Interview with Declan Sullivan

Can you briefly summarise your time at the Institute of Criminology?

I came to the institute with eight years of professional experience in the American criminal legal system. That work was predominantly in policing, and before I came to Cambridge, I received a master's in public administration. So, I had a good understanding of a lot of the administrative and regulatory aspects of policing in the USA, but I was really interested in pivoting my career to focus more directly on research.

What I noticed before I came to Cambridge, was that a lot of the work I was doing was predominantly in the realm of program administration and evaluation. I lacked the space to critically interrogate the structural and normative assumptions underpinning policing; a gap that criminological theory and research at Cambridge helped me address.

And I would say that, in general, my time at the institute was amazing. I got everything I wanted out of the degree. While the lectures and the professors obviously helped deliver the methodological training that I was looking for, I was also really keen to open up my perspectives on theory. The rich, diverse environment to study criminology that exists at Cambridge is fairly unique, and I didn't find that a lot of programmes in the USA took on that international perspective.

Another thing that was really unique about the institute is the way that they're so well-networked and well-resourced within the international criminological community. They offer many talks and lectures from both academics and practitioners, which allows you to connect theory directly to practice. I made sure to take the time to attend all of those, and through those experiences, I had opportunities to have coffee with some of the world's leading academics, like Professor Lawrence Sherman, who works at the Institute, and also high-profile practitioners like Dame Cressida Dick, who is a former Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police.

 It was really amazing for me to go from watching someone like her on TV in the USA, to having coffee with her and asking her about the strategies or politics from when she was the Commissioner. Having the opportunity to speak directly with someone of her stature and ask questions about her tenure in such an important role, was something I’d never had the chance to do before. That was an opportunity that I've never really had before and I think that's something that really, uniquely, is available at Cambridge.

What convinced you to study Criminology?

After years of working directly in American policing, I realised that understanding the the policy, the people, and the institutions within the criminal legal system requires a deeper theoretical grounding. My prior experience taught me to administer programmes, but did not focus on broader or foundational questions about the logics and theories of change that led to their creation.

Criminology offered me the tools to approach these lines of inquiry through theory. Additionally, as many folks will know, most of the work in criminology is highly interdisciplinary. This interdisciplinarity enables criminologists to critically examine the institutional logics, political dynamics, and socio-legal assumptions that underpin contemporary criminal justice systems.

It's also not just individual behaviour, and I think it's really cool that in a room of criminologists, there can be a sociologist, a political scientist, a historian, and a lawyer. These diverse perspectives in the Institute, and in the discipline more broadly, lay a solid groundwork for critical and impactful scholarship. Criminology provided the ideal foundation for transforming my practitioner experience into theoretically informed, interdisciplinary scholarship.

Why did you decide to come to Cambridge?

I first became acquainted with the work of the Institute when I attended a lecture by Dr. Lawrence Sherman and Dr. Heather Strang at a conference in the USA. They presented some work that they had done, which looked at changing the way that police respond to domestic violence incidents. For me, it was fairly groundbreaking research, and after I looked into their work, I immediately knew that I wanted to be trained at the place that they were producing that type of scholarship.

On top of that, the fact that the Institute has a reputation of critical and experimental criminology seemed to be the perfect fit for the scale of research that I was hoping to do.

Can you briefly describe your thesis?

My thesis looked at the policing of gentrification, and the way that gentrification changes how people utilise police services. I looked at 10 years of police dispatch data from Austin, Texas, and I wanted to understand how those things change over a 10-year period in one area.  

This is a scale of data that we have not really had access to until recently. After 2020, there was a massive release of all this data from local police departments, that provided us with new insight into the way that police spend their days. Prior to that, it would be one- or two-year periods at a time. So, on the advice of my supervisor Dr. Justice Tankebe, I took advantage of this to evaluate how things have changed over the last 10 years. We have seen significant social, cultural, and economic shifts in the past decade. Had any of this translated to changes in police behaviour?

Building off of that, I then explored how calls change specifically in the context of social and urban change within neighbourhoods that gentrify. I found some evidence that calls related to quality of life were increasing in areas where gentrification was intense in scale or rapid in pace and also the neighbourhood was low density. These calls were not related to property or violent crime, but more minor neighbourhood complaints: your noise complaints, traffic issues, suspicious people, etc.

These findings suggest a breakdown in collective efficacy within gentrifying neighbourhoods, particularly where the scale or pace of change is high and population density is low. In other words, if gentrification occurs rapidly in a low-density neighbourhood, residents in that neighbourhood might be more likely to call the police to sort out a noise complaint than deal with it amongst themselves. That's a big claim to make, so I intend to pursue doctoral research to more rigorously test and refine these findings using expanded data and methodological triangulation. Nevertheless, the thesis essentially served as a proof of concept for that idea, which I believe it successfully did.

What have you gone onto since graduating?

I’m applying for a PhD, hoping to develop some of the ideas I got to present in my MPhil course.

I've still been working on my thesis. I'm trying to develop a manuscript to publish it. We've had another year of data that's been released since the time I wrote the thesis, so I'm trying to take advantage of that.

I also have a small consulting firm where I do some work here and there with non-profits, police agencies, and journalists. A lot of that work has involved programme evaluation and strategic planning. Feeling confident in my methodological toolbox, which Cambridge certainly helped me do, has been invaluable in my client-facing work. I also serve on the board of advisors for an organisation that looks at accountability and peer-to-peer intervention in prisons and prison settings, mainly through prison officers.

Can you give some examples of how you have used learning from the course in your career?

One of the great strengths of the programme, as I mentioned, is its ability to open you up to interdisciplinary thinking and pull from different fields. Sociology is not a space that I really engaged with a whole lot prior to attending Cambridge. But going to Cambridge made me much more familiar with the main theories and work in that literature.

I also think it’s inherent, in a lot of the theoretical and the methodological training at Cambridge, to ask these more fundamental questions about the nature of the research that you're pursuing. What is its value? Its feasibility? How does it fit within broader theoretical understandings and contribute to knowledge?

I found myself asking a lot of these more fundamental questions in my consultancy and my advocacy work. I’m constantly pulling myself back to those fundamentals, and I try to encourage my partners and colleagues to do the same. In the current American political and scientific climate, it’s essential to interrogate not only the rigour of our research but also its urgency, relevance, and public value, as many programmes and scholarships are on the chopping block due to funding cuts. 

The technical skills and experience I had at Cambridge helped me be a much more active voice in guiding research than I have been previously. Candidly, I have to thank Dr. Lanfear for his attention to methodological rigour. He and my supervisor, Dr. Tankebe, helped me understand how to process really large data sets with more nuance and skill than I had been able to do before.

Prior to coming to Cambridge, if you had told me that I would look at 10 years of data and be able to draw any sort of conclusion from that, I probably wouldn't have believed you. But now that I've received that training, I feel much more confident and capable in engaging in that type of work, drawing meaningful conclusions, and communicating them effectively.

 One final note I have is that the Institute is great because of the people at the Institute. The faculty and the student body are incredibly diverse, which forces you to think about the role of culture and upbringing in how you think about research and its subjects.

As an American, I know we are prone to US-centrism, this idea that the only things that ever matter are what happens in the United States. Americans often struggle to grasp that ‘our’ justice system is not universal and that exporting its assumptions can do more harm than good. Our justice is not everyone’s justice. Our policing is not everyone’s policing.

The great thing about Cambridge is that it's almost impossible to get trapped in your own cultural myopia. You have to think about things on an international level, and people are great about sharing their perspective and logics. I think that was really helpful, and again, something that I was not really getting in my education or experience prior to coming to Cambridge.

What was the most important thing criminology taught you?

One thing that I really valued when I was at Cambridge was the opportunity to dive deeply into my research, but also to have an opportunity to develop relationships with the folks at the Institute. One of the most impactful relationships that I had was with my supervisor, Dr. Justice Tankebe. Our conversations about my research, my coursework, the theories I was engaging with- they were all incredibly enriching and rewarding to me,

I think one of the things that I learned a lot about through those conversations was the ways to develop research that questioned structures of power, in ways that I had not thought about previously. And I would say that a lot of that stems directly from those conversations with my supervisor.

Criminology encouraged me to interrogate how power is structured, legitimised, and contested within systems of control; a perspective that continues to shape both my scholarship and my advocacy. These lines of inquiry are critical in work on policing and in my personal capacity as an engaged citizen. And again, those foundational questions are really important for developing strong and meaningful scholarship. That was something that I feel like I really developed and honed in on while I was at Cambridge, and I hope to deepen my knowledge in as I move forward in my career.

March 2025