Charting the progress of professionalization and evidence based practice in UK Policing

This application relates to a pre-approved project whose aim is to chart the progress of professionalization and evidence based practice within UK policing. The initial stage of the project would be to gain a greater understanding of evidence based practice and seek to identify the current position within UK policing with regards to professionalization. This would then inform the direction of the project by identifying Forces who have an evidence based approach embedded and those that do not utilise this method. This would allow individual Forces to be approached for fieldwork as the project moves forward. It would be important to examine why Forces use different approaches and their effectiveness as a result. Having discussed this project with the lead supervisor the specific areas for focused research are likely to emerge from the initial scoping work but given my interesting football policing and public order I would like the opportunity to further develop this as part of the project as these are areas that lend themselves to research on evidence based practice and professionalization and would build upon my current dissertation topic. I would anticipate employing a mixed method strategy to the research using both qualitative and quantitative methods to gather data.