Last year, the OPCSA piloted a partnership between Lancashire Constabulary and Lancaster University to create a Data Science Summer School for master's students. 

The Data Science Summer School had four key objectives:

• Build closer relationships between policing and academia, so academia better understands real world policing problems, and policing can understand the value of data science techniques.
• Develop data-driven solutions to local policing problems.
• Enable skills and experience to be transferred between academia and policing.
• Expose students to careers in policing, with the potential for policing to recruit data science graduates through these partnerships. 

The students tackled real life police challenges such as identifying patterns in residential burglary data to predict the areas most likely be targets and optimising the deployment of police resources to reduce burglary. 

If your force, or university are interested in replicating the Summer School contact the OPCSA via [email protected]