Our societies are more diverse than ever - more than 300 languages are spoken in the UK today. This increased diversity has had a major impact for the police. Officers now have to investigate and combat organised crime 'networks' whose members communicate across multiple languages. Police therefore increasingly need translators to be able to investigate serious crimes such as people trafficking and child sexual exploitation. This involves significant challenges, including cost, number of languages, quality and the limited supply of qualified linguists. In the Transnational Organised Crime and Translation (TOCAT) project, researchers, the police and translation providers will work together to understand and face up to these challenges. Our starting point is the need for practical guidance to help police officers and translators work together as effectively as possible. A working group has drafted official new UK guidelines for police to use when they work with translators. The TOCAT project team will conduct a trial of these new guidelines, using a 'Test, Learn, Adapt' approach. Selected police officers in the UK and Belgium will be trained to use the guidelines, then researchers will interview and 'shadow' police officers as they work to measure their effectiveness in practice, as well as any other potential needs identified by the users. This will allow us to revise the approach to make it better suited to actual needs. The Belgian trial will also allow us to test how far the approach can be 'translated' to other countries facing similar challenges, since transnational crime operates across national borders. The main questions we will be asking are: 1. How can police work more effectively to understand and fight transnational organised crime such as people trafficking when it is conducted across different languages? In particular, how should police work with translators when victims, witnesses or suspects don't speak the same language as investigators? 2. Is the planned police approach effective in practice, and, where it is not, what can be done to enhance it? 3. What are the experiences of frontline workers (police officers, support workers, translators) when they face these new challenges, and can they help us develop a better overall understanding of transnational organised crime? To answer these questions, two researchers at the University of East Anglia in the UK, Dr Joanna Drugan and Dr Alexandria Innes, will work with two researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium, Prof. Heidi Salaets and Dr Katalin Balogh. We will draw on our established partnerships with the police and all the professional associations representing translators to design and carry out the research. The research team has decades of experience in researching translation practice in 'real-world' settings, migration, and police working with linguists, suspects and victims of crime, including children and other vulnerable groups. Dr Drugan, an expert in translation quality, will oversee the project. Dr Drugan and Dr Innes, who is an expert in migration, will conduct the UK research, working with three Constabularies and the College of Policing. Prof. Salaets and Dr Balogh, who both have expertise in interpreting in police settings, will conduct the Belgian research, working with local and federal Police. We will focus particularly on the crimes of human trafficking and smuggling in this project. We will also focus on the impact of language challenges on frontline workers, notably police officers and translators. We will share our research findings and the tried-and-tested approach as widely as possible among police, translation providers and researchers, including making our (anonymised) data available for free. This will result in a valuable contribution to evidence-based policing of increasingly significant transnational crimes, and support further research on this important topic.

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.

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.

The COVID-19 crisis is changing the shape of crime. Drawing on crime science, this research will inform evidence-based policy and practice. Lockdown requires people to stay home, leading to domestic violence and child abuse increases. Yet social distancing means police are arresting fewer suspects: reduced services at time of greater need. COVID-19 gives fraudsters a 'conversation starter' to approach people in-person, via text, email and online. Remote working and online leisure activities, furloughs and financial difficulties, provide more potential targets for online crimes of various types. Vulnerable groups including the elderly and disabled are more at risk. Yet a Harvard study (Kissler et al. Science, 14 April) suggests that, absent a vaccine, social distancing may continue into 2022, perhaps 2024. So we will anticipate crime effects of prolonged, graduated or cyclical exit strategies. We will also anticipate post-crisis scenarios, seeking to sustain declines in crimes like burglary, to avoid them returning to 'normal'. We will use (1) national police data, (2) detailed data from three police partners, (3) fraud and e-crime data from industry, and (4) sources from other agencies such as Childline (for unreported crime). Pre/post-change analysis will use a combination of time-series and spatial modelling. Nesting force-level analysis in the national and international context will allow us to gauge scalability. We have police and industry partners, national (Home office, National Police Chief's Council, College of Policing) and international advisors. The aim is to inform policy and practice, producing 16 deliverables including policy and practice briefings and research articles.

The proposed project provides a near real-time evidence base to inform the police approach to the apparent surge in domestic violence and abuse (DA) triggered by the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK. Police case file data from seven diverse police forces are pooled to track the impact of the pandemic on DA, analysing changes in the risk factors, frequency, nature and profile of DA reported to police. These changes are mapped closely to shifts in the restrictions imposed during lockdown, transitional phases and post lockdown, when DA calls to police are expected to spike. The proposed study is the largest and most rigorous analysis of police DA case file data conducted anywhere in the world to date. The statistical analysis is complemented by regular focused semi-structured phone interviews with police officers, to identify emerging challenges and best practice in the frontline response to DA. The mixed-methods study addresses urgent questions on the impact of Covid-19 on DA, which may have significant implications for the complex task of accurate police risk assessment, victim safeguarding, and criminal prosecution as the Covid-19 pandemic evolves. The Home Office, the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), and College of Policing (CoP) are project partners and constitute direct links to critical decision-makers and provide direct routes to impact. A timely and evidence-based development of a police strategy is urgently needed to address the emerging DA crisis and its devastating, long-lasting consequences for victims and their children.