About Thinking About Policing

Thinking About Policing tells the stories behind research, data and practical work that is helping to shape modern policing.

The website does not conduct academic research and it is not an authority on police procedure. Its purpose is simpler: to find useful work already being done by researchers, police forces, analysts, practitioners and others, and explain it in a way that people will remember.

Evidence-based policing produces a great deal of useful knowledge. Much of it appears in research papers, evaluations, official datasets, inspection reports and policy documents. Those sources are invaluable, and articles on this site should take readers back to them.

But quoting research papers is not usually how the best ideas travel.

Most people do not sit over coffee discussing the methodology section of an academic paper. (Some do!) They talk about what somebody tried, what happened, what surprised them and whether the same idea might work somewhere else.

The most memorable research is often the research with a story.

A reader may forget the title of a paper or the exact percentage reported in a study. They may remember that another force approached a familiar problem in a completely different way. They may remember an unexpected pattern in a dataset. They may remember that something widely believed by practitioners did not survive contact with the evidence.

That remembered example can shape how they think about the next problem they encounter.

Use. Produce. Communicate.

The Society of Evidence Based Policing uses the short line Use | Produce | Communicate | Evidence. Thinking About Policing borrows the core language deliberately because it describes the same practical habit in three words: use evidence, produce useful learning, communicate it clearly.

That does not make this site part of SEBP, and it is not an attempt to rebrand their phrase as something new. It is an aligned mindset.

Use what is already known before starting from scratch.

Produce analysis, explanation or practical learning when there is something worth adding.

Communicate it well enough that somebody can carry the idea into a briefing, a conversation or a decision.

For Thinking About Policing, that is the point of the work. Evidence has limited value if practitioners cannot find it, understand it or pass it on.

A collection of other people’s work

The research and evidence discussed on Thinking About Policing belong to the people and organisations that produced them.

The site draws on published research, official statistics, police force material, evaluations, inspection reports, policy documents and other identifiable sources. Where possible, articles link directly to the original material so readers can examine it for themselves.

Thinking About Policing does not claim authority over that work. Its contribution is finding it, connecting it with a practical policing question and explaining why it is interesting.

Ideas worth passing on

Policing is full of work that is known locally and almost invisible elsewhere.

A team tries something different. An analyst produces a useful piece of work. A force evaluates an intervention. A researcher publishes a finding with obvious practical relevance. It is discussed for a while by the people closest to it and then disappears into a report, presentation or webpage.

Thinking About Policing tries to stop some of those ideas disappearing.

The site is not here to tell readers what to think. It is here to give them more things to think with.

If somebody remembers an article months later because it gave them a useful example, introduced them to a piece of research they had never encountered, or made a familiar policing problem look slightly different, then the story was worth telling.

About the editor

Nathan Tracey is a serving police officer who designed and built Thinking About Policing in his spare time out of an interest in evidence-based policing, data and the questions that emerge from operational experience.

Everything on the site is written and published in a personal capacity. The views expressed do not represent the official position of any police force, the Home Office or any other organisation referenced on the site.

For academic correspondence, collaboration, article ideas or data queries: [email protected]