Dr Paul Bleakley is a Lecturer in Criminology at Middlesex University. He received his PhD in Criminology from the University of New England (Australia) in 2019, where he received a federal government research grant to complete his thesis on the impact of historical corruption on the relationship between police and marginalised subpopulations. He has published extensively on various areas of police corruption, policing of protest and child sexual abuse. Paul has published in journals like Crime, Law and Social Change, Criminal Law Forum, Criminal Justice Studies, Critical Criminology and The Police Journal. His first book, Under a Bad Sun: Police, Politics and Corruption in Australia, will be published by Michigan State University Press in 2021. Paul is currently working on a grant-funded research project with a team from the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies, exploring the efficacy of a recently introduced Stalking Screening Tool across several police forces in the UK.
Paul comes from a long background as a trained teacher, spending much of the last ten years teaching in a secondary school environment. He has a Graduate Diploma in Education from Griffith University on the Gold Coast, Australia. He is a committed advocate of designing a curriculum that appeals to different learning styles, and encourages direct student participation in the learning process as much as possible.
Paul currently serves as co-programme leader for the BA Criminology. He also leads second-year module CRM2510 Urban Criminology, which explores issues from community formation to controversial policing methods. Paul also leads CRM1270 Crime in Social Context, a core first-year subject focusing on better understanding criminological concepts in practice. Finally, he is module leader for CRM4251 Global Criminology and Policing, a postgraduate module offering a critical appraisal of a series of important global policing concerns in the modern world.
In addition, Paul works on CRM3222 Review of Professional Practice. In this module, he works directly with police services to upskill police trainers and improve delivery of professional training.
Urban criminology, historical criminology, corruption, policing, organisational criminology.
Bleakley, Paul (2021) Accused of an "abominable crime": punishing homosexual blackmail threats in London, 1723–1823. Crime, Law and Social Change , 75 (4). pp. 331-348. ISSN 0925-4994
Bleakley, Paul (2021) The cult of corruption: reframing organizational frameworks of police corruption from a cultic perspective. Deviant Behavior , 42 (5). pp. 565-577. ISSN 0163-9625
Bleakley, Paul (2021) A new front in the history wars? Responding to Rubenhold’s feminist revision of the Ripper. Criminology & Criminal Justice . ISSN 1748-8958 (Published online first)
Bleakley, Paul (2020) Whitechapel, dark city: performative recuperation of urban identity in Gilded Age Chicago’s Whitechapel Club. Urbanities: Journal of Urban Ethnography , 10 (2). pp. 56-70. ISSN 2239-5725
Bleakley, Paul (2020) Muddy Waters: Critiquing the Historical Criminology Method in the Investigation of the Smiley Face Murders Theory. Homicide Studies . ISSN 1088-7679 (Published online first)
Paul is a member of the steering committee for the Australian and New Zealand Historical Criminology Network (ANZHCN), a thematic subgroup of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology. He is also an active member of the British Society of Criminology's Historical Criminology Network (HCNet) and the North American Historical Criminology Network (NAHCN). Paul is also an associate researcher with the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies (CATS) based at Middlesex University. He is a board member of The Football Collective, a research network for intersectional research of issues to do with football (soccer) ranging from business and management, to media and crime.
