Dr Helen Selby-Fell joins the Centre

A warm welcome to Dr Helen Selby-Fell who joins the Centre as a CPRL academic and Senior Lecturer with the Policing Organisation & Practice team. Helen has joined us from the Liverpool Centre for Advanced Policing Studies (LCAPs) at LJMU where she was the Programme Leader for Policing & Forensic Psychology and held a Senior Lectureship for 3 years. In this role Helen also led the development of teaching and knowledge exchange in relation to ‘evidence-based practice’ (EBP).

Prior to joining academia full-time, Helen has almost fifteen years’ experience working in the police service. For most of her career, Helen held the role of Head of Corporate Analysis at Merseyside police (having joined the force as an Analyst in 2003), leading a large team of analysts and researchers. This role involved identifying emerging issues and priorities for the police force and presenting recommendations to chief officers (and wider audiences) to inform decision-making. For the last three years of her police service, Helen was seconded to the Office of the Police & Crime Commissioner for Merseyside, where she held the role of Director of Commissioning, Policy & Research. In this role Helen was responsible for designing and implementing the first pan-Merseyside commissioning strategy to provide support for victims of crime across the county. Throughout her career, Helen has developed strong links with a range of academic institutions and police forces and is passionate about bridging principles from academia into policy and practice.

Helen studied part-time for her PhD in Applied Criminology & Policing whilst working in the police service. Her research explored the challenges & opportunities associated with embedding EBP in the police service. In 2016 Helen developed an ‘EBP implementation strategy' for Merseyside police (based upon her PhD research) and has worked with the College of Policing to inform the development of the EBP agenda. Helen continues to work with police forces to help develop their approaches to embedding EBP. In addition to her work on EBP, her research interests include the role of police analysts, decision making, and forensic psychology in policing.