Launched in 2014, COPR was founded by Warwick researchers from the School of Law, Psychology Department and WBS to formalise a set of research relationships with police forces around the country. Since then, COPR has expanded into a multi-disciplinary research centre with more than 25 members across all faculties, including doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers, as well as permanent academic staff.

Our activities include an annual PhD/ECR symposium bringing together researchers from all disciplines to present and discuss their work with academic researchers, practitioners and policymakers. In Autumn 2024 we launched our new Blog series, beginning with a reflection from one of our Psychology PhD students. Our research seminars encourage collaboration, broaden networks and promote academic-practitioner knowledge and discussion in areas such as policing and technology, and trauma and policing. The breadth of the Centre's expertise enables us to bring together social scientists, psychologists, data, and technology expertise, to work with individual police forces in their priority areas - whether carrying out evaluations (eg Operation Soteria; West Midlands Partnership with Coventry UK City of Culture); conducting new research (eg preventing hate crime; disproportionate stop & search; alcohol & domestic abuse);
or sharing new findings with key stakeholders through in-force training or NPCC conferences and webinars.

Policing challenges do not sit within disciplinary silos. We understand that the legal, practical, technical and ethical aspects of policing require an interdisciplinary approach. By uniting world-leading researchers from a broad range of disciplines, including law, psychology, sociology, business, behavioural science, statistics, politics & international studies, computer science, and engineering, COPR offers a new approach to policing research. Our work draws on a wide range of disciplinary expertise and methodologies, including police ethnographies, behavioural science, machine learning, statistical modelling, 3D technologies, ethics and experimental work.

Our research partners range from individual police forces, the College of Policing and the NPCC, to theatres, the NHS, the CPS, the Forensic Capability Network, Alan Turing Institute, GCHQ and other research centres and universities in the UK and across the world.