Criminal Justice Centre » News (tag [COPR])

Divya Sukumar wins the Warwick Three Minute Thesis® competition

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 14:22:28 GMT

Congratulations to CJC member Divya Sukumar who won the Warwick Three Minute Thesis® competition during the live final last night (7 June)!

Divya's presentation got the highest score from a panel of specially appointed judges drawn from senior University staff and an external guest judge. She also won the People’s Choice Award from the audience. She now gets the chance to enter the national 3MT competition.

Melissa Colloff and Divya Sukumar win the 2016 Psychology PhD Student Publication Awards

Mon, 22 May 2017 08:02:00 GMT

Congratulations to Melissa Colloff and Divya Sukumar for winning the 2016 Psychology Student Publication Awards! The awards worth of £100 were announced and presented on Friday 19 May, during the closing session of the Psychology Postgraduate Research Day. Melissa is supervised by Kim Wade and Divya is jointly supervised by Kim Wade and Jackie Hodgson.

This is what the judging panel said about the award-winning publications:

Colloff, M. F., Wade, K. A., & Strange, D. (2016). Unfair lineups make witnesses more likely to confuse innocent and guilty suspects. Psychological Science, 27(9), 1227-1239.

"The study used a sophisticated and careful experimental design to examine an important real life issue from a theoretical perspective. An impressively large sample size gives more strength to the study's results which potentially will have important practical implications for improving the lineup construction practices in the police force."

Sukumar, D., Hodgson, J. S., & Wade, K. A. (2016). Behind closed doors: Live observations of current police station disclosure practices and lawyer-client consultations. Criminal Law Review, 12, 900-914.

"A great example of interdisciplinary observational fieldwork that draws on research in the fields of both psychology and law and on four weeks of observations of police disclosure practices before and during custodial interviews of legally represented suspects. The results of the study help us to better undertand the nature of police practices in the disclosure of evidence and assess the potential risks of those practices to more vulnerable suspects or to suspects without legal representation."

Call for proposals - Improving Police/Public Relations and Police Diversity

Tue, 02 May 2017 08:43:11 GMT

The Open Society Initiative for Europe has published a call for proposals on Improving Police/Public Relations and Police Diversity.

The call for proposals is available here and more details on their website.

Fair lineups for suspects with distinctive features

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 09:55:48 GMT

New Publication!

Melissa Colloff (PhD student, Psychology), Assistant Professor Kim Wade (Psychology), and Deryn Strange (John Jay College, CUNY) have a new publication. Their paper "Unfair Lineups Make Witnesses More Likely to Confuse Innocent and Guilty Suspects" has just been published in a leading psychology journal, Psychological Science.

In a study containing almost 9000 participants, the authors compare three fair lineup techniques used by the police with unfair lineups in which nothing was done to prevent a distinctive suspect from standing out. The paper highlights the importance of constructing fair lineups for distinctive suspects.

Access the press release here:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/news/getting_digital_line-ups_wrong_can_put_innocents_behind_bars1/

Access the paper, here:

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/07/21/0956797616655789.abstract

How the timing of police evidence disclosure impacts custodial legal advice

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 20:18:50 GMT

New Publication!

The new publication by Divya Sukumar, Prof. Jackie Hodgson and Assistant Prof. Kim Wade's article on the impact of police evidence on the advice which solicitor's give to client is now available to be read at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298789500_How_the_timing_of_police_evidence_disclosure_impacts_custodial_legal_advice

Presently, the police in England and Wales disclose their evidence at different points during the arrest and detention of a suspect. While the courts have not objected to this, past field research suggests that lawyers can only advise their clients accurately when the police disclose their evidence before the police interview. To examine this from a law/psychology perspective, we recruited 100 criminal defence lawyers to participate in an online study. Lawyers read fictional scenarios and provided custodial legal advice to a hypothetical client (Christopher) when given either pre-interview disclosure or disclosure at various points during the police interview (early, gradually or late). Lawyers given pre-interview disclosure provided considerably more informed legal advice compared to those who were only provided with disclosure during the hypothetical police interview. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this article provides further evidence that pre-interview disclosure is essential for lawyers to deliver case-specific legal advice to suspects.

ESRC IAA funded COPR conference on evidence based policing

Sun, 05 Jun 2016 13:05:36 GMT

COPR is proud to host the SEBP West Midlands Regional Conference on the 22nd June 2016.

The keynote speaker, Professor Neil Stewart from COPR will begin by discussing his research into 'Police Big Data: Custody, Complaints and Sickness'. Professor Jackie Hodgson, also from COPR, will discuss measuring police confidence, followed by another member of COPR, Divya Sukumar who will discuss the impact of police evidence disclosure on custodial legal advice.

The afternoon will entail contributions from Dr Tony Kearon of Keele University on 'Police and knowledge exchange - knowlege informed practice or practice informed knowledge', Sgt John Tanner who will discuss Evidence Based Leadership, and Professor Geoff Berry from the University of Derby who will present a 'Plenary discussion on EBP'.

To register for this free event, please email K.Hearty@warwick.ac.uk