The Policing Academic Centre of Excellence - Leicester, Aston and Birmingham

Leads: Professor Heather Flowe (University of Birmingham) and Dr Claire Davis (University of Leicester)

• Ethical, legal and acceptable development and deployment of science and technology
• Public perception of new technologies
• Building trust among marginalised communities
• Victim and witness identifications and evidence giving

Recent work

Building and maintaining public trust

Northern Ireland is a divided society which is now largely post political violence, is still living with conflict. Building and maintaining trust in the police has been a core component of the peace process and remains a significant, ongoing concern. Professor Joanne Murphy (University of Birmingham) has worked with PSNI to develop programmes and developmental opportunities for police officers at all levels to allow them better understand and manage ongoing conflict dynamics – including those impacted by the legacies of the past – as an organisational and leadership challenge. This includes operating with care in a highly political environment, developing leadership capacity at multiple levels, and building contextual foresight, insight and oversight into decision making processes.

Future workforce and training

P-ACE LAB researchers have been researching the psychological wellbeing of staff in the criminal justice system who are exposed to traumatic material on a regular basis. To further progress this work, we have collaborated with the Investigator Wellbeing working group to bring together colleagues from across the UK as part of a Secondary Investigator and Analyst Wellbeing group.

As part of this work we aim to develop a single, overarching steer for forces on how best to support those who are involved in this work by:

• Raise awareness of the key issues that have an impact upon wellbeing.
• Consider key triggers and concerns raised by colleagues and in the academic research.
• Identify best practices and meaningful interventions that positively impact resilience and wellbeing.

We have developed two checklists, which aim to provide practical guidance to policy leads and supervisors to help highlight key areas of support that can be put in place to ensure staff wellbeing and through Centre-UB (University of Birmingham) are launching a new online CPD course on the topic of working with distressing topics and content.

Leads: Professor Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay (University of Birmingham) and Professor Matt Hopkins (University of Leicester)

• Safe online and offline public spaces and behavioural linkage
• Crime investigation in the clear and dark web (child sexual exploitation) and extremist fora
• Police well-being
• Evaluation of policing interventions
• Acquisitive crime (retail crime, burglary, robbery, fraud, money laundering)
• Hate crime
• Violent crime including corrosive substance offences and football-related violence
• Sexual offences
• Youth justice
• Electronic monitoring
• Cross-border policing

Recent work

High quality evaluation, including responsible use of randomised controlled trials

P-ACE LAB members have successfully run ethically robust randomised controlled trials (RCTs), co-produced with stakeholders, to understand the effect of interventions in key areas of policing. These have included work with the Youth Justice Board exploring interventions that reduce the onset of criminality and violence for young people (University of Leicester), an evaluation of an intervention to support domestic abuse survivors for the Home Office and two studies for the Youth Endowment Fund regarding mentoring interventions for young people involved in violence (University of Birmingham).

In addition, P-ACE LAB members have undertaken high quality research into hospital navigator programmes for the Youth Endowment Fund and knife crime for the College of Policing (University of Birmingham) developed an evaluation strategy with suite of recommended evaluation measures for Leicestershire and Rutland Violence Reduction Network (University of Leicester).

Decision Support Software

In partnership with the Serious Crime Analysis Section (SCAS) and other sections within the National Crime Agency, P-ACE LAB colleagues across AU, UoB and UoL have co-created decision-support software to address serial sexual crimes and online sexual abuse.

LATIS is software currently being deployed to support the more efficient and effective identification of serial sexual offenders across the UK. The software and its algorithms were developed with extensive input from SCAS analysts and senior management including how the output was displayed/visualised and how LATIS was deployed to support decision-making within the unit. The project was Highly Commended from Home Office Science and Innovation Team.

P-ACE LAB software responds to the urgent need facing policing where demand for services has increased year-on-year, without a comparative increase in human and technological resource. It also reduces the exposure of analysts to distressing material.

P-ACE LAB and the NCA will continue to work together to evaluate these tools, ensuring they meet need and delivers the anticipated benefits for policing and the wider public.

Leads: Professor Patricia Thornley (Aston University) and Dr Sarah Jane Fox (University of Leicester)

• Road safety
• Autonomous systems (e.g., drones and vehicles)
• Sustainable transport solutions
• Crowd evacuation
• Microwave integrated systems
• Robotics

Recent work

Sustainability of mobility

Being able to move quickly and safely is an absolute necessity in policing, but as the demand for new technologies grows there is also a need to monitor and assess the sustainability of mode, vehicle and fuel transitions. Last year Aston University's expertise advanced fuel life cycle assessment allowed us to: support an international motor manufacturer in developing their European future vehicle/fuel strategy; critically assess the availability of sustainable fuels for the International Aviation Transport Association; work with ports to develop future-proof plans and compare the life-cycle impacts of advanced fuels for industrialists participating in DESNZ's net zero innovation portfolio. This comprehensive knowledge of future fuels, propulsion and environmental constraints will allow us to work with the police to develop robust mobility strategies.

Drones

The NPCC have issued a position paper on drones as first responders stating that drones are indispensable to policing.

P-ACE LAB have considerable expertise and experience in understanding drone technologies including experts at the heart of operational development and developing the policy, governance and legal frameworks that support police drone operations.

Our recent projects have examined public and community trust in the police use of drone technologies and multiagency working with drones - for example between emergency services.

As this technology and policy work develops individual forces will be expected and enabled to make greater use of drones in a wider set of operational contexts. We are here to help you seize these opportunities and work on your priority use cases. We can help evaluate public responses, compliance issues and also develop evaluations of the effectiveness of the different use cases and capabilities as they arise.

Leads: Professor Carole McCartney (University of Leicester) and Dr Krzysztof Kredens (Aston University)

• Forensic linguistics and author identification
• Deepfake algorithm detection
• Digital forensics
• Police interviewing
• Validation of identification evidence

Recent work

The state of forensic science

P-ACE LAB member, Professor Carole McCartney (University of Leicester) produced a report as a Commissioner on the Westminster Commission on Forensic Science: Forensic Science in England and Wales: Pulling out of the Graveyard Spiral (June 2025). 

It argues that forensic science in England and Wales is not working well for anyone - the police, the scientists, the suppliers of services or those companies who may wish to enter the market, the courts, and by extension, the public.

Enhancing the quality of forensic evidence and its use in court is also a key concern of Professor Geoffrey Morrison and Aston University’s Forensic Data Science Laboratory. This focuses on methods for the evaluation of forensic evidence which are empirically validated, reproducible, resistant to cognitive bias and which use the logically correct framework for interpretation. This work has contributed to UK and international ISO standards in forensic science (ISO 21043).

Identifying online offenders

Aston University and the University of Birmingham have worked together with West Midlands Police and the NCA to develop new methods of analysing and linking offender activity in child sexual abuse in dark web fora.

Using their combined expertise in forensic authorship analysis (linguistics) and forensic crime linking (psychology), researchers from the Universities devised a codebook of linguistic and behavioural features against which they coded a set of CSA offender interactions. An analysis of the presence and absence of these features revealed patterns of consistency and distinctiveness in the ways in which offenders behave in and across these spaces, making it possible to link single users across their multiple usernames.

Significantly, the linguistic and behavioural analysis combined was more powerful than either approach used in isolation. While some users were easier to link through their linguistic traits and others were more behaviourally consistent, the combination of linguistic and behavioural analysis added to the overall capacity to resolve multiple usernames to a single individual.

Leads: Professor Tim Grant (Aston University) and Dr Fuxiang Chen (University of Leicester)

• Improving data quality and digital futures
• Machine learning and AI (mathematical foundations and ethical application of such technology)
• Analysing text-based data (e.g., natural language processing and large language models)
• Forensic data science

Recent work

Analysis of natural text

P-ACE LAB members are experienced in the analysis of unstructured natural text in different domains. For example, social media datasets (Facebook and Twitter/X) have been analysed to understand user behaviour and reactions to external changes. Additionally, at UoL members have worked on low-resource language (less commonly used languages where there is a scarcity of data and tools for natural language processing tasks) and multilingual datasets.

The University of Birmingham and Aston University have also been involved in the American IARPA funded HIATUS programme developing large-scale authorship analysis and obfuscation tools for intelligence and forensic applications. We have a long history of developing authorship analysis approaches and tools and members of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics are frequently involved in investigative work and in providing linguistic evidence of authorship in court.