Reducing the impact of serious organised crime in local communities 

A new project 

Perpetuity Research and The Police Foundation are running a two year project which will focus on helping the police and their partners to work towards identifying strategies to reduce the impact of serious organised crime in local communities.

Bridging the knowledge gap

As volume crime continues to fall, concern about serious organised crime, which is costly, harmful and widespread, is rising. Organised crime targets the most vulnerable people and communities but is rarely a priority for the police and their partners.

With cuts in police funding likely to reduce further the allocation of resources for tackling organised crime in local communities, there is an urgent need to provide a systematic assessment of the scale, nature and impact of organised crime locally, to raise awareness of the harm it causes and assess the effectiveness of the responses to it.

Innovative strategies

Stage 1 of the project will focus on improving understanding of the impact of organised crime on vulnerable people and communities and will assess how effectively this threat is tackled locally and Stage 2 will use the research findings to develop tools to help policing agencies more effectively tackle organised crime. The lessons learnt will be used to develop a follow-up demonstration project.

Funded by an independent grant, the project started in April 2014. It presents an exciting opportunity for Perpetuity Research and the Police Foundation to work closely and collaboratively with the police and their partners to bring about positive changes on the ground.

Find out more

To find out more about this research please download our project summary, or get in touch with Ruth Crocker or Sarah Webb, our two team members who are working on the project full-time.