Professor Adam Crawford
Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, School of Law, and Director of the Leeds Social Sciences Institute, University of Leeds
I have been a member of the British Society of Criminology since the early 1990s. With an intellectual background in Law and Sociology (from Warwick), I have always been interested in, and keen to support, interdisciplinary research which draws on the strength of the existing disciplines that make up criminology as rendez-vous discipline, but also works across these boundaries. After cutting my teeth in the late 1980s working on the second Islington Crime Survey with the late Jock Young and colleagues at Middlesex Polytechnic (as it then was), I worked for nearly five years at the University of Hertfordshire. Since 1993, I have worked at the University of Leeds, becoming the Director of the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies throughout 2005-11. In 2005, together with colleagues, we hosted the BSC annual conference at the University of Leeds.
Between 2010 and 2015, I was Editor-in-Chief of the BSC’s official journal Criminology and Criminal Justice. As a nominated member of the Law sub-panel for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), working closely with Loraine Gelsthorpe (the then BSC President and sub-panel member for Social Work and Social Policy) and others, we sought to ensure that criminological research was well represented in the REF assessment processes. To this end, we sought to ensure cross-panel working between the three main sub-panels that explicitly welcomed criminological work: namely Law (UoA 20); Social Work and Social Policy (UoA 22) and Sociology (UoA 23). In its reviews of the exercise, HEFCE recognised criminology as providing valuable lessons for how such multi-disciplinary research might best be accommodated within the process. In 2015, I became the Director of the Leeds Social Sciences Institute which serves to support and enhance cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaborations within and beyond the social sciences at the University of Leeds. It also fosters capacity and skills training through the ESRC funded White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership together with the universities of Sheffield and York.
My publications and research interests broadly revolve around: the governance of safety and security; policing; youth justice and restorative justice. Recently, I have published articles on: ‘Temporality in Restorative Justice’ in Theoretical Criminology; ‘Everyday Security’ (with Steven Hutchinson) in the British Journal of Criminology and ‘The role of procedural justice in the implementation of Anti-Social Behaviour interventions with young people’ (with Sam Lewis and Peter Traynor) in the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research. I am currently working on an AHRC funded study of the past, present and future of public parks (with Anna Barker, Nathan Booth and David Churchill) and Principal Investigator for an ESRC seminar series on ‘markets in policing’.
I am the Director of the N8 Policing Research Partnership (N8 PRP), a research and knowledge exchange collaboration between eight universities (that comprise the N8 Research Partnership) and eleven police forces and Police and Crime Commissioners in the north of England. Supported by a HEFCE Catalyst Grant (2015-20), the N8 PRP is seeking to transform the ways in which policing organisations value and utilise research as well as the ways in which academics engage with external partners and maximise the impact of their research findings.
I started my academic career writing about policing and community safety partnerships and now find myself leading one. All the challenges of partnership working that I wrote about in my first book, The Local Governance of Crime (Oxford, 1997), now are my everyday reality!