Adam Crawford

Professor of Policing and Social Justice, University of York and Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 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 and 2021 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. In its reviews of the exercises, 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 supporting and enhancing 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.

My publications and research interests broadly revolve around: the governance of safety and security; policing; youth justice and restorative justice. I have published articles on diverse themes including ‘Temporality in Restorative Justice’ in Theoretical Criminology; ‘Everyday Security’ (with Steven Hutchinson) in the British Journal of Criminology, ‘Societal Impact and the Co-production of Knowledge’, also in the British Journal of Criminology, and ‘Temporalities in Security’ in Cameron Holley and Clifford Shearing’s edited collection Criminology and the Anthropocene. I also collaborated with Anna Barker, David Churchill and Nathan Booth on an AHRC funded study of the past, present and future of public parks, which produced a number of publications in Theoretical Criminology, Urban Studies and the International Journal of Law in Context.

From 2013 to 2020, I set up and was 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 continues to seek 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.

In 2021, together with a number of colleagues across the UK and beyond, we secured long-term funding for an ESRC Research Centre, the first time criminologists have led a successful bid of its kind in open competition. We launched the Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre in May 2022.  I am Co-Director of the Centre along with Charlie Lloyd (York). The Centre is co-hosted by the universities of York and Leeds and I now work at both institutions. The Centre is advancing a programme of place-based and problem-oriented research, knowledge exchange and capacity building. As a large-scale, interdisciplinary centre of excellence, it is exploring how vulnerabilities are produced, compounded and mitigated by policing and how best the police and other services might be harnessed to prevent and reduce vulnerabilities. We are trying to rethink and help refashion the role of policing within a wider framework of public safety and harm reduction. In so doing, we are seeking to integrate insights from data science with qualitative social analysis and lived experiences.

I started my academic career writing about policing and community safety partnerships and now find myself leading another 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!