Police Science Dr Podcast, making research accessible to the police practitioner

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

What is an RCT?

 

You’ve probably heard the term ‘RCT’ a few times, especially in the field of academic research and / or evidence-based policing. Commander Alex Murray used it a lot in his Dr IPIP interview on evidence-based policing. But what is an RCT? In essence, it is the most robust and reliable way of carrying out research that tests something.

RCT stands for randomised-controlled trial. Now, you might think the terms ‘random’ and ‘controlled’ might sound as if they don’t really belong together, but it will become more obvious in a bit how they are connected.

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

What is the evidence-based policing matrix?

 

What is the evidence-based policing matrix? And how do you use the EBP matrix?

It is an online tool that has been developed to help police decision-makers make sense of the current

research that is out there. Hopefully you’ve seen in the ‘What is Evidence-Based Policing’ video what EBP is and why we need it to become more and more a part of policing, and you may also know that it is not always easy to make sense of all the research, or you might not even be able to access any academic works. Watch the ‘How to read academic research?’ video if it might be useful to you. In essence, the evidence-based policing matrix is there to provide you with a single location where relevant policing research on interventions that have been tested is stored, and it also tells you whether the interventions it lists are effective or not. And they are all of at least moderate robustness. Quite neat, isn’t it? And it’s openly available to anyone who’s interested, just go to www.PolicingMatrix.org. It was put together by Drs Cynthia Lum, and Christopher Koper of George Mason University, with the assistance of Dr Cody Telep. It is updated annually with new research that has come out and it tells you a number of things about each study, including whether it worked, didn’t work or had mixed results, or whether it actually had a negative effect, as in backfired.

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

Analysing the future of policing - Nic Pole interview

 

My name's Nick and I'm a principal analyst at the College of Policing, and I suppose people might know me because in policing, when people think of 'analyst', they think of crime analyst or intelligence analyst or performance analyst. But I do a different type of analysis which is futures analysis. Which means I kind of analyse the future to try and inform and support present-day decision-making. So to think about issues that are kind of developing on the horizon. So for the longer-term five or ten years from now and what implications those things might have for, for policing - in the here and now. So how we might better prepare for them.

 

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

Commander Alex Murray on Evidence-Based Policing

 

Hello everyone, my name is Alex Murray.

I'm a police officer in West Midlands, the West Midlands Police, currently a temporary Assistant Chief Constable [moved on to become a commander in the Metropolitan Police since the interview]. But for a long time within policing I've been interested in 'What Works' and for that you can read 'Evidence-Based Policing'. ....

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

Why do police use force?

 

The first and obvious answer is that they deal with some of the worst members of society you could think of. Just imagine the people that normal individuals would run away from, those are the people that the police have to run towards. Some of those people are often not very nice, rational or reasonable. When the police do use violence, it looks very bad and often makes the headlines, because they’re in uniform and are supposed to protect us. Out of context, however, you should refrain from making a snap judgement on who was at fault there – the officers or the members of the public, until you know the circumstances better. Undoubtedly, there are and have been incidents of police using violence completely without any moral ground whatsoever. In some countries, that is still the norm. I’m speaking about Western police forces here though, which should be bound by modern laws and accountability. In general, only 2% of police-citizen encounters involve violence (MacDonald, J. M., Kaminski, R. J., & Smith, M. R., 2009). Also, most violent police-citizen interaction is predicted by the citizen’s demeanour, not the officer’s (Engel, R. S., Sobol, J. J., & Worden, R. E., 2000). I’m not talking about extreme incidents such as riots, mass demonstrations, terrorist incidents or football games here. I’m talking about 1-on-1 incidents of use of force by police officers and what the factors are that can contribute to it. Police, like any other profession, should aim to be the best they can be.

In this video, we’ll talk about research on three factors that can lead to police getting involved in violent incidents: the officer’s heart rate, self-control and carrying weapons....

 

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

Prof. Kim Rossmo on Geographic Profiling - interview

 

SKN:

So, Kim, thank you very much for agreeing to speak with me and I know it’s the middle of the night for you, about half past midnight, 6 o’clock in the morning here for me in the UK. I do really appreciate you taking that time. Would you mind starting by telling our viewers your short definition of what geographic profiling is. Some people will not have heard of it – it is something you swim and bathe in daily, but for some people it’s new. How would you just give them a quick explanation of what it is so they really get it?

 

Kim:

Geographic profiling is a criminal investigative methodology that uses the locations of a connected series of crimes to determine the most probable area where the offender responsible for those crimes is based. So, let’s say we have a serial arsonist or a serial robber or a rapist: We analyse the locations where those crimes have occurred, and then, using a specialised software system produce maps that show the most likely areas to find the offender. So you could think of it as an information management strategy or as a suspect prioritisation tool. It helps you find the needle in the haystack. 

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

How to avoid false confessions

What is a false confession? It’s when someone who is being interrogated, for example by a law enforcement officer, claims responsibility for an offence they have not committed. Intuitively, most people would think that never happens, as the immediate consequence is often a conviction, and let’s face it, that’s usually what criminals and innocents alike try to avoid. So you’d be more than justified to wonder why anyone would ever confess to something they haven’t actually done, when they’re likely to get punished for it? ....

 

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

Prof. Lawrence Sherman on Evidence-Based Policing

 

My name is Lawrence Sherman. I've been working on an idea called evidence-based policing for over 20 years now and before that with the New York City Police Department, Metropolitan Police in London at Scotland Yard and many other places, to try to find the most effective ways police can identify the greatest risks to public safety and the most effective ways of reducing those risks. The way I have approached this is through experiments as well as 'big data' and increasingly what's called 'digital policing'.

 

How to read academic research

       

I suggested in the last video, the one on evidence-based policing, that you should try and find research about the topic you’re interested in. So, what is academic research, where do you find it and how do you read it?

 

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

What is academic research?

Academic journal articles are the published research results of professional researchers who work at universities or other organisations. Sometimes, they receive funding from somewhere for their time spent on that research. In some cases, it might be worth looking at that funding source, which they have to declare, so that you can decide for yourself if that funding relationship might have affected the researchers’ impartiality and objectivity during the project. For example, I once got really excited about an article which claimed you could reduce behavioural problems in children by giving them omega 3. But then I saw that the

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

You’ve probably heard of evidence-based policing. It is becoming increasingly engrained in UK police forces, and quite frankly, it’s about time. When we say ‘evidence’ in this context, we are not talking about forensic evidence such as DNA or fingerprints. We are talking about something that has been proven to be true.

So, if you’re making your decisions in an evidence-based way, that simply means you are making your decisions based on what has been shown to work, or what has been shown not to work. This is a much better decision-making process than just going with that you’ve always been doing, or going ‘with your gut’.

Although individual, professional experience does have its place and can be very valuable, it might be biased and tainted by opinions and other external factors that make it unreliable. On the other hand, if you base your decisions on a solid evidence-base, that simply means you use information on what has been tested and scientifically shown to work or not to work through methodological research.....