Challenges and Opportunities for Criminological Research in a Transforming Reality

Abstract

In the context of intense and accelerating transformations of social reality, science acts as one of the adaptive mechanisms to understand the nature of what is happening and the prospects for future change. However, in the face of rapid and substantial social change, the social empirical sciences, including criminology, also need to be transformed to take account of the digitalisation of relations, their exponentially increasing complexity and the growth of universal connectivity. These properties of a transforming reality require not only a move away from traditional sources of information on criminologically relevant phenomena, not only the application (expansion) of an interdisciplinary approach, but also the establishment of a 'quantitative criminology paradigm', a 'computational criminology' that enables the tracking of both criminal and potential criminogenic phenomena as well as background crime phenomena in real time through monitoring and using both preset and self-generated algorithms.