Liz Aston is a Professor of Criminology at Edinburgh Napier University and has been the Director of the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (SIPR) since 2018. Her expertise centres on local policing and her current research focuses on technology in policing, and the intersect between policing and drugs. Liz is the Principal Investigator for the INTERACT project, she chaired the Independent Advisory Group on Emerging Technologies in Policing and is the co-editor of Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies series.

Tom Tyler is the Macklin Fleming Emeritus Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is a social psychologist who studies the dynamics of authority in groups, organizations and societies. His books include Why People Obey the Law (2006), Why People Cooperate (2011) and Legitimacy-based Policing and the Promotion of Community Vitality (2022). He received the Kalven prize for paradigm shifting scholarship in the study of law and society in 2000; the lifetime achievement award from the International Society for Justice Research in 2012; the lifetime achievement award from the International Compliance Network in 2022 and the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2024.

Dr Helen Wells is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Keele University and Director of the Roads Policing Academic Network. Her research focuses primarily on the impact of technology in policing contexts, including its effects on legitimacy and culture, its unintended consequences, and its contribution to the (re)conceptualisation of 'crime' itself.

Ben Bradford is Professor of Global City Policing and Director of the Centre of Global City Policing in the Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London. His research focuses primarily on issues of procedural justice, trust, legitimacy, cooperation and compliance, as well as various aspects of operational police practice.

Dr Arabella Kyprianides is a Research Fellow at the UCL Institute of Security and Crime Science, involved in the UCL Centre for Global City Policing and the Keele Policing Academic Collaboration. Her work includes ESRC and Nuffield-funded research and consultancy in intervention evaluation, policing, crime, and recidivism. She focuses on public trust, police legitimacy, and compliance in policing marginalised communities, and the social determinants of well-being among vulnerable groups.

Professor Megan O’Neill is a Reader in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Dundee and an Associate Director of the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (SIPR). Her work focuses on aspects of police culture, stop and search, community policing, public sector pluralisation in policing and surveillance practices of the state. Dr O’Neill’s work is largely qualitative, with a particular focus on ethnography.

Sharda is a Senior Lecturer in Policing & Criminology, and Course Leader for Policing at Birmingham City University. She is a socio-legal scholar and undertook her Ph.D. at the University of Warwick researching the concept of a 'good' stop and search in the era of Body-Worn Videos. She has a keen interest in stop and search, stop and search scrutiny panels and police accountability.

Jean-Pierre is a Southern criminologist currently completing a joint-PhD at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The doctoral research examines various ways in which public police and body-worn video technology shape one another other. He has worked in academia as a senior researcher on topics such as community safety and private security, in the private sector as a security risk analyst, and in animal protection as a wildlife crime investigator.

Diana’s research aligns criminological and sociological approaches to explore the use of emerging biometric and data driven technologies in Justice settings. From visual surveillance technologies (such as body-worn video and facial recognition) to identification and classification technologies more generally, (e.g photographic, lofoscopic, genetic but also soft biometrics and emotion recognition AI tools), her projects explore the use of these tech devices in criminal investigation, predictive policing, smart cities, security of borders and prisons.

Dr Estelle Clayton is a Lecturer in Criminology and a Research Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University. Her work focusses on police policy and practice, stop and search, community policing, and police use of technology in both national and comparative contexts. Beyond this, Dr Clayton also explores how neurodiverse individuals experience policing and criminal justice systems more broadly. Dr Clayton is a skilled ethnographer, having conducted two large scale ethnographies in Scotland, and also has expertise in interviews and focus groups.

Dr Robert Skinner is a lecturer and research assistant based in the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies (LINCS) at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. In 2014 Robert joined the LINCs team working on the Insign project, Justisigns, Translating the Deaf Self and the SLTI UK census. In 2020 Robert completed his PhD at Heriot-Watt University investigating at video-mediated interpreting in frontline policing contexts (For more information visit www.proximityinterpreting.com). Since 2020, Robert has published a number of studies investigating deaf people’s experience of the police, the suitability of interpreting services in policing contexts, and ways of using video conferencing technologies to increase high quality access to interpreting services.

Dr Will Andrews is a Research Fellow at Keele University. His research, as part of the INTERACT project, has investigated the role of technology in affecting police-public interactions, focussing in particular on drones, drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected with two English police forces between 2022-23. Will's previous research has explored the modified car community in the UK, exploring the the socio-technical framing of the car and driving, within particular groups.

Dr. Sarah Van Praet is a senior researcher at the Criminology Department of the National Institute for Criminalistics and Criminology (NICC). Her current focus lies within the DIGIPOL research project, which investigates the impact of digitalization through technologies such as body-worn cameras, mobile data terminals, and multi-tenant platforms on work relations within the Belgian local police and their interactions with the public. Funded by BRAIN-be (Belgian Research Action through Interdisciplinary Networks) under BELSPO (Belgian Science Policy), this collaborative project brings together researchers from NICC, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), and Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). In addition to her work at NICC, Dr. Van Praet serves as a lecturer at ULB and HeLHA. She is also a scientific collaborator at the Centre d’Histoire du Droit et d’Anthropologie juridique within the Université libre de Bruxelles.

Jasper De Paepe is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University and the Department of Public Governance & Management, Ghent University. In the past, Jasper De Paepe has conducted research on local security networks, police lethal force and the interaction between experts and policy makers, as well as the acquisition of expert advice in the formulation of policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis in the EU and Indo-Pacific regions. His PhD research focusses on the interplay between community policing and technology. His research adopts an empirical qualitative approach, using an ethnographic research methodology in both the Belgian and Dutch police.

I am a PhD-student at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB), situated within the Department of Law and Criminology, operating under the supervision of Prof. dr. Lucas Melgaço and Prof. dr. Sofie De Kimpe. I graduated in Criminology in September 2022, and started my PhD in February 2023. The primary goal of my research, as part of the DIGIPOL-project, is to assess the potential impact of the use of technologies in daily frontline policing on police legitimacy and police-public relations. Data is collected by conducting ethnographic research and semi-directive interviews within various Belgian local police forces between 2023-2025.