The Crime and Security Research Institute (CSRI) has helped reduce crime and increase security by identifying problems and providing practical, well-researched solutions, that directly inform policy and practice.

The CSRI approach is challenge-led and uses regular and close interactions with policy-makers and practitioners to meet their needs for robust evidence and insight to inform their decisions.

This work revolves around four key themes:

• Police science: Neighbourhood policing, automated facial recognition, signal crimes and developing evidence-based policing methods.

• Security and defence applications of computer science and artificial intelligence: Instinctive analytics, anticipatory situational understanding and evolution of human systems.

• Violence and alcohol related harms: Alcohol harm reduction, violence prevention and violence reduction.

• Digital Behavioural Analytics and Open Source Data: Information influence and intervention operations by hostile state actors, counter terrorism support and assessing the social consequences of terror events.

Across these diverse themes, the Institute draws from a wide range of expertise to create a highly inter-disciplinary approach. The researchers have backgrounds in social science, public health, computer science, psychology, journalism, politics, law, forensic linguistics, maths and business, and collaborate with experts from both the public and private sectors.

Research from the CSRI has directly influenced how police, governments and security agencies are responding to the opportunities and challenges induced by the new information environment and its associated disruptive technologies. This includes:

• Informing a High Court Judicial Review about the benefits and limits of Automated Facial Recognition systems to policing;

• Evidencing the influence of foreign state disinformation campaigns in Europe;

• And, contributing advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and network science for a large scale US/UK government defence programme.

Alongside this, the Institute’s public health research has had global impact upon policy and practice, such as creating a violence reduction model that has been implemented across the UK and worldwide, and shaping legislation tackling alcohol misuse.