ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre

LIDA: Societies, and the LIDA Data Scientist Development Programme (DSDP) have partnered with the new Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, a joint initiative led by the University of Leeds and University of York, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The ground-breaking new research centre aims to change how the police, public services and local government work together to help vulnerable people.

Launched in October 2022, the centre brings together a wide range of national and regional partners to study how policing and other services can better tackle problems associated with diverse vulnerabilities. These include exploitation by county lines drug networks, online child sexual exploitation, domestic abuse, modern slavery, mental illness and homelessness.

An important dimension of the centre’s immediate work begins in Bradford.  The Centre supports six 6-month DSDP projects each year for a period of five years. Centre data scientists analyse police, health, education, and social care datasets housed in Connected Bradford - a secure anonymised research database which links disparate routine electronic data at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Their goal is to explore how administrative datasets – combined with a range of other information – can provide powerful insights into the types of problems that many disadvantaged communities experience. They study the conditions under which these problems emerge, intersect, and become compounded, and explore the ways in which public services are organised to respond to the needs of these communities.

The Centre's deputy director, and lead of the Centre's Connected Data Analytics programme is Dr Dan Birks - co-director of LIDA:Societies.  Over the past 12 months LIDA data scientists working with the Centre have explored a range of diverse topics including identifying ways to better measure the nature and scale of police demand across Bradford, exploring Yorkshire Ambulance Service 999 call data to better understand how vulnerable populations interact with the service, and analysing geospatial patterns of unauthorised school absence across the Bradford district. Each project is supported by a multi-disciplinary team drawn from across the university and further afield providing relevant domain and methodological expertise and real-world practice knowledge.