Public trust in policing is currently extremely low, with a real deterioration in public confidence in the police over the past few years.   

In the context of widely-publicised instances of individual police brutality and malpractice, alongside evidence of systemic racism, misogyny, and homophobia raised in the recent Casey Review and in the MacPherson report over 20 years ago, we investigate the ways in which arts-based interventions might impact police practice, and begin to address the crisis in police legitimacy. We know that arts and culture can have benefits in social, health, and economic terms, and arts initiatives are now widely used in prisons and across the criminal justice system. We consider then the potential impacts of police forces engaging with and through creative endeavours.

We began this research in 2021 by examining the partnership between West Midlands Police and the Coventry City of Culture Trust during which an embedded police team worked with creative practitioners to co-design and co-deliver arts-based initiatives, such as: a forest camp with young people deemed at risk of school exclusion/withdrawal and/or criminal exploitation, a mural with people with experience of homelessness, and an artist-in-residence Link opens in a new windowscheme.  

In examining this partnership, we evaluated the possibilities and challenges of this collaborative endeavour, considering the opportunities that may be afforded by the arts over more traditional methods of police-community engagement, for instance sport. Our Report: Policing, Culture & Community is available to read online.

Building further on this research, we undertook an evaluation of an outreach programme led by WMP and Ernst and Young for young people at risk of school exclusion and/or involvement in criminal activity; constructed an empathetic story-telling initiative; and collaborated with the Belgrade Theatre to produce a performance piece After Preston, written by Amahra Spence, based on the findings from our research around young people’s experiences of policing in Coventry.

We continue our collaboration with the Belgrade in a new project Keeping us Safe? in which we are working with several local schools, using arts-based workshops to gain an understanding of how young people feel about policing, and how they believe they are perceived by those who police.