WEST MIDLANDS POLICE AND CRIME COMMISSIONER

Their core work

West Midlands Police is the second largest police force in England, serving Birmingham and the surrounding metropolitan area with approximately 2.9 million residents. In the EU research context, they contribute real-world law enforcement expertise to security-focused projects, particularly around CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear) preparedness and privacy-preserving intelligence tools. Their role is as an end-user and practitioner voice — they bring operational policing experience to help researchers build tools and training programmes that actually work on the ground.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

WMP's H2020 involvement began in 2017 with a focus on CBRN training infrastructure and networking through eNOTICE. By 2019, their focus shifted toward the human and societal dimensions of security — PROACTIVE emphasises civil society engagement, human factors, and practitioner coordination rather than just training capability. The SPIRIT project (2018) also shows a parallel interest in digital intelligence tools, suggesting a broadening from physical threat response toward data-driven and community-oriented security approaches.

Moving from technical CBRN training toward integrating human factors, civil society engagement, and privacy-aware intelligence — reflecting modern policing priorities around public trust and proportionate response.

How they like to work

WMP participates exclusively as a partner, never as coordinator — consistent with their role as a practitioner end-user rather than a research organisation. With 44 unique partners across 18 countries in just 3 projects, they operate in large, multi-national consortia typical of EU security research. This makes them an accessible partner: they bring operational credibility without competing for project leadership.

Despite only 3 projects, WMP has built connections with 44 partners across 18 countries — a wide European network reflecting the large consortium sizes typical in the Security pillar. Their reach is broad rather than deep, with no visible geographic clustering.

What sets them apart

As one of the UK's largest metropolitan police forces, WMP brings a scale of operational experience that few law enforcement partners can match — serving a diverse, multi-ethnic urban population of nearly 3 million. For consortium builders, they offer something hard to find: a genuine end-user with both the institutional capacity to participate in multi-year EU projects and the frontline experience to validate whether research outputs will actually work in practice. Their involvement signals to evaluators that a project has serious practitioner buy-in.

Highlights from their portfolio

• eNOTICE
  Largest funded project (EUR 221K) building a pan-European network of CBRN training centres — a flagship infrastructure initiative.
• PROACTIVE
  Addresses the often-overlooked human and civil society dimensions of CBRNe response, moving beyond technical training to community resilience.
• SPIRIT
  A departure from CBRN work — focused on privacy-preserving identity resolution, showing WMP's interest in digital intelligence tools with built-in rights protections.