Police use of Out of Court Disposals to Support Adults with Health Vulnerabilities

The research team at Skills for Justice, alongside RAND Europe and Get the Data, make up a consortium of research organisations working to understand the Out of Court Disposal process and map the varying use of disposals across every police force in England and Wales. This project, led by RAND Europe, aims to complement the introduction of the 2-tier model of OOCD (Community Resolution+ and Conditional Caution+) and a move away from the 6-tier model.

The role of Skills for Justice in this ambitious project depended heavily on our long history of evaluative work in the justice sector. In late 2021, Senior Researcher Brenda Gonzalez was one of several researchers in the consortium conducting pre-engagement interviews with police forces in preparation for larger-scale data gathering.

In early 2022, Brenda was joined by Senior Workforce Data Analyst Niall Allen-Curry, Senior Researcher Jemma Jones, and Researcher Alex Hetherington who worked to conduct interviews with stakeholders within a collection of police forces, mapping their OOCD use and preparing for more in-depth work with police forces in the coming months. This work was undertaken alongside concurrent efforts from colleagues in the research team from RAND Europe and Get the Data.

• Map the use of OOCDs among police forces in England and Wales (Late 2021 – early 2022)
• Establish a picture of good practice (Mid 2022)
• Pinpoint key local and national challenges for work in the OOCD space (Mid 2022 – project end)
• Work with a select number of case study forces to untangle issues and identify the impact of individual OOCD interventions (Mid-late 2022 – project end)
• Deliver training to police forces on OOCD data collection practices (Late 2022)

March 2023