Police Use of Research Evidence

Professor Betsy Stanko is Head, Evidence and Insight, Mayor’s Office for Policing And Crime in London.  For over a decade, she worked inside Corporate Development, London Metropolitan Police Service, establishing a social research function alongside performance analysis.  In her first life, she was a professor of criminology, teaching and researching at Clark University (USA), Brunel University, Cambridge University and Royal Holloway, University of London (where she is an Emeritus Professor of Criminology).  She has published over 80 books and articles over her academic career.  The most cited of these works is Intimate Intrusions:  Women’s Experiences of Male Violence, published in 1985, and reissued as an ebook by Routledge in 2013. She has been awarded a number of lifetime achievement awards from the American Society of Criminology, most notably the Vollmer Award (1996), recognising outstanding influence of her academic work on criminal justice practice. From 1997-2002 she was the Director of the ESRC Violence Research Programme.  In 2002, she joined the Cabinet Office, in the Prime Minister’s Office of Public Services Reform.  In 2013 she was a member of the Adebowale Commission on Mental Health and Policing.  She is a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, a visiting professor at University College London (from 2014), a visiting scholar at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. She was awarded an OBE for her services to Policing in the 2014 Queen’s Birthday Honours.Dr. Paul Dawson is the Research Manager in Evidence and Insight, Mayor’s Office for Policing And Crime in London. He is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He previously worked for four years within the National Health Service followed by five years in the Home Office prior to joining the Metropolitan Police Service in 2008. He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Birmingham investigating the empirical contribution of offender weapon-use within the analysis of serious sexual offending.

• Foreword.- Preface.- Introduction: Starting the conversation.- Section 1: Foundations for receptivity: thinking about the where and the how of police work.- Section 2: The case for programme integrity in police craft: you can't do science without being systematic.- Section 3: Embracing the challenges in professionalising the police profession - learning to work with evidence differently.