Nick Alston CBE, the former Police and Crime Commissioner for Essex, is the Chair of PIER, which will provide academic support including police and public safety related research, knowledge exchange and education aimed at making the region a safer place to live.
PIER will carry out research to help address key issues affecting local communities, from improving responses to domestic abuse to using technology to change how policing is delivered.
Nick Alston said: “The main aim of PIER is to improve policing practice across the region through encouraging and leading research into current and likely future challenges in policing, together with supporting the professional development of officers and staff.
“Crime of all types is evolving quickly. Technological advances provide perpetrators with new ways of committing crime and, working together with other agencies such as Health and local authorities, the police are faced with understanding and responding to this changing picture.
“The College of Policing is leading moves towards the professionalisation of the police service, and a central tenet of this is the role that effective academic-police partnerships should play in the development of better policing and the promotion of a culture of continued professional development. PIER is ideally placed to address this.”
The Eastern region forces, which comprise Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and with which Kent is also closely associated, already collaborate in many areas of policing.
Anglia Ruskin’s campuses in Chelmsford, Cambridge and Peterborough offer extensive resources that are well placed to support the further development of this regional collaboration.
Criminal Psychologist Dr Samantha Lundrigan has been appointed as Director of PIER and Anglia Ruskin currently has a 30-strong community of academics actively involved in police-related research.
Dr Lundrigan said: “Policing in the UK is undergoing a period of substantial change and forces are having to address the challenge of ‘doing more with less’.
“The issue of future safety and the smarter delivery of public services, ranging from health to policing, are ones that affects everyone living in the region. We look forward to working with police forces and others to help make the East of England an even safer place to live and work.”
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For more press information please contact:
Jon Green on t: 01245 68 4717, e: jon.green@anglia.ac.uk
Jamie Forsyth on t: 01245 68 4716, e: jamie.forsyth@anglia.ac.uk
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Policing Institute aims to make region safer
19 July 2016
Anglia Ruskin University has launched a Policing Institute for the Eastern Region (PIER), to work in partnership with police forces and other agencies across the East of England.