Purpose and Editorial Scope

Thinking About Policing brings together academic research, evidence-based policing, and new thinking with an ear-to-the-ground officer’s view of what policing actually looks like day to day. That’s the grounding for everything on the site: not research for its own sake, and not opinion without evidence behind it, but the two put together.

The articles sit in five areas:

• Evidence & Practice — what works, and the evidence behind it: misconduct prevention, officer wellbeing, use-of-force proportionality, neighbourhood policing.
• Leadership & Culture — the wider structural questions: criminal justice, legislation, and the political pressures that shape demand on the police.
• Influential People — profiles of the researchers and practitioners who have shifted how policing is done.
• Technology & Innovation — short, data-led pieces where the numbers carry the argument.
• Data Stories — non-police stories on history, research methods, and other topics, including the Somerton Man code mystery.

Three free tools

Alongside the writing, the site hosts three tools built to put evidence directly in front of the people who need it, not just describe it.

The Research Assistant searches over 250 million academic works and returns a cited briefing rather than a wall of paywalled abstracts. Most policing research sits behind institutional access that a shift-working officer will never have, so the tool does the digging and links back to the legal, open-access version of each paper.

The Crime Dashboard pulls live, street-level data from data.police.uk and the Home Office recorded-crime series, so you can check a force’s or a neighbourhood’s actual trend rather than take someone’s word for it.

Perception turns a quarter-century of UK news coverage of the police into a word race — watching the language shift, year by year, is a faster way to see how the story has changed than reading the archive yourself.

All three are free. Sign in once — no password, just an email link — and all three unlock. Open the research tools →

About

Nathan is a serving police officer who designed and built this site in his spare time, out of an interest in evidence-based policing. He writes and maintains it as a hobby.

Disclaimers and integrity

Everything here is written in a personal capacity. The views are mine alone and do not represent the official position of any police force, the Home Office, or any other body I work with or reference.

Where the argument rests on external research or data, the source is named in the prose or cited in full. Where it rests on judgement or experience instead, that distinction is made explicit rather than left implied. Comments are open on every article, and disagreement — methodological or otherwise — is the point, not an inconvenience.

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