Thiago R. Oliveira

Welcome to my website! I am currently a Lecturer in Criminology at The University of Manchester. Previously, 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 Nuffield College in the University of Oxford, an Associate of Harvard University’s Department of Sociology, and an Associate Member of the Center for the Study of Violence of the University of São 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.

I am a quantitative criminologist. With a background 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, spatial data, and other kinds of data. I use methods from statistics, 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.

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, as well as the consequences of undermined legitimacy beliefs to deviant behaviour and tolerance of violence. I study primary exposure (e.g., direct contact with policing practices), secondary exposure (e.g., personally seeing or hearing about policing practices), and tertiary exposure (e.g., learning about or being in spatial proximity to policing practices), which means I am interested in the effects of public-police interactions but also in broader temporal and cultural aspects of public reactions to police behaviour. 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 policing 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 police intrusion and cynicism about police protection 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 whether they end up promoting legal cynicism and criminal offending. 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.

• 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.

Find more about me here! On this website, you can also find my up-to-date CV, some research I am currently working on, and a list of my published papers. You can also find a list of papers I published in Portuguese.

Feel free to contact me!