At the University of Manchester, I am currently involved with teaching the following course units:

• CRIM20051 Policing and the Police | Course unit director
• CRIM20452 Modelling Criminological Data | Course unit director

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I am a quantitative criminologist. With a backgorund in sociology and social data science, I mostly draw on theories from sociology, social psychology, and social policy to investigate policing's sometimes conflicting objectives of crime deterrence and public legitimacy. I am particularly interested in understanding the implications of confrontational proactive policing tactics, police use-of-force, and procedural justice policing to community trust, legal cynicism, and violence in large cities in the Global North and the Global South. Most of my studies have focused on the cities of Chicago, London, and São Paulo. I study these topics from a quantitative social science approach, and mostly rely upon survey data and other kinds of data and use methods from statitics, causal inference, and data science, and I am particularly interestered in longitudinal data analysis. My work has appeared in venues such as the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Journal of Experimental Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Law & Society Review, and the British Journal of Criminology.

Visit my website for my CV and research outputs: https://thiagoroliveira.com 

Prior to joining Manchester in 2023, I was Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Surrey (2022/23) and a Research Fellow of Nuffield College in the University of Oxford (2021/22). I have a PhD in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics and Political Science. I am currently an Associate Member of the Centre for Social Investigation (Nuffield College, University of Oxford), an Associate of Harvard University’s Department of Sociology, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society's Social Statistics Session, and an Associate Member of the Center for the Study of Violence of the University of Sao Paulo. I am also part of the team for the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods(PHDCN+), a multi-cohort study led by Robert Sampson and Dave Kirk.

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My chief research interests are primarily organised around the following topics:

• Implications of public exposures to policing

  Drawing on procedural justice theory, legal cynicism theory, and legal socialisation theory, I am curious about the the extent to which people lose faith in the legitimacy of legal institutions when they are repeatedly exposed to police use-of-force, misconduct, and/or officer aggressive behaviour during childhood and adolescence, as well as the consequences of undermined legitimacy beliefs to deviant behaviour and tolerance of violence. I’m interested in the effects of public-police interactions, but also in broader temporal and cultural aspects. For instance, what are the effects of cumulative exposures to police misconduct throughout the life course? Do people who belong to specific social groups and are collectively exposed to certain police practices develop shared expectations and tools through which to interpret the functioning of the law?

• Procedural justice theory

  I’m interested in theoretical developments of procedural justice theory, as well as its close connections to the legal cynicism and legal socialisation perspectives. I’m particularly keen to investigate what other aspects of police conduct beyond fair process could also consist of legitimating norms that contribute to enhance or harm public beliefs about the legitimacy of legal authority, especially in understudied societies in the Global South. For instance, my ongoing investigation in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, demonstrates that perceptions of overpolicing (e.g., the degree to which people perceive police officers to be repeatedly intruding upon their lives) and underpolicing (e.g., how sceptical people are about police officers’ interest and ability to ensure public safety) also contribute to undermine legitimacy beliefs.

• Confrontational proactive policing tactics

  I’m very keen to conduct criminal justice policy evaluations. I’m eager to assess the extent to which certain aggressive policing tactics such as stop and search actually work to deter crime, but also if they work as a tool of social order maintenance and even whther they end up promoting legal cynicism and offending behaviour. For instance, in previous research I showed that police stops at gunpoint undermine legitimacy beliefs and that stop and search practices in London tend to concentrate in economically unequal locations. In general, I’m mostly keen to investigate policing policy in Latin America, especially Brazil.

• Quantitative methods

  I am also very interested in teaching, applying, and developing quantitative research methods. Drawing on data science, statistical, and econometric methods, my main methodological interests include longitudinal data analysis, causal inference with observational data, measurement, multilevel modelling, spatial data models, and R programming.