Gloria Laycock

Who is Gloria Laycock?

Gloria Laycock, OBE, was the founding Director of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London, and ran UCL's Centre for Security & Crime Science. She is an internationally renowned expert in crime prevention, and especially situational approaches which seek to design out situations which provoke crime.

She was born in New Brighton and raised in Liverpool, England, and graduated in Psychology from UCL in 1968. She began her career as a prison psychologist, and in 1975 she completed her PhD, working at Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London. Building on her PhD research, she commenced work in the late 1970s at the Home Office Research Unit where she stayed for over thirty years, dedicating the last twenty to research and development in the policing and crime prevention fields.

She founded the Home Office Police Research Group, and edited its publications on policing and crime prevention for seven years. Alongside working in Britain, she has been a consultant on policing and crime prevention in North America, Australia, Israel, South Africa and Europe. She is currently an advisor to HEUNI, a UN affiliated crime prevention organisation based in Helsinki.