The N8 PRP people and knowledge exchange strand

Hopes to provide significant staff mobility and interaction between police/partner agencies and academics (including early career researchers) in Higher Education institutions. The intention is to foster greater mutual understanding and trust between the partners via people exchange, including secondments, internships, and placements, and also to facilitate research into priority policing issues.

Nikki D’Souza from Durham Constabulary will be the first to pilot one of our staff exchange initiatives. Nikki has been seconded for three months and in collaboration with the University of Sheffield will be conducting exploratory research into utilising restorative approaches with organised crime groups.

Here Nikki tells us about her background and what led her to this field.

Background

I joined Durham Police 10 years ago, having worked as a probation officer and middle manager for the previous 10 years. Having an enduring interest in intervention practices with offenders, I have always been attracted to roles which involve examining motivation for behaviours – especially criminal behaviours!

This extends to my operational and academic career to-date: I undertook primary research as part of my Masters in Criminology, Penology and Management at Cambridge University examining public confidence in Unpaid Work, which I subsequently published in professional journals.

Organised crime groups

Based in the Force Intelligence Unit as an analyst some years ago, I was fascinated by our local organised crime groups and untangling the heavily networked relationships between criminals “within” families and between those “families” and their local community. A couple of years later as the force lead for Restorative Approaches and the Victims Code, I wondered if anyone had tried restorative practices with OCG members.

N8 policing research pilot

This led to the inception of this pilot project exploring the feasibility of utilising restorative approaches with OCG members – a relatively unexplored area of our business. Are such offenders and their victims willing to take part in restorative options? What are their views of such a disposal, either as a stand-alone option or running alongside a traditional adversarial process? What forms of Restorative Approaches would work best for such offenders and for victims?

There are many questions which I am hoping to shed some light on!

“I am really thrilled to get started on this project – it is always exciting when you are able to bring quite disparate subject matter interests (OCGs and Restorative Approaches) and merge them with both practitioner and academic roots!”

Staff exchange future plans

We hope to roll out this scheme more widely from September 2016, with applications opening in June 2016 for police officers, police staff, academics and postgraduate researchers, any announcements will be made on the staff exchange page.

Nikki D’Souza along with Xavier L’Hoiry (university of Sheffield) are due to speak at the upcoming North East Crime Research Network Conference, Thursday, 7 April .

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