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Webinar

18/11/2025

From Evidence to Change: Lessons from Policing with African and Brazilian Communities in Ireland

Date: 12 December 2025
Time: 10 – 11 AM CET
Platform: Zoom

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Why do diversity strategies, oversight bodies, and community forums so often fail to translate into trusted, equitable policing? Drawing on groundbreaking research with African and Brazilian communities in Ireland, Dr. Lucy Michael (Lucy Michael Research Training & Consultancy) and Shane O’Curry (Director, Irish Network Against Racism and Facing Facts Network member) examine the structural barriers that keep well-intentioned initiatives from achieving transformative change.

Michael and O’Curry will explore three critical dynamics facing police services across the EU: the gap between symbolic and substantive reform, the exhaustion of community intermediaries who lack decision-making power, and the persistent individualization of systemic discrimination, themes that are also explored in Facing Facts’ own online learning programme Police Discrimination in the Context of Hate Crime. Using Ireland as an illuminating case study, they demonstrate how accountability must shift from individual misconduct to strategic institutional responsibility, with enforceable data collection, oversight with teeth, and diversity mechanisms that have real power to shape policy.

Their research, involving 172 survey respondents, 30 in-depth interviews, and focus groups with African and Brazilian communities, reveals systematic patterns in how police organizations implement reform and present a strategic framework for realistic accountability. The insights are grounded in rigorous mixed-methods research but designed for immediate application across different EU policing contexts.

Experiences of Policing amongst Brazilians and People of African Descent in Ireland (March 2025) was commissioned and published by the Policing Authority of Ireland.