It is unlikely that David Farrington ever saw what I name in this commentary as the ‘Farrington Curve’, which plots the combined seriousness and frequency of reported offending among the most harmful suspects in any population. It is also unlikely that he ever knew just how extreme the difference can be in cumulative harm between median offenders and the most extreme outliers. Even so, without Farrington's years of pondering and publishing on such issues, I doubt that Sir Mark Rowley, a Cambridge mathematics graduate and current Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, would have even asked a vitally important question as he took office in 2022: Who are the hundred most dangerous people in London?
Fortunately, the work of David Farrington had already spread widely in British criminology and policing, at least among the discerning. That work, based on the 411 males from southeast London who David studied for much of his life (and theirs), revealed important differences among people who were either self-reported criminals, convicted offenders or both. These differences went far beyond the orthodox UK Civil Service perspective on repeat offending as an either/or category, with nil regard to the difference between a bicycle theft and a murder or between one bike theft and two hundred.
As late as 2007, the UK Home Office told me that the only officially acceptable test of whether a justice innovation worked was the percentage of convicted offenders who were convicted a second time within a fixed time period (usually 2 years). Even while the Home Office economists had been developing a cost-of-crime weighting for common offences based on governmental expenditures per crime for each crime type (Brand and Price 2000), the policy officials would not accept a cost-of-crime reduction as a measure of reduced severity and frequency of crime. In response to my challenge, I was invited by the Home Office policy team to argue the point with a Home Office statistician, but the statistician agreed with me—and with David Farrington who had already written on the issue. Therefore, using the Home Office economists' estimates of cost-of-crime tariffs by offence category, the estimates by Shapland et al. (2008) were able to show that police-led restorative justice conferences lowered repeat offending costs of crime substantially in three of our randomised controlled trials (L. W. Sherman et al. 2015).
The foundation for the Home Office economists' work had been laid decades ago by David Farrington. His 1987 Crime and Justice article showed how large the variance in the frequency of crime was across his 411 cases (Farrington 1987). That article also identified the need for criminology to create an index to show how dangerous the mix of any one person's offending was in relation to the relative seriousness of the variety of offence types. In a 1985 discussion of differences in