Criminal Justice PhD student, Hannah Steinman has co-authored a new article with Dr. Jennifer Wood published in Policing and Society entitled Health harms, climate harms and the regenerative potential of policing. The article focuses on how policing, public health, and climate change are all interconnected. Police respond to health harms, from pandemics to mental distress, and to climate harms, such as floods and fires. These changing ‘harmscapes’ – or landscapes of harm – place new demands and strains on policing, but they can also serve as ‘portals’ to new imaginings of policing functions.

The essay goes on to examine the potential for policing to serve a regenerative function, working not only to protect life, but to act as a glue that binds local harm reduction efforts together and stimulate their growth. Two developments aimed at improving the policing of health harms (COVID-19 and mental distress respectively) are used as examples to illustrate the potential of regenerative policing and distil its nascent features. The essay concludes that intentional efforts to advance regenerative policing should be considered in view of new and compounding harms to planetary and human health. Wood, J. D., Marks, M. M., & Steinman, H. K. (2024). Health harms, climate harms and the regenerative potential of policing. Policing and Society, 1–9.