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Arts-led approaches to anti-racism in policing
In the context of a widespread, and decades-long, crisis in police legitimacy in England and Wales, punctuated by inquiries and reports repeatedly demonstrating entrenched racism, homophobia and misogyny within the police, our work positions arts-based approaches as both a methodology for scholarly engagement with policing, and as a tool for supporting change in police culture and practice.
In this talk, we will offer an overview of our Policing, Culture and Community body of work. Our project is positioned within a broader body of scholarship on arts-led methods in criminal justice contexts (see e.g.
Cheliotis and Jordanoska 2016; Caulfield et al 2021); however, where existing research more typically focuses on ‘marginalised’ communities, notably prisoners and other offenders, we instead centre the possibilities afforded by creative encounters for officers, as holders of authority, to engage more profoundly with their own practice.
We will reflect on three key strands of our work: (i) A 2021-22 evaluation of the West Midlands Police (WMP) partnership with the Coventry UK City of Culture Trust in which officers and communities collaborated on a
range of creative projects to build more trusting relationships. (ii) 2025’s Project Seshat, an arts-led programme for around 50 frontline WMP officers to engage with the national Police Race Action Plan by reflecting on how racism is experienced by communities and police colleagues and understanding its implications for their own practice. (iii) Our current project with a small group of WMP officers who hold a leadership role around training and disseminating good practice, in which we aim to expand and deepen their understanding around arts-led approaches to police training as part of an effort to embed this across WMP.
Through this talk, we explore the tensions and possibilities in creative engagement with policing as a scholarly object of study, and as a route into more meaningful and substantive reflection on institutional practice.
The talk is on Wednesday 14 January at 1pm in room s2.12.
This work sits within COPR and the Law School’s Arts, Culture & Law research cluster Jackie Hodgson (Law) Rachel Lewis (Sociology) Ruth Bernatek (Law)