The Yorkshire Policing-Academic Centre of Excellence (TYP-ACE) 

Context

The Yorkshire Policing-Academic Centre of Excellence (TYP-ACE) is a new research centre jointly hosted by the Universities of Leeds and York. Launched in October 2025, it forms part of the national network of nine Policing Academic Centres of Excellence (P-ACEs), created by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and UKRI to strengthen links between academia and policing and to improve access to high-quality scientific evidence and innovation.

The P-ACE programme was designed to enhance how evidence is identified, shared, and used across the policing sector. Its centres have two main roles: to mobilise and showcase relevant research from universities, and to work directly with police forces and national bodies to address the questions and challenges they face through co-developed research and knowledge exchange. As part of this programme, TYP-ACE provides university-wide accreditation for both Leeds and York, recognising the breadth of expertise across the institutions that is relevant to contemporary policing.

TYP-ACE was established to harness this expertise and focus it on the priority issues facing policing today. Police forces are dealing with rising and increasingly complex demand, diverse forms of vulnerability, shifts in crime patterns, pressures around public trust, and the effects of environmental and technological change. Alongside these challenges, there is a growing emphasis on prevention, early intervention, problem-solving, and evidence-informed decision making. The Centre seeks to support this shift by helping policing partners access the best available research from across both universities and by facilitating new collaborative work that responds directly to contemporary policing challenges.

The Centre is directed by Professor Dan Birks at the University of Leeds (previous co-director of LIDA:Societies) and Professor Adam Crawford at the University of York. They are supported by four academic leads who oversee the Centre’s key Areas of Research Interest - crime prevention (led by Dr Anna Barker), data analytics (led by Dr Toby Davies), public trust (led by Dr Nadai Jessop), and climate crisis(led by Dr Ali Malik) - and by the Centre’s Project Manager, Dr Eleri Pound.

Partnerships

Partnership working is central to the mission of TYP-ACE. The Centre builds on well-established relationships with policing and public-sector organisations across the region, nationally, and internationally. It draws on years of collaborative work led by both universities, including previous research and joint initiatives focused on vulnerability, prevention, and data-driven public service reform.

Within the universities, TYP-ACE is designed as a gateway that brings together expertise from across all faculties and disciplines. Taking a challenge-led approach, the Centre seeks to build a multidisciplinary network of researchers to ensure it can support policing partners in examining problems from different angles and identifying evidence-informed ways forward. It builds on the strengths of long-standing centres and institutes such as the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures, the York Environmental Sustainability Institute, and the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination. By drawing on these internal networks, TYP-ACE ensures that policing partners have access to a wide range of academic insight, from environmental science and health research to AI, data analytics, criminology, and social policy.

Externally, the Centre is also an active part of the NPCC’s national P-ACE network, which enables collaboration across the nine centres and supports joined-up approaches to working with policing. Through these partnerships, TYP-ACE aims to build a long-term infrastructure that makes it easier for police and their partners to access academic insight, understand emerging evidence, and work collaboratively with researchers at Leeds and York to address pressing issues.

Next Steps

As a newly established centre, the coming year will focus on building the systems, processes, and relationships that will enable TYP-ACE to deliver on its mission. The priority is to develop clear and accessible ways for policing partners to share their evidence needs, engage with research expertise, and draw on work taking place across both universities. This includes creating mechanisms for supporting collaborative problem-solving, and ensuring that research findings are communicated in a way that is useful and practical for policing audiences.

A major milestone in this next phase of development will be the launch of TYP-ACE’s first funding call, planned for December 2025. This call will be designed to support activities that strengthen knowledge exchange between academic researchers and policing partners. It will help disseminate existing research from Leeds and York, and it will support the co-production of new research in direct response to applied policing problems. By focusing on both existing and emerging evidence needs, the funding call will lay the foundations for a sustained programme of collaborative work in the years ahead.

To find out more about the Centre and details of the funding call you can visit our website - leeds.ac.uk/policing - and attend an information webinar and Q&A on 9th December at 9.30am – Register here  TYP-ACE Information webinar

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