About the EMPAC Local and Community Policing Network.
What we do
We work with local police forces in the East Midlands to help them provide the best possible service to their local communities. We are one of five EMPAC networks and we focus on local and community policing. That includes neighbourhood policing, responding to emergencies and crime prevention.
What research we do is guided by what information police forces tell us they need in order to do their job effectively. In cases were evidence exists already, we review that evidence and summarise it in a format that the police can use. If the necessary evidence doesn’t already exist, we set up research projects to answer the question directly. Either way, our priority is to make sure everything we do helps the police serve local communities.
Together the leads for each EMPAC network have selected two projects for us to focus on in our first year, based on priorities suggested by police forces together with police and crime commissioners. The first is to develop a system to allow police officers to work out how best to communicate with different groups of people in their local area. The second is to identify which victims of anti-social behaviour are at risk of becoming victims of other types of crime, including serious crime. We’ll be writing more about these projects in the next few weeks.
Who we are
The Local and Community Policing Network is led by Simon Cole (@CCLeicsPolice on Twitter), the Chief Constable of Leicestershire, and Simon Holdaway (@simonholdaway1), Professor of Criminology at NTU, who are responsible for ensuring we produce high-quality research that is useful to the police. We’re also supported by Kathie Moore, the Dean of NTU Social Sciences.
Four researchers are involved in our current research projects. Andromachi Tseloni and Becky Thompson (@thompsonbeccy) are working on a project to predict if victims of anti-social behaviour will go onto become victims of serious crime. James Hunter (@placepoverty) and Matt Ashby (@lesscrime) are developing a tool to help police identify the best ways to communicate with different local communities.
We are based in the Quantitative and Spatial Criminology Research Group in the School of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and make use of expertise both at NTU and from across EMPAC.
If you’d like to find out more about our work, please get in touch or send us a tweet.
Local and Community Policing Network 