Martin Wilson's Page

Dear Martin, thank you for your kind message.  My primary areas of research tend to gravitate around crime prevention and community safety programmes; reviewing of the criminal law; and punishment and sentencing benchmarks and trends. I am also deeply interested in community policing and how this approach impacts upon society.  Although this style of enforcement has a long history in British policing, it does not appear to resonate well with the image we have of a police officer being a crime fighter.  This of course feeds back into the type of recruits we see applying to the police academy - being a crime fighter is quite different from being a community police constable - entirely different mindsets, aptitutes, skills and personalities are requried, although there are some less significant overlaps between the two.  As a police change manager, I can imagine how difficult your job may be if your constables are not able to make this transition from crime-fighter to community-police-officer well.  However, this community approach (coupled with a problem-solving perspective), appears to be the most effective way of maintaining social order within an increasingly fractured and vocal community, usually polarised by ethnicity, age, class, and religion - not to mention, the often unsubstantiated fear of crime that some demographic groups experience more so than others.  We live in exciting times indeed! Let us hope that the shrinking of the public sector does not result in the thinning of an already thin blue line!