far more likely to become a victim of knife violence themselves. In fact, nearly 60% of young victims of knife-related injury were suspects in another offence.

The team behind the study say that statistically mapping co-offender data from across police databases can reveal the young people more likely to be responsible for the most serious violent crime – as well as those most likely to be victimised. 

This approach could lead to a new “scoring system”, they argue, enabling police and social services to prioritise targeted intervention programmes for those teenagers in the highest-risk criminal environments who are most likely to act violently. 

“Traditional approaches treat young offenders in isolation, focusing on individual risk factors such as age, background and previous behaviour,” said Prof Paolo Campana, lead author from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. “In reality, we are missing a crucial layer, as youth violence is deeply social, driven by relationships and peer groups.” 

“Mapping co-offender networks using police records could help agencies identify and engage with young people at greatest risk of inflicting violence and becoming victims.

“Intervening when young people first become embedded in criminal networks, regardless of the seriousness of the initial offence, could prevent loss of life down the line,” Campana said. 

The research used records from Cambridgeshire Constabulary, which covers cities such as Peterborough and Cambridge, as well as several large towns where county lines gangs have operated, between March 2018 and October 2021. 

Researchers say their study should be replicated using data from the UK’s major urban areas, but believe the “underlying dynamics” will be the same, as the Cambridgeshire findings match those from studies on US cities using these techniques. 

Each police-recorded crime event includes details of the incident with suspects and victims. A connection in the network map is created when two individuals are both recorded as suspects in the same crime incident. 

For each additional co-suspect in a young person’s overall criminal record, the likelihood of violent crime increases by around 30%, and for knife violence by 19%. In turn, each co-suspect connection increases the likelihood of becoming a victim of violence by 7%, and of knife-related injury by 11%. 

Most young people suspected of an offence have between one and three connections to other criminal suspects of any age. Those in the top 5% typically have more than seven, with 21 connections the maximum recorded. 

In the study database of Cambridgeshire records, over 10,000 young people were recorded as victims of a crime, and some 6,000 were suspects. Nearly one in four young victims had also been identified as a suspect in a separate offence.

Campana, who conducted the work with Cambridge’s Dr Noemi Corsini and Dr Cecilia Meneghini at the University of Exeter, says co-offender data can be used to flag teenagers for early interventions in other ways. If they are embedded in networks with several adult co-offenders, for example. The data could also help track the success of any interventions by charting displacement from within a crime network. 

“Understanding where a young person sits within a crime network, and who they are connected to, should inform how and when we intervene. That means building the capacity to map and share network intelligence across police, youth services, schools and community organisations in a responsible way,” added Campana. 

“Violence does not happen in isolation, and tackling youth violence means tackling the networks that sustain it.”

The report ‘Breaking networks of youth serious violence’ is online on the University of Cambridge website.