Dr Les Humphreys

Many of these past and current projects are collaborations with colleagues in other universities including Edinburgh University, Lancaster University, and City University London.  Has also continues to work with colleagues at Lancashire Constabulary.  Les also supervises postgraduate projects on violence, domestic violence, sentencing, gender, policing, and more generally criminological projects that use quantitative methods.

Les is a Senior Lecturer in Criminal Justice and Policing, and is the Programme Lead for the Masters in Criminal Justice in the School. He is also Deputy Lead of the Policing Strand of the Criminal Justice Partnership and lead for Continuing Professional Development in the School.
As Programme Lead for the Masters in Criminal Justice, Les is responsible for the organisation and management of the course and for issues related to assessments. He is also responsible for providing academic support to students on the course. In his role as also Deputy Lead of the Policing Strand of the Criminal Justice Partnership he works with the Lead to provide and implement strategies that enable and encourage impactful research, knowledge exchange and training for criminal justice researchers and practitioners. In his role as lead for Continuing Professional Development he is responsible for producing a curriculum of courses that meet the needs of staff in the School and wider faculty, as well as for external researchers and practitioners such as the police.

Les joined The University of Central Lancashire in 2021 as a Senior Lecturer in Criminal Justice and Policing. After completing his undergraduate degree at Lancaster University, he then went on to complete his PhD on the criminal careers of deceptive offenders also at Lancaster University in 2004. Les then spent 10 years working as a Research Associate (Senior since 2008) in the Maths and Stats Department where he was involved in a large number of externally funded criminological projects and projects concerned with developing quantitative research methodology. Whilst in the Maths and Stats department he also taught quantitative and statistical methods to postgraduates and early career researchers. The funded projects Les has jointly run are all tied by taking a longitudinal/life-course methodological approach and he has applied this approach to number of substantive topics such as deception, organised crime, and understanding crime trends. Projects include the development of an offending risk tool used by the Probation Service and the National Offender Management Service; research into gender and ethnic bias in sentencing in Brazilian courts; and understanding the criminal careers of organised criminals. Les has also been co-investigator on two ESRC funded national programmes (the National Centre for Research Methods and Applied Quantitative Methods Network) aimed at developing capacity for quantitative research in the social sciences and developing new methods for quantitative research. Since 2017 Les’s substantive research interests have revolved around domestic abuse, violence, gender, and policing and he is currently a Co-Investigator on the £7million VISION project funded by the Medical Research Council that aims to reduce the violence that harms health by improving the measurement and analysis of data on violence.