Dr Tom Cockcroft joins the Centre on secondment from Leeds Beckett University

Dr Tom Cockcroft is Reader in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University, seconded to CPRL to work on the project ‘Building the Evidence Base for Effective Tutoring of Police Recruits’.

An authority on police culture, Tom's most recent work has seen him explore the challenges for police organisations of developing effective cybercrime training; the challenges of applying transformational leadership models to police contexts; the experiences of police officers studying on Higher Education programmes; the relationship between police culture and the police professionalisation agenda and the impact of new knowledge paradigms in policing.

In addition to this, he has recently worked on a major College of Policing/HEFCE funded piece of research, with West Yorkshire Police entitled 'An Evidence-Based Approach to Fighting Cyber Crime from the Frontline: Improving the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Investigating Cyber Enabled Crime'. His career has seen him work with a host of police and criminal justice organisations both in the UK and international contexts (including West Yorkshire Police, Europol, the Home Office and the Bundeskriminalamt [the German Federal Police]). He is the author of Police Culture: Themes and Concepts (Routledge, 2012) and Police Culture: Research and Practice (Policy Press, 2020). He also sits on the editorial board Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice (Oxford University Press) and is a Series Editor for Routledge Advances in Police Practice and Knowledge.

For Tom, the motivation to join the Centre on a secondment was two-fold...

This piece of research speaks directly to my interests around police culture, knowledge and education and will, I hope, lead to greater insight around how best to support new police recruits as they join the organisation. Likewise, being part of such a dynamic and active research centre will provide tremendous opportunities to work with, and learn from, a range of practitioners and academics.

Dr Tom Cockcroft