Rebuilding: Policing and public trust Ben Bradford, Sam Fowles, Justice Tankebe, Mirren Gidda and Ailbhe O'Loughlin

Ben Bradford is Professor of Global City Policing at the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, University College London, where he is also Director of the Centre for Global City Policing. His research interests include public trust, police legitimacy, cooperation and compliance in justice settings, and social identity as a factor in all these processes. He has also published on organisational justice within police agencies, ethnic and other disparities in policing, and elements of ‘public-facing’ police work, such as neighbourhood patrol, community engagement and stop and search.

Sam Fowles is a barrister specialising in public and constitutional law, with experience of law in the UK, US, Australia and at the Council of Europe. He has worked on many of the most significant political cases of recent years. He regularly appears in the media, including on the BBC, Sky and Al Jazeera.

Justice Tankebe is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, where he is the Deputy Director of the Institute of Criminology. His research concerns police legitimacy, police-community relations, violence and corruption. He received his Ph.D. in Criminology from the University of Cambridge. Prior to his current appointment, he held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, and he was a teaching associate on the Cambridge Police Executive Programme at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Mirren Gidda is an award-nominated investigative journalist with Liberty Investigates, an independent journalism unit based at the human rights organisation, Liberty. Since helping set up Liberty Investigates in 2019, Mirren has reported extensively on the criminal justice system, particularly policing. She exposed serious ethnic disproportionality in the police's coronavirus fines, resulting in her giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, whilst her article about the Met abandoning its decision to record the ethnicity of people subject to vehicle stops resulted in the force issuing a reversal a day later. Her latest findings, which revealed disproportionate strip searches of Black female children, were put directly to Met Commissioner Mark Rowley in a Channel 4 interview.

Ailbhe O'Loughlin is a Senior Lecturer in Law at York Law School. She holds a PhD in Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the intersection between mental health, criminal justice and human rights. Her recent work has examined the role of psychiatric evidence in sentencing decisions and the implications of the Draft Mental Health Bill 2022 for the human rights of people who enter the mental health system through contact with criminal justice agencies.