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This research asks how the police can use City of Culture as a platform to engage the public, whilst also managing crime and protecting event attendees. The project explores how police partnerships around arts and culture can support crime reduction and protect vulnerable people. Read more...

Through interviews with 25 people in Coventry city centre in June 2021, new COPR research asks how people have experienced this loss of freedom and what their new-found liberty looks like as they emerge out of lockdown and return to the city. Read more...

Black and Asian people in the United Kingdom are more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people. Following a panel of 36,000 searches by 1,100 police officers at a major English police force, COPR research has unveiled measures of over-searching relative to two baselines: the ethnic composition of crime suspects officers interact with and the ethnic composition of the areas they patrol. Read more.

Domestic abuse is increasingly recognised as a serious public health concern worldwide. Previous research has suggested a link between national football tournaments and domestic abuse. While hypothesised to be a significant factor, the role alcohol plays in this relationship has not yet been explored quantitatively. Read more.

COPR members Emily Spearing and Dr Kim Wade have published a study in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, investigating at what point in an interview eyewitness should be prompted to provide judgements about how confident they are in their memory report. Read more.

Watch COPR member Professor Mark Williams from WMG discuss and demonstrate the scanning technology his team uses to support the work of West Midlands Police in collecting evidence for investigations on BBC Two’s .

You can now watch our recent webinar on "The Future of Policing - Lessons from covid-19" through the link above. The speakers are Carly Kind, Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute and Christine Elliot, interim Chair of the College of Policing.

COPR member Professor Mirko Draco (Economics) and colleague (London School of Economics) have published a new article investigating the extent to which policing cuts affected crime rates during austerity.

You can view the article here.

Here's general summary:

As the Conservatives hailed the end of austerity in late 2019, they also pledged £750 million to fund 20,000 more police officers, effectively reversing the cuts to police numbers implemented during austerity. The pledge has been described as a move to ‘make our streets safer’ in response to rising crime levels. The cuts to police numbers were indeed large by historical standards (14.3%), and have been more severe in existing high crime areas. Crime rates actually fell for a long period in the late 2000s and early 2010s but since 2013 there has been a sharp increase in violent crime that is hard to explain. It could be that the cuts to police numbers reached a ‘critical point’ such that violent crime was able to surge. But, as we will show, this is hard to establish conclusively with the available data. The cuts in police numbers may indeed have played a role in the violent crime surge but it’s also plausible that other dimensions of austerity policies - such as cuts to benefits and local services – may have contributed.

Danni Norman has been awarded the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine PhD Thesis Impact Prize for her thesis entitled "Factors Modulating Memory-based Deception Detection in Concealed Information Tests".

Dr Danni Norman (WMG) and colleagues, Dr Daniel Gunnell, Aleksandra Mrowiec, and Professor Derrick Watson (Psychology) have published a new paper investigating whether the Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) can determine whether suspects recognise crime-related scenes.

You can download a freely available version of the paper via .

Here is a general summary:

Detecting a suspect’s recognition of a crime scene (e.g. a burgled room or a location visited for criminal activity) can be of great value during criminal investigations. Although it is established that the reaction-time Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) can determine whether a suspect recognizes crime related objects, no research has tested whether this capability extends to the recognition of scenes. In Experiment 1, participants were given an autobiographic scene-based RT-CIT. In Experiment 2, participants watched a mock crime video before completing an RT-CIT which included both scenes and objects. In Experiment 3, participants completed an autobiographic scene-based RT-CIT, with half instructed to perform a physical countermeasure. Overall, the findings showed that an equivalent RT-CIT effect can be found with both scene and object stimuli and that RT-CITs may not be susceptible to physical countermeasure strategies thereby increasing its real-world applicability.