In the 21st century, cracking crime in a sustainable way, amidst limited public service budgets, requires a wider skills set than just traditional investigation. New, more creative ways are needed to proactively get upstream and cut crime by tackling its causes, rather than relying on triaged police resources responding to its symptoms.
Dr Ahmad Al-Hiari, of De Montfort University Business School, is one of that new generation who are helping policing modernise into a more proactive partnership world. He is a specialist in public sector governance and community regeneration, originally training as an architect, now a chartered member of the Institute of Housing. Ahmad is a leading scholar and practitioner of Solution Oriented Practice by applying such architectural vision and goal setting, to rebuilding community agency, through collaboration https://policeprofessional.com/feature/solution-orientated-policing/.
By reducing the vulnerability of a community, the exploitation by organised crime business is reduced, thereby creating sustainable cold zones where public services do not need to reactively respond so much to ‘hot spots’. In turn, that means more collaborative efforts can be made to proactively build an area, creating a virtuous circle.
Security and Ethics
Dr Al-Hiari is also an expert on anti-corruption, responsible business and social justice, with extensive expertise internationally. His business and strategic planning expertise is bolstering the ongoing research around Think OCB, not OCG, where looking at crime as an entrepreneurial business, rather than as a gang activity, transforms State intervention capabilities beyond just criminal justice sector options, such as by disrupting supply chains and markets https://empac.org.uk/new-soc-research-ocbs-not-ocgs/.
Ahmad’s skills are now facilitating collaborative growth by working with University Policy Hubs and breaking through silos between research and policy by building a bottom-up architecture where community insight drives knowledge mobilization and creation.
Co-creating a safer future
Ahmad is driving new research to enable Leicester’s diverse communities to exercise prosocial agency in shaping their community safety through co-production with police and partners that is grounded in their conceptualization of ‘what does good look like’. This new research aims to contribute to strengthening collaboration by proactively rebuilding trust between communities and police, particularly among marginalized and over-policed communities.
Such cutting-edge research work is shifting policing into being more connected with its partners and communities, so that long-term sustainable growth can elevate communities to be their best, whilst putting crime out of business. EMPAC Senior Research Fellow Dr Ahmad Al Hiari may never have served as a traditional police professional, but he, and others like him, with their eclectic professional business skills, are the architects of safer communities and the modernisation of policing in the future.
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