2023 PhD Project
About The Project
The Nottingham/Nottinghamshire Violence Reduction Unit (NNVRU) brings together civic partners from Local Government, Health, Education, Policing, and Criminal Justice to work with communities and the charity sector to reduce serious violence (SV). This seeks to build community resilience, change social norms, and use local intelligence/evidence to interrupt the transmission of violence. To date, intelligence is based on analysis of SV data using official statistics. There is an identified gap as decisions are made on evidence that this is not necessarily representative of local lived experience.
Concurrently, there is an emerging trend of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data science in crime analysis. While estimates suggest these approaches could help reduce crime by 25%, there are concerns of fairness and ethics given the growth of automated decision-making systems to predict people’s actions and assess risk of certain behaviours. Criminal justice data contains an inherent bias linked to ethnic disproportionality, and the adoption of AI may perpetuate existing concerns around discrimination, trust and confidence in policing. This may also further distance communities from local decision making for reducing serious violence.
The NNVRU local Strategic Needs Assessment references issues around disproportionality in the criminal justice system, specifically that black and mixed heritage boys continue to be overrepresented. Work is being undertaken by both youth justice boards in the City and County to understand and form a response to these issues in more depth. This research will provide an opportunity to work with communities to build mutual trust in the provision of personal data and its use.
A challenge for this PhD is how to ensure communities and lived experiences are represented in local understanding of serious violence and properly represented in the deployed data analytics. At the same time, it must be ensured that these communities benefit from the use the data analytics to develop innovative smart solutions that can maximise available resources and increase efficiencies for developing local intelligence. The successful candidate should ultimately become a local champion, empowering local communities to develop evidence informed responses to reduce SV that combine lived experiences with best practice data analytics.
This project has been co-created and is supported by researchers from Nottingham Trent University, the University of Nottingham and partners at Nottingham Violence Reduction Unit.
Project Aims
This project aims to empower local communities to co-design evidence-based solutions to reduce serious violence. It seeks to do so through addressing the following objectives:
- To ensure lived experience is reflected in local decision making to reduce serios violence.
- To ensure local data analytics are reflective of local lived experience.
- To develop community champions to support local decision making in reducing serious violence.
- To combine lived experience and data science to develop a citizen science model for reducing serious violence in young people.
The Project Team
- PhD Candidate: Leanora Gardner
- Lead Supervisor: Dr Andy Newton, NTU
- Co-Supervisor: Dr Kai Xu, UoN
- Community Supervisor: Helen Johnston, Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire Violence Reduction Partnership