News & Events

Spotlight on EMPAC experts: Graham Pickering

Graham is a Service Improvement officer within Leicestershire Police and the EMPAC point of contact in Leicestershire for two-way communication in our regional policing research collaboration. Graham performs a vital role in making things happen at the local level and ensuring research is helping the continual improvement of  policing in…

Fully-funded PhD studentships at NTU

Guardian University of the Year 2019, Nottingham Trent, is a world-class research community now offering fully-funded PhD studentship opportunities for UK, EU or international candidates. NTU research is highly respected globally, as world leading in a number of specialist fields. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 – the system for…

Innovation driven policing: what works, what might, what if

What works In the policing world, much thinking has been for a while now focused on ‘what works’. This is partly because of the successful College of Policing What Works Centre, and drawing upon tried and tested approaches with an emphasis upon efficacy. And there is no doubt that has…

Communities of practice in the policing workplace

Communities of Practice bring together autonomous, action and lifelong learning, practitioner action research, enhancing of the evidence base, innovation and insight and enhanced staff morale:  so all in all they are a great opportunity for policing! What is a community of practice? In a nutshell, it’s about people thinking and…

Spotlight on EMPAC experts: David Herrington

EMPAC is pleased to welcome another Senior Research Fellow on board – David Herrington – who has a specialist skill in quantitative analysis and foresight scanning in a multi-agency context. David has over 20 years’ experience in strategic management (MCIM), research, PRINCE methodology and programme management. He has worked as…

Innovation and the merits of the moan

What is innovation and where does it come from? Necessity is the mother of our invention, so the saying goes. It’s an old saying which many attribute to Plato, since it was printed in the 1894 translation of his Republic.  Innovation is about finding new ways of doing things, or…

Dashboard dream and data dysfunction

The dashboard as a concept became popular in the mid-nineteenth century as a defence for mud splashing up onto a carriage’s occupants. Later, automobiles retained the protective feature but used this space to co-locate a variety of gauges so that the driver had a ‘one stop shop’ overview of core component…

Spotlight on EMPAC experts: Professor Robert Smith

EMPAC is pleased to welcome on board another new Senior Research Fellow – Professor Robert Smith. Robert is a former Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of the West of Scotland, and is a member of the Scottish Institute for Policing Research [SIPR]. Dr Smith has been an…

Analysing Police Demand: the service of first and last resort

Kate Hemstock is Interim Head of Analytics at Derbyshire Constabulary. Kate is an experienced analyst and team leader with 12 years’ experience in law enforcement, working in strategic analysis, performance management, business intelligence and business change. She is the lead developer of the Organisational Risk Assessment (ORA) model on behalf…

Epidemiological enquiry and the absence of crime

Amongst the Peelian principles in the establishing of the professional police in the nineteenth century, the notion that the police should be judged not upon their arrests but upon the absence of crime seems to have been somewhat forgotten. It may be worse than the principle has simply been forgotten…