Edinburgh Napier University

  The police have always dealt with vulnerable people but over the past decade, the nature and extent of this involvement has changed dramatically. Increasingly, the police have been drawn into policing modern slavery, County Lines drug networks, mental health, child sexual exploitation, domestic abuse – all complex and ambiguous problems which the police know they cannot solve on their own.
These problems have been made much worse by austerity, with the police having to step into the gaps left by underfunded public services and NGOs. The Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre has therefore been funded for five years by the Economic and Social Research Council to address the following big question: "How are vulnerabilities produced, compounded and mitigated by policing and how best can the police and other services be harnessed to prevent and reduce vulnerabilities?"
Jointly led from the Universities of York and Leeds by Professor Charlie Lloyd and Professor Adam Crawford, the ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre is one of six recently announced ESRC Centres. There is an interdisciplinary team of 25 co-investigators (including Prof Liz Hughes, Edinburgh Napier) across institutions in the UK and beyond, supported by 38 police, non-governmental organisations, local and national government partners.