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Today, 28 September 2023, TU Delft and the police have strengthened their partnership by signing a framework agreement. The police and TU Delft are already successfully working together in domains such as smarter detection, cyber security, robotics and forensic research. This step enables more and easier collaboration on innovation and new technologies.

In recent years, additional financial resources haven allowed launching various local, regional and national projects to tackle and frustrate drug related organised crime. As a result, more awareness has arisen in the Netherlands about the seriousness of this problem and the need to tackle it together.

In the Netherlands, community service was introduced in the Criminal Code in 1989 as an alternative to imprisonment. In the juvenile justice system, community service is the most imposed punishment for perpetrators. Even though community service is most often imposed in the juvenile justice system, few large-scale, reliable studies have been conducted on its effectiveness since the 1990s.

The media has often drawn attention to increasing armed violence amongst youth. Since 2019, an increase in violence amongst youth has become apparent. Rotterdam and its surroundings have been the scene of this violence more than once. Although national and local campaigns have been launched and research has been done in Rotterdam and the Netherlands, much information on the scope, cause, and background of this issue among the youth in Rotterdam remained inconclusive.

It could come straight out of Stanley Kubrick's dystopian movie A Clockwork Orange: using direct brain stimulation to reduce aggressive behaviour. For PhD candidate Ruben Knehans, it's his daily business. Aside from the medical complexity, it raises all sorts of questions. Is it ethical, for example, to modify someone's behaviour? Can you justify imposing brain stimulation on convicts under criminal law? How to set rules and standards? Ruben tries to answer these questions in his PhD research at UM's Faculty of Law.

Researchers from Amsterdam UMC, the University of Amsterdam and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) - partners in the forensic research institution the Co van Ledden Hulsebosch Center - have developed a method that allows for a more accurate determination of the time of death at a crime scene. Existing methods can only give a window of several hours; the new method reduces this to less than an hour.