LIDA Societies x DSDP Seminar Series: Social Good
LIDA: Societies have teamed up with the Data Scientist Development Programme to bring you a seminar series full of diverse topics within the field of Societies.
Thursday 2nd February - 12noon -1pm
Hybrid – 11.09 / online
Speakers: Amanda Hass, Alexander Davie and Abigail Brake
Talk 1: Developing tools to estimate Vulnerability-related harm and policing demand in Bradford
Speaker: Amanda Hass
Abstract:
The police has always dealt with vulnerable people, but over the past decade, the nature and extend of this involvement has changed dramatically. The ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre conducts research dedicated to understanding how a range of key societal vulnerabilities interact with, and are shaped by, policing.
This project aims to develop exploratory tools/methods to quantify the spatio-temporal distribution of vulnerability related harm and police demand in Bradford as recorded through police administrative data. It will harness two event-based datasets provided by West Yorkshire Police. The first describing police calls for service, the second crimes recorded by police occurring within Bradford.
We have developed tools to analyse the spatial and temporal patterns of these events at various scales in the Bradford district, from conducting simple event count, rate and spatial concentration measures, to more complex measures which weight crimes by their associated severity, and explore means to quantify demand through the measuring of call priorities, resourcing requirements and attendance times recorded in calls for service data.
Talk 2: Exploring the Characteristics and Trajectories of Individuals Referred to Social Care via the Police in Bradford
Speaker: Alexander Davie
Abstract:
This project is being carried out in conjunction with, and with the supervision and support, of the ESRC Vulnerabilities and Policing Futures Research Centre. The overarching goal of the Centre is to better understand how vulnerabilities, both at an individual and area levels, interact with policing and other service providers. In the past decade there has been a rapid increase in the profile of complex interdependent problems, including modern slavery and County Lines, which have added to the longer standing-challenges for policing, such as domestic abuse, homelessness and mental illness. The Centre will undertake a substantial programme of research that combines data science with insights from lived experiences to explore how vulnerability relates to policing and other service providers, and use these findings to build new, integrated, and innovative approaches to harm reduction that addresses the needs of vulnerable groups. This project focuses on the exploration of the interactions between policing and social care service provision at both individual and place-based levels in Bradford. This will be achieved through analysing data provided by Social Care services and West Yorkshire Police which has been uploaded to the Connected Bradford Research Database. Through the two main objectives this project aims to identify potential pathways through which connected public service data can be harnessed to support effective evidence-based multi-agency service provision.
The project consists of two main aims, the first of which is the identification, quantification and comparison of characteristics, trajectories and outcomes of individuals referred to social care through policing intervention in contrast to those referred through other means e.g. Healthcare providers, self-referral and referral by family/friends/neighbours. In this presentation I will cover the preliminary quantitative and comparative analyses I have carried out into the Police Referral data and comparator groups as well as further analyses I plan on carrying out. The comparator groups used were picked initially as they are the largest sources for social care referral data in Bradford. Within each of these groups I have looked at specific characteristics of the individuals referred. These characteristics include ethnicity/race, sex and age, as well as the outcome of their interaction with social care and the initial reason for contacting social care.
The second aim of the project will be achieved by combining social care referral data with crime and incident data provided by West Yorkshire Police. The project will explore place-based associations between the levels of social care referrals of various types and vulnerability-related events recorded in police data across Bradford neighbourhoods. This will be carried out using LSOA data available through the Connected Bradford Research Database. During the presentation I will discuss progress made in this area and my plans for the area based analysis.
Talk 3: How can we identify vulnerable populations using ambulance and police data?
Speaker: Abigail Brake
Abstract:
Bradford is one of the most deprived areas in the UK, but not all residents are affected equally. By connecting previously unlinked incident data from the Yorkshire Ambulance Service and West Yorkshire Police, and routinely collected primary care data on over 700,000 residents from the Bradford Institute for Health Research, we can carry out spatio-temporal analyses of the demand for service associated with key indicators such as mental health issues and substance misuse, highlight “hotspots” for ambulance and police callouts, and thus identify Bradford’s most vulnerable populations.