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 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 social scientist working on quantitative criminology, urban sociology, and longitudinal data analysis. With an interdisciplinary background in sociology and social data science, I mostly draw on theories from sociology, social policy, and social psychology to investigate how legal institutions and law enforcement agents influence crime, community trust, and social inequality. My research addresses policing’s often conflicting objectives of crime deterrence and public legitimacy using a combination of longitudinal, survey, and spatial data from cities in the UK, US, and Latin America.

I am particularly interested in understanding the implications of confrontational proactive policing tactics, police use-of-force, and procedural justice policing for public beliefs about the legitimacy of the law, legal cynicism, and neighbourhood violence, thus potentially contributing to reproduce social inequality. 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 longitudinal, survey, and spatial data. I use methods from econometrics, demography, and epidemiology, and I am particularly interested in longitudinal data analysis and causal inference. 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 abusive policing 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. I have contributed to a life-course perspective to procedural justice theory that also takes into into account neighbourhood socialisation. For example, an ongoing project argues that the experience of unfairness in exposures to policing goes beyond police-citizen encounters and should rather be framed as a cumulative, developmental process that unfolds across the life course through repeated experiences of unjust policing. I am also interested in the connections between procedural justice theory and 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.

• Policing and social inequality

  Beyond legitimacy, trust, and legal cynicism, I’m curious about some other unintended consequences of exposures to policing, especially cumulative experiences with police stops during adolescence. For example, early exposures to unjust policing might have important life-course implications, including educational damage, mental health problems, system avoidance, lower civic and political engagement, and crime involvement. I am currently investigating the extent to which exposures to stop and search in adolescence are related to mental health problems, educational damage, and crime involvement.

• 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!