We are delighted to report that we are about to start a new project entitled ‘Reducing the Impact of Serious Organised Crime in Local Communities’. We are undertaking this work with the Police Foundation. As volume crime continues to fall, concern about serious organised crime, which is costly, harmful and widespread, is rising. It targets the most vulnerable people and communities but is rarely a priority for the police and their partners. The cuts in police funding is likely to reduce further the allocation of resources to tackle organised crime in local communities. There is an urgent need to provide a systematic assessment of the scale, nature and impact of organised crime in local communities, raise awareness of the harm it causes and assess the effectiveness of the response to it. Our project is specifically focussed on identifying strategies to reduce the impact of serious organised crime in local communities. The aim of stage one is to improve our understanding of the impact of organised crime on vulnerable people and communities and to assess the effectiveness of how this threat is tackled locally. Stage two aims to develop tools to help policing agencies tackle crime and will depend on the research findings.

This project will be led by Sarah Webb who starts work on 1 April, and we are looking for a researcher to work with her. If you are interested in this post please take a look at the details here.