Enhancing community engagement with crime prevention and reduction

The awarded PhD studentship (to the value of around £100,000) is aligned with Royal Holloway’s Social Science Impact Accelerator, a 5-year funded programme to amplify the impact of our social science research. At the heart of the PhD is ensuring that applied research has real-world benefit and has a positive impact on communities and local and national organisations and ensuring that on completion of the PhD the graduate has excellent transferable skills to take forward to future employment.

The project will explore and develop ways to enhance community engagement with crime prevention and reduction, through close partnership working with Neighbourhood Watch and key stakeholders, such as the police. The project outcomes will have direct and immediate impacts on the real world. Our key partner, Neighbourhood Watch, is a voluntary scheme run with the support of the police in which a particular neighbourhood contributes to reducing crime and its impact by sharing information and support between members and between members and the police. The work draws on areas such as how individuals and local communities experience crime, feel that their voice is heard and can make a difference, and how systemic factors (including trust and confidence in the police) might impact on how communities engage with crime prevention and reduction.

This project builds on existing research conducted by Dr Emily Glorney and Dr Anastasia Jablonska in the Department of Law and Criminology in the School of Law and Social Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London.