As a dynamic, highly skilled and multidisciplinary research team, we have expertise in many areas relevant to understanding and responding to crime. Our topics range from designing out crime in housing developments and  reducing alcohol-related violence in town centres, to tackling crime on public and commercial transport and  understanding high crime neighbourhoods. We also research the role of the police in the detection and prevention of crime, the impact of prisons on offenders and their families and the prevention of terrorism, violent extremism and hate crime. We adopt a broad approach in researching these topics that includes a concern with victimisation, offending, perceptions of crime and safety and the presence of crime opportunities particularity how these are influenced by the social, physical and built environment.

Within the Applied Criminology and Policing Centre we strive to ensure our activity is relevant to practice and applicable to ‘real world’ settings as well as being of the highest academic quality. We aim to achieve this by:

• Conducting academic, practice-relevant and multidisciplinary research on crime and the policy, social and environmental contexts in which it occurs
• Promoting the transfer of knowledge to practitioners and agencies responsible for reducing crime
• Developing international links in academia and practice
• Communicating with academic audiences, practitioners, agencies and policy makers through publications, conference presentations and training
• Nurturing the next generation of researchers, analysts and problem solvers by supporting a strong PhD student community