UCL courses for police officers

UCL’s crime, forensics and counterterrorism courses are attracting serving officers in the UK.

UCL’s Dept of Security and Crime Science is home to some of the UK’s premier courses in crime and security including the MSc in Crime and Forensic Science which began last September, and joins the already popular MSc in Crime Science and MSc in Countering Organised Crime and Terrorism.

Dr Ruth Morgan, Director of UCL’s Centre for the Forensic Sciences, explains what makes the new course so distinct: “We are focused on providing a course that is more focused on practical forensic science. We are looking to train up a future generation of people who are going to be able to understand how forensic science fits into the context of crime. They’ll also be able to conduct research and be intelligent consumers of that research. So they’ll become policy makers and managers who have more of an understanding of how forensic science fits into an investigation.”

The MSc in Crime and Forensic Science is the only UK forensics masters course to offer training with the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) Crime Academy (the agency that trains forensic practitioners for the Met). By the end of the programme students will be prepared for a variety of different career paths including research, crime investigation, forensic science provision, policy making and public sector careers such as the civil service.

UCL’s courses attract a strong mix of serving police officers as well as first time students, and this has been a key reason for their outstanding success.

Web: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/scs/pg-taught  

The MSc/Diploma in Countering Organised Crime and Terrorism is aimed at security professionals whose role involves developing and implementing strategies to address the threat of extremism, against public, corporate and critical targets.

The MSc/Diploma/Certificate in Crime Science is the UK’s first (and most successful) programme designed specifically to equip law enforcement and security practitioners, and graduate students, with the means to deliver immediate and sustainable reductions in crime through the use of scientific method.

The programme brings together multiple disciplines to create techniques to better analyse and reduce crime problems by (a) preventing them from happening in the first place and (b) increasing the probability of detecting and arresting offenders.

About the UCL Department of Security and Crime Science (SCS)

The SCS (part of the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science) is the first university department in the world devoted specifically to reducing crime. It does this through teaching, research, public policy analysis and by the dissemination of evidence based information on crime reduction. Their mission is to change crime policy and practice. In the last Research

Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008) 75% of the department’s research activity was judged to be internationally excellent or world leading, placing the department joint second in the UK in the relevant unit of assessment. The department, based at University College London, consistently ranked one of the world’s top universities, currently runs the highly popular MSc in Countering Organised Crime and Terrorism and the MSc in Crime Science as well as the new UCL JDI Centre for the Forensic Sciences and the £17m international Security Science Doctoral Research Training Centre.