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Head of Evidence and Insight, MOPACDr. Paul Dawson holds a varied career incorporating practical clinical psychological experience with mentally disordered offenders, doctorate level study, alongside 19 years of government/policy (Home Office, Metropolitan Police Service, MOPAC) research analytics covering many different analytic crafts (i.e., surveys, performance insights, evaluation and social research) – all to develop and harness insight to promote improvements. Paul is currently Head of Evidence and Insight – an internally based analytics unit at the Mayor’s Office for Policing And Crime (MOPAC) with the aim of conducting a wide ranging programme to the benefit of crime, justice and policy making in London. |
Presentation: Trust and Confidence – Policing Legitimacy in UK and NZ
Concurrent Session Three – Excellence in Fighting Crime: Learning from London into Serious Youth Violence – insights into policy implications
Violent crime takes an appalling toll on our cities, inflicting terrible harm on victims, devastating families and traumatising communities. Reducing and preventing violence in all its forms is the London Mayor’s first priority in his current term. Police recorded violence against the person began to increase both in London and across E&W in 2014/15. Some violent crimes in London had started to fall before the pandemic – for example knife crime resulting in injury and gun crime. However, the number of teenage homicides in 2021, the highest on record of 30, shows how much more there is still to do to ensure Londoners are safe. An evidence-based approach is a core ingredient in tackling violence. The session will present findings from a rich and diverse indepth problem profile led by the MOPAC Evidence and Insight team – that pulls together a complex and wide-ranging set of analytics generating a wealth of key insights, many of which confirm what was already known, many are wholly new. Findings highlight borough variation in violence, the stark role of robbery in wider violence, Londoners perceptions of violence, at the geographic level the importance of deprivation as well as specific sites associated to violence, levels of disproportionality, the quality of MPS intelligence, typologies of violence and levels of victim attrition. Finally, seeking to move beyond only a presentation of insights – the session will outline the MOPAC policy next steps and outline how the results have been used (and will be used) to contribute to making London safer.
An introduction to MOPAC Evidence & Insight – reflections on applied policing policy research
In London, the Mayor acts as the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), a democratically elected position with an office that has a statutory duty to set and manage the policing budget and ensure effectiveness in policing practice.
The session will introduce the Evidence and Insight team – the research analytics unit based within the Mayors Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC). With a staff of over 30, the team has the aim of generating a wide array of evidence based insights – from pan London surveys, data analysis and visualization to large-scale evaluations – all to support policy making, oversight of the police and ultimately seek to make London safer.
The session will document the journey of the team and their transition from the Metropolitan Police Service to the PCC Office in 2014 and use this as a springboard to offer wider reflections upon the craft of evidence based working from this unique perspective.
Innovation in evaluation – devising a novel quasi-experimental approach to understanding the impact of the London Gangs Matrix
A robust assessment of the impact of polices, programmes or interventions on desired outcomes is paramount to effective evidence-based decision making. Within this, the key to understanding impact lays within the design of the counterfactual – that is, knowing what would have happened in the absence of any given initiative. Decades of learning have produced many sophisticated approaches in developing tests of the counterfactual. However, certain real-life operational scenarios, especially within policing can negate these approaches. This session will document one such instance, focussing upon the MOPAC Evidence and Insight analysis into the London Gangs Matrix – a panLondon, retrospective evaluation of a tactic with selection bias – which to all purposes eliminated conventional approaches to developing a robust counterfactual. In the absence of a suitable existing methodology, a novel quasi-experimental approach was developed by MOPAC in collaboration with UCL inspired by ‘the Knox Test’, a technique commonly used in the spatio-temporal analysis of crime and behavioural crime linkage. This session will document the background, approach and findings in the hopes of stimulating discourse and providing evaluators/analysts with a new technique to generate a counterfactual.