Biography
I am the Faculty Head of Teaching Quality and Learning Enhancement within the International Recruitment and partnerships Office, where I am responsible for all quality issues for all out international and UK partners.
I amd also a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the Department of Sociological and Psychological Sciences. I specialise in policing and criminal justice.
I’m a former Senior Police Officer, having retired from Strathclyde Police in 2010 after 30 years’ service. I held various positions including Deputy Manager of a multi-agency initiative designed to reduce gang violence across Glasgow.
My research interests focus on policy transfer in international criminal justice - specifically violence prevention initiatives. My PhD research was an in-depth case study of the policy transfer of the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV) to Glasgow.
I’m interested in all aspects of policing research and have recently carried out work on the policing of parades and demonstrations, and citizen engagement in policing.
I was a Co-Investigator with a multi-university team examining the impact of organised crime on Scottish Communities that reported to the Government in May 2018. I am also an academic advisor to the National Violence Prevention Board.
In July 2018 Northamptonshire Polcie employed me a Consultant to advise them on the establishment of a violence reduction programme for gangs, building on my previous experience in the police in Glasgow and my PhD research.
I carried out an evaluation of the effectiveness of Braveheart Industries (Street and Arrow Cafe) in Glasgow on behalf of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, a social enterprise venture that trains ex-offenders in the workplace, reporting in April 2020.
I have also completed a major project on behalf of Police Scotland and The Scottish Police Authority, evaluating the Mobile Working Project for the police, which evaluated the roll out of mobile devices to officers replacing the paper notebooks. The report was submitted in December 2020.
My current research project is as a co-investigator of an evaluation project of 5 sites in the UK, delivering focussed deterrence strategy approaches to reduce violence in gangs, the largest such evaluation ever undertaken in the world to date.
I’m also an Associate Member of the Scottish Centre for Criminal Justice Research, and a member of the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (SIPR), sitting on its Education and Leadership Network.
