Policing, Culture and Community: WM Police as City of Culture Partners
How can the police use City of Culture as a platform to engage the public and improve public perceptions of policing, whilst simultaneously helping to manage crime and protect event attendees?
West Midlands Police (WMP) was a principal partner in the delivery of Coventry City of Culture. In addition to the obvious community safety aspects of running a city-based cultural mega event (from policing large audiences, to licensing venues and outdoor spaces), collaboration is underpinned by numerous shared values and objectives around community engagement, public safety and protecting vulnerable populations.
The project sought to understand the potential for police partnerships around arts and culture to have a positive impact on crime reduction and the protection of vulnerable people, on increasing diversity in recruitment, and on police relationships with young people and seldom heard communities. In addition to monitoring community safety and security throughout the year of events, this partnership also provided WMP with an opportunity to engage with the general public. Through a number of arts initiatives, including a mural and artist-in-residence scheme, they aimed to foster confidence and trust and build relationships with local communities.
This successful body of work has led to a number of further initiatives, including evaluating an outreach programme led by WMP and Ernst and Young for young people at risk of school exclusion and/or involvement in criminal activity; an empathetic story-telling initiative with a group of young people; and a collaboration with the Belgrade Theatre to produce a performance piece based on the findings from our research around young people’s experiences of policing in Coventry.
About the team
- Professor Jackie Hodgson: Jackie is Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Professor of Law. She established the Criminal Justice Centre and the cross-faculty Centre for Operational Police Research (COPR), which she co-directs. Jackie is also the University lead on research around City of Culture and works closely with colleagues leading on public engagement and monitoring and evaluation. Jackie has worked with police forces on a variety of policing issues, including working with Professor Neil Stewart on a study of public confidence in, and victim satisfaction with, policing. Her research also focuses on the area of European and comparative criminal justice. Jackie's recently published monograph "The Metamorphosis of Criminal Justice" (2020, New York: OUP) analyses decades of legal and political change, contrasting domestic and European drivers within British and French criminal justice, evaluating how procedural models are able to influence, structure or limit reform. Adopting a comparative empirical and policy lens, she questions the extent to which modern criminal justice systems continue to reflect core values of the adversarial and inquisitorial traditions, or whether concerns with managerialism, efficiency and securitisation prevail, producing a kind of facsimile of justice and fair trial.
- Dr Rachel Lewis: Rachel a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Law at Warwick University. She works at the intersections between Law, Sociology, and Applied Linguistics, and focuses on issues around bordering, anxiety, and punishment in the contemporary UK.