THE CHIEF CONSTABLE OF LANCASHIRE CONSTABULARY

Their core work

Lancashire Constabulary is a territorial police force serving Lancashire, England, responsible for law enforcement, public safety, and crime prevention across the county. In EU research contexts, they act as an operational end-user and practitioner partner, contributing real-world policing knowledge and community engagement expertise to security research consortia. Their H2020 involvement spans citizen participation in community policing and civil protection, where they bring front-line experience in managing public-police interaction and resilience planning. They are not a research body — their value to consortia is ground-truth operational insight and access to practitioner networks.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their first H2020 project (2015-2018), Lancashire Constabulary focused on community policing and digital tools for citizen-police engagement, with no explicit resilience framing in the available keyword data. By their second project (2021-2024), the focus shifted visibly toward risk perception, resilience, and civil protection — reflecting a broader trend in European security research moving from policing-as-enforcement toward policing-as-community-resilience. This evolution mirrors post-COVID and post-Brexit shifts in UK public safety priorities, where forces increasingly engage with behavioural science and emergency preparedness alongside traditional law enforcement roles.

Lancashire Constabulary is moving from operational policing tools toward community resilience and risk communication research, making them a relevant partner for projects at the intersection of civil protection, emergency management, and public engagement.

How they like to work

Lancashire Constabulary participates exclusively as a consortium partner, never as coordinator — consistent with a practitioner body that contributes domain expertise and end-user validation rather than leading research agendas. Their two projects were both Research and Innovation Actions (RIA), suggesting they are comfortable in large, multi-partner research settings. With 34 unique consortium partners across 13 countries from just two projects, they operate in broad European networks rather than tightly recurring clusters.

Despite only two projects, Lancashire Constabulary has connected with 34 unique partners across 13 countries, indicating they joined large, internationally diverse RIA consortia. Their network skews toward European security research communities, likely including other police forces, emergency management agencies, and social science research institutions.

What sets them apart

As an active territorial police force rather than a research institute, Lancashire Constabulary offers something few consortium partners can: direct practitioner access, operational testing environments, and the institutional credibility needed to pilot citizen-facing security solutions in a real UK policing context. For projects requiring end-user validation in public safety, having an actual constabulary at the table strengthens both the research design and the eventual uptake case. Their consistent participation in EU security research despite Brexit complexities signals genuine institutional commitment to European collaboration in this domain.

Highlights from their portfolio

• INSPEC2T
  Lancashire Constabulary's first EU project addressed digital platforms for community policing engagement — an early and forward-looking step for a UK police force entering the H2020 security research space.
• RiskPACC
  Running 2021-2024 — post-Brexit — this project demonstrates the constabulary's continued access to EU security research networks and reflects their expansion into behavioural resilience and civil protection themes.