The project will build a strategic and innovative knowledge exchange and research co-production platform, providing a structured relationship between West Yorkshire Police (WYP), the Office of the PCC for West Yorkshire (OPCCWY) and the University of Leeds. The platform provides a model in which different mechanisms of knowledge, people and data exchange are piloted in four thematic areas of policing: partnerships; acquisitive crimes of burglary and shoplifting; community engagement and public order. The approach is driven by a combination of interdisciplinary research excellence, innovations in knowledge exchange and lasting impact on both policing and academic partners. It will seek to change the ways in which the police use evidence and insights from research as well as the ways in which researchers frame research questions and engage with policing professionals across the life-course of research. The platform will provide a two-way exchange, learning opportunities and data exploitation that embed the PCC's strategic priorities of 'innovation, income and investment'. It will seek to foster a greater appreciation among police officers for the relevance, role and value of research evidence in informing police practice, as well as a greater awareness of research methodologies and skills within the police organisation. At the same time, it will seek to foster greater understanding of the operational police challenges and encourage responsibility amongst researchers for helping shape evidence-based responses to these. In so doing, it will build an academic culture of engagement and a commitment to co-production. The four hubs will focus on: (i) the role of partnerships in promoting organisational change and the manner in which this can be analysed through co-produced research; (ii) the exploitation of large police datasets to explain and better understand the spatial and social distribution of the acquisitive crimes of burglaries and shoplifting; (iii) the evaluation of an innovative community engagement project; and (iv) public order training and the evaluation of the impact of training on police practice. Each hub will benefit from one academic research lead and one nominated police lead seconded from WYP. WYP will contribute staff time, venues and resources associated with the preparation of significant datasets (including 10 years of burglary and shoplifting data across West Yorkshire). This new collaboration will develop innovative ways to address the challenges faced by the police and will provide for: collaborative framing of the research questions from the outset; the two-way flow of knowledge and data; mutual engagement with research programmes from their inception to dissemination; joint ownership of research and its outcomes or products; enhanced research impact on policy and practice through collaboration on projects that are directly relevant to police managers; the production of an evidence-base for policy and practice, and to enable innovation; the exploitation of knowledge exchange including training opportunities; opportunities for the development of research expertise and capacity among police officers and staff; and the development of skills within policing to get research evidence used over the longer-term. The work of the project will be overseen by a Steering Group including members of the WYP senior command team and chaired by the PCC, which will meet bi-monthly. Each of the thematic hubs will produce accessible policy briefings outlining the findings as will the programme as a whole. Whilst the initial activity is focused on West Yorkshire, it is intended that benefits will attend to the region (via the N8 Policing Research Partnership) as well as national and international debate and practice. This wider dissemination will be overseen and promoted by an Advisory Board with members drawn from the College of Policing, ACPO, What Works Centre for Crime Reduction and N8.

Women who work in the lap dancing industry are stigmatised and often exploited by unregulated working environments making the work precarious, unstable and potentially unsafe. Aside from moral opinions regarding how they earn money, thousands of women each night in the UK are taking part in exotic dance to earn a living. The conditions under which they work are mostly unregulated, as current regulation focuses on the premises and the external aspects of regulation such as fire regulations, door security and selling alcohol. How the dancers experience their jobs is currently not considered a regulatory concern. In a recent ESRC project involving a large scale survey of 200 dancers and follow up interviews with 30 dancers and 60 other people involved in the industry (club managers, owners, door staff, 'house mums', health and safety officers, police, licensing officers etc), we exposed the motivations for dancing and their experiences as self employed independent contractors. This research is innovative as it moves away from the existing literature on lap dancing which focuses on the identities and emotional management strategies of the dancers and their relationships with the customers. For the first time, this research project examines the dancers experiences as workers. Two important themes came out of the research. First, that the status of 'self employed' is misleading. Financial exploitation from management was a concern expressed by participants: fees paid to work in the club were often high, along with random fines, internal tipping systems, and the threat of instant dismissal. Safety inside the clubs, especially in private closed-off spaces was another concern for some participants. Working long hours throughout the night with few facilities or a space to rest and refresh were the kinds of issues that dancers felt made their jobs difficult. Secondly, the majority of dancers were young, single women under 30 years of age, and were also in other forms of low paid jobs (such as retail, beauty, and bar work) and/or were also studying. The group who mainly used dancing as their sole income were migrant women. For all of the participants, dancing was considered a highly flexible job but at the same time could not be relied on due to the volatile and unstable nature of the industry. Therefore dancing was used strategically to manoeuvre out of precarious employment prospects and to build a more secure and financially stable future. The researchers believe that these two findings can be acted upon and made relevant to policy and practice in an attempt to improve the working conditions for the women who work in the clubs. This proposed project comes at a time when there has been some new laws introduced in 2010 to govern the way in which lap dancing clubs operate and change how they are licensed. This programme of work will take key research findings forward to a non-academic audience made up of policy makers, licensing practitioners, unions and industry members who can act upon them and improve standards through the licensing processes. The project will work with the HM Revenue & Customs to provide education and workplace rights information to dancers regarding paying tax and the benefits of doing so. Information in an accessible form will be given to unions and representative groups who can take forward this campaign for better working conditions. Partnership work will also be conducted with West Yorkshire Police Community Safety Team to develop safety information and a clear line of reporting incidents. To do this we will write five bespoke briefing papers and create two visual summaries so that the findings from the research can be understood without dense text and statistics. In all of our activities dancers will be consulted and integrated into the planning and delivery of the activities to ensure that their input shapes the materials created. A website will allow these materials to be permanently available.

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.

Over recent decades there has been what many have called a 'visual turn' within the social sciences. Within visual criminology important research agendas have developed on prisons and community punishments, the fear of crime and punitiveness, and media representations of crime and deviance. Against this context, it is difficult to understand why policing has not also been more significantly subjected to research that is theoretically and methodologically informed by the visual. One of the reasons why this lacuna is particularly puzzling is that there is a long-standing body of work within the sociology of policing that emphasizes the significance of symbolism, that police embody state sovereignty, and that there are strong performative and communicative dimensions to police activity. Police uniform and patrol cars, for example, together with ceremonial flags and regalia, are considered significant to public perception, trust and legitimacy. Analysis of these is further developed in this study but wider dimensions of visibility are also included. The location, design and architecture of police buildings, material cultural representations of policing in children's toys, and social media imagery of policing are among the novel dimensions of police visibility considered in this research. No previous study has considered these broad terms or tested public perceptions of these different dimensions using visual research methods. In policy terms, visibility in policing has been primarily addressed in narrow terms regarding the potential for patrol officers to provide reassurance to anxious publics. In the context of recent policy debates about future deployment of diminishing resources there have been frequent commitments to the provision of visible frontline policing. Against a background of funding cuts imposed in the years after 2010, government ministers have tended to claim that such reductions could be focused on aspects of policing that would not reduce visible police presence. Opponents, however, have argued that spending cuts ought to be reversed in order to preserve frontline services. From whatever side of the debate, the provision of visible patrols has been presented in terms of staff on foot or in vehicles as a physical presence in public space. Building upon an emerging body of research in sociology, criminology, media, cultural studies, and human geography, this project examines the nature and impact of visible policing through the study of a wider range of activities and material practices that increasingly shape perceptions of policing, but have been neglected in research terms. Three strands of visibility are identified: 1. The symbolic power of police stations. This is particularly important since the architecture of the police estate changes as new properties (often in new locations) adopt contemporary forms and as pressure on resources leads to co-location with other agencies in shared premises. 2. The symbolic properties of police material culture, including ceremonial uniforms, flags, badges, tourist souvenirs, and children's toys. This strand will incorporate analysis in terms of the organisational and professional identity of police staff as well as public perceptions of legitimacy. 3. Police visibility in social media, incorporating official police accounts as well as those owned by individual officers, staff associations and other networks. These will be considered in terms of their impacts on the public, including whether the police play an online role analogous to real world patrol, for example, in providing for public reassurance. Photo elicitation and photo narrative techniques will be used to generate data that will address the key research questions and also provide a body of visual material that will inform focus group discussion. Visibility will be enhanced through the dissemination of findings via a dedicated website, a public exhibition and via production of a documentary film.

Stalking is included in the governments national strategy on violence against women and girls, whilst people of all genders can be victims, the majority of victims are women and the majority of perpetrators are men. Research nationally has identified a whole range of negative effects on stalking victims' psychological and physical health and has established a link to domestic murder, making prevention and early intervention particularly important. Stalking offences were introduced into law in England and Wales ten years ago in 2012, there has been a large increase in reports of stalking across West Yorkshire in the last two years, including in the Kirklees district, but convictions for stalking offences are low. There is no recent research on stalking in West Yorkshire nor any specialist support provision for victims, despite research showing such support brings about much better outcomes in terms of victims health and well being and in the criminal justice system (Suzy Lamplugh Trust 2022). Secure Societies Institute (SSI) at the University of Huddersfield are carrying out an action research project which will bring the issue of stalking from the margins to the centre in policy, practice addressing violence against women and girls in the West Yorkshire region. We are carrying out an action research project focused on the Kirklees district of West Yorkshire, which involves the voices of women who have been victims of stalking. Our main partners in the project are West Yorkshire Police, West Yorkshire Violence Reduction Unit (West Yorkshire combined Authority), Safer Kirklees and Pennine Domestic Abuse Partnership. Action research is committed to supporting change, improving The main strands to the project are; a. Setting up a new stalking knowledge and research hub linked to the Secure Societies Institute at the University of Huddersfield. b. Reviewing police data on stalking and investigative decision making in stalking cases to inform improvements to policing responses. c. Scoping current support for victims of stalking and review best practice for stalking victims/survivors internationally. d. Consulting/involving women who have been victims of stalking about their experience of support and views on improving support. e. Producing a model for a stalking support provision, produced with victims of stalking their advocates, domestic and sexual abuse services, women's and girls services and other organisations. We will share practice and academic learning from the project across West Yorkshire via the hub. We will also share learning via the established multi-agency and community networks that the university and our partners, West Yorkshire Police, West Yorkshire Violence Reduction Unit, Safer Kirklees and Pennine Domestic Abuse Partnership are active within. Also we will share learning nationally.