Summary Criminological research has for some time focused on the types of people that commit crime and why they might do so. However, over the last decade, there has been substantial progress in research concerned with the complimentary question of whether there exist regularities in how, where and when crimes are committed. Such research has demonstrated that the risk of crime is not random, but that the risk of crime is greater for some people, in particular neighbourhoods, and at some homes. Similarly, research demonstrates that the risk of crime varies over time. For instance, crime is more likely at certain times of the day and months of the year. These findings have clear implications for operational policing and currently inform the crime reduction strategies adopted by many UK police forces. More recent academic research conducted by the applicants demonstrates that other regularities in crime patterns exist and that their identification can inform police decision-making in such a way so as to lead to the more effective use of police (and other) resources. For example, our research shows that when a burglary occurs at one location, others are more likely to occur at the same location or nearby in the near future. Put another way, the risk of burglary spreads in much the same ways as a communicable disease. Importantly, the identification of such regularities can provide intelligence that can inform what the police might do to prevent or detect crime. Furthermore, based on such findings, it is possible to develop mathematical models to generate predictions regarding the future locations of crime events. Such models have been shown to outperform existing methods of crime mapping. The ability to identify these kinds of regularities and to use them to inform police priorities or tactics is particularly important at a time when police budgets are being cut. However, because the types of analysis noted above are at the cutting edge of academic research, and were generated for research purposes, they cannot be conducted using available software. The aim of the proposed project is to bridge this knowledge-practice gap, identifying the most promising types of analysis and developing usable software packages that would make a real difference to police practice. The collaboration would facilitate a two-way exchange between police practitioners and academics and lead to the translation of cutting edge research into tools that can be used to prevent harm to society. We envisage that the project would also lead to the identification of new research questions that would inform the academic agenda.

Preventive policing of serious crime sometimes involves deception and disguise. A case in point is the prevention of abuse arising from paedophile grooming and peer to peer networks where abuse images of children are discussed and exchanged. The preventive techniques by police investigators include assuming identities of existing community members, and of children, so that interventions and arrests can be made. Often, there are tight time constraints associated with this process - investigators have only a small window in which to learn and assume the identity in question before arousing suspicion in their target(s). The training that undercover online investigators currently receive, although broadly informed by linguistic theory, is in need of development. Furthermore, the time constraints mean that a semi-automated system to assist in identity assumption would represent a crucial contribution to the investigative toolkit. Research taking a computational approach to the analysis of online communications has thus far focussed overwhelmingly on the structural elements of Computer Mediated Discourse (CMD), such as typography, orthography and other low level features, with little to no attention being paid to the socially situated discourses in which these features are embedded. The Centre for Forensic Linguistics (CFL) - a research centre within Aston University combining leading-edge research and investigative forensic practice - and Lexegesys - a consultancy and technology company specialising in developing and implementing data analysis solutions, recently collaborated on a project that was successful in automating the process of identification and extraction of low-level features for the purposes of attributing authorship of unknown texts within the context of Twitter. Yet CMD has widely been recognized to operate on a number of linguistic levels, such as those of meaning, of interaction, and of social practice. Outside of the computational linguistic field, the characteristic features of CMD are understood as resources that users draw on in the construction of identities in particular contexts, and CMD constitutes social practice in and of itself rather than simply being shaped by social variables. Taking an inductive approach, which is to say that the phenomena of interest, rather than a specific theoretical paradigm, are primary, this research aims to bridge the gap between complex theories of the discursive construction of online identities on the one hand, and computational approaches to analysing online communications on the other. A small scale study CFL and Lexegesys are currently engaged in is addressing the challenges of automation at the pragmatic and interactional levels, working towards the semi-automated identification of phenomena such as indirect speech acts and topic management. The work is extremely practical and is informed by real-world police investigations. A partner in the project, the West Midlands Police, Technical Intelligence Development Unit is crucially committed to providing data and operational insights. In addition to empirical applied linguistics, the project conducts proof-of-concept work for software that will assist in an ethical use of assumed identities in policing. Furthermore, it will involve an assessment of the ethical and policy implications for policing and security of complexity in online identity performance. This proposal was previously submitted to the AHRC, and is resubmitted here on their advice.

The concept of legitimacy lies at the heart of democratic policing: in a democratic society, police must seek and maintain public support by acting impartially, using coercion proportionately, and persuading the citizenry that they are an institution that is entitled to be obeyed. Yet, there are multiple highly marginalised communities for whom perceptions of police illegitimacy, non-compliance, conflict, and experiences of police coercion are the norm. With its central focus on fairness, legitimacy, identification between police and public, and normative compliance, Procedural Justice Theory (PJT) is a useful model to understand how to improve police community relations. But there are several aspects of the theory that limit its policy relevance in relation to policing marginalised groups - i.e. those with whom police have most contact. First, PJT research focuses on the general population and only infrequently on sub-populations. While we know much about how people in general understand and read policing, and the role of fairness in such understandings, we know less about how general experiences feed across to those parts of the population who have most at stake in their interactions with officers, who have long histories of problematic relations with police, and/or are increasingly the focus of police strategic priorities (e.g. safeguarding, radicalisation, anti-social behaviour, protest groups). Second, there is a heavy reliance in extant research on survey data and correlational analysis, and there is a pressing need for laboratory-based experiments to establish causal relations and delineate the subjective processes linking procedural justice, legitimacy, and law-related behaviour. Third, there is a related failure to address the nature and role of social identity, intergroup relations, and the dynamics of police-public interaction as mediators of fairness, legitimacy, and compliance. This project will address these limitations by developing two parallel programmes of research. First, we will use ethnographic methods to obtain direct semi-structured observational data of a series of police interactions with marginalised groups across a range of contexts. We will conduct interviews with the people involved in those encounters (police, 'citizen', observer) to interpret how encounters were experienced, processed, and judged. When arrests (or other forms of criminal justice action) take place, we will develop longitudinal data by tracking those individuals through the criminal justice processes, undertaking a further series of interviews and questionnaires with various stakeholders involved in that process. We will also have access to statistical data concerning the nature and context of the encounters (e.g. stop and search statistics). Second, we will translate a series of police-public encounters into a fully immersive Virtual Reality (VR) programme that participants will experience via headsets to engineer a series of experimental studies. Both experimental and ethnographic strands will explore the following questions: 1) What specific role(s) does 'social identity' play in perceptions of procedural fairness? 2) What contextual factors shape people's perceptions of the fairness of police activity and how do these change through and within interaction? 3) Are marginalized/excluded groups attuned to the fairness of police behaviour in different ways, and how do the dynamics of interaction with police officers shape or undermine this marginalisation? 4) What effect does the experience of police procedural (in)justice have on the subsequent behaviour of the individuals concerned? By addressing these questions the project will advance our theoretical understanding of the ways police can move away from coercion toward a consent-based approach among highly marginalised and 'difficult to reach' groups; theoretical knowledge that will provide applied benefit for a range of different stakeholders.

Evidence obtained from victims and witnesses is of critical importance to the criminal justice system. Current interview procedures for eliciting this evidence frequently fall short of best practice, and have not kept pace with theoretical developments relating to human memory. This is highly problematic as poor quality investigative interviewing leads to incomplete witness evidence at best, and unreliable evidence at worst. Concerns over the quality of investigative interview skills is particularly acute for frontline uniformed officers who have a lack of policing experience coupled with demanding and multi-faceted work priorities. The provision of interview training for these officers is already severely limited; usually a couple of days of basic training are allocated to learning how to interact with victims and witnesses. At a time of financial austerity, when forces have been required to make savings of £2.4bn by 2015 due to a 20% cut in Home Office grants to police authorities, this situation is moving towards crisis point; the number of frontline officers is being reduced, officer workloads are increasing and there are even fewer opportunities for training. A key recommendation made by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) to budget for these severe cuts highlighted the need to transform the efficiency of front line staff. The proposed research directly addresses this. The critical challenges of falling budgets and rising expectations were central to a recent government policy conference in the UK (Policing & Justice for the 21st Century, July, 2013). The UK Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice called for 'greater innovation to maintain standards' as part of his bid to promote recent Home Office policies - 'Making the criminal justice system more efficient' (April, 2013), and 'Helping the police fight crime more effectively' (March, 2013). UK police forces are being encouraged to modernise by adopting new technology, such as body-worn-cameras. These new initiatives are promising, and have every potential to make policing more efficient and effective by speeding up the path to justice, reducing paperwork, and enabling officers to spend more time on patrol. However, digital innovations will also expose the deficits in interviewing and interpersonal communication skills, due to increased transparency and the availability of recordings. In light of this increasingly difficult policing context there is an urgent need for new and effective evidence-based interview procedures that complement national guidelines on the collection of evidence while also (a) supporting frontline officers, (b) increasing the speed of obtaining evidence, (c) enhancing the quality of evidence obtained, and (d) promoting the success of current and future technological implementation of digital-recording in policing contexts. The primary aim of the project is therefore to support current and future generations of frontline officers via the development and introduction of a novel 'Structured Interview Protocol', an investigative interview protocol that will efficiently and effectively promote the conduct of ethical best practice interviews to elicit high quality evidence. The protocol will draw upon relevant memory theory and principles of memory, current psychological theory on the strategic control of memory reporting, and cutting-edge psychological developments in investigative interviewing research. It will be developed in collaboration with police-based Knowledge Exchange partners to enhance the success of digitally-recorded interviews, at the same time consolidating and improving front line officers' practice conducting interviews. The College of Policing will provide expert oversight and a quality assurance role. The Structured Interview Protocol will be scientifically validated via controlled experiments and a randomised controlled field-trial. As a whole, the research promises significant impact.

Over recent years, the ways in which members of the public can contact the police have undergone significant change. Whilst much contact is still face-to-face, many police organisations have introduced different types of communication technology, such as online reporting of crimes and answering of queries, body worn video cameras, mobile data terminals, and the use of social media accounts. As a result, the public is increasingly likely to encounter policing in ways that are 'technologically-mediated'. In the UK, the National Police Chiefs' Council supports this shift, and has a portfolio of work focused on developing technologies for use by the public to contact the police because, they believe, the public now expects that policing will be 'online' just as other services are. However, while attention is being paid to what technology can do, and particularly what it can do for the police, the public side of this encounter has barely been considered. Online reporting (for example) may appeal to some people, or be particularly useful for some crime types, but we do not know enough about how people experience these types of interactions to be confident that they will benefit everyone, in all circumstances. Nor do we know if and how these developments might affect the way people feel about, and act in relation to, the police. This project therefore focuses on understanding the implications of introducing technologies into conversations between the police and the public. Two main objectives are to explore how members of the public feel about these new developments, and to consider the ways in which the police can and should design their systems to better reflect people's needs and expectations. PoLITiC is designed to include a range of different groups and individuals, for example those who are more and less confident using digital technologies, and those with particular access needs (for example the deaf community). We aim to shape policy and practice, with a view to improving service provision. We will work closely with three police forces, with various communities, and with national policing organisations, so that our findings can directly and positively influence what the police do, and therefore what the public are able to do to access police services. We know that when people interact with the police they come to conclusions about how much they support the police, how good the police are at their jobs, and how much they trust what the police do. But this knowledge is based on research which assumes that most or all police and public contact happens face-to-face, person-to-person, as it has done for decades. At most a telephone may be involved. Given that this situation is changing, it is important that we reconsider our theories of public trust and police legitimacy, and explore if they are fit for purpose in the current environment and future-proof against new developments. PoLITiC therefore aims to explore police and public experiences and understandings of technologically-mediated contact by using methods such as interviews, focus groups, and extended observations to gain a deeper understanding of these new forms of contact in action. To help us understand how experiences may differ, we will carry out our research in a variety of different locations (for example urban and rural) and will work with various communities. We will also consider what it means for the police to be 'visible' and 'accessible' in a digital age and assess how the public feel about the different ways the police can be seen and contacted. A series of on-line experimental studies will complement the qualitative methods, and allow us to estimate the causal effects of, for example, different forms of mediation on trust. Using a variety of methods our research will develop understandings of police legitimacy in changing times, and allow us to recommend ways for the police to stay legitimate in the eyes of the public in the 21st century.