Data Ethics Committee
Thames Valley Violence Reduction Unit has formed a Data Ethics Committee, ensuring transparency and ethical use of data, as it continues to lead the way in harnessing the power of analytics to support a public health approach to tackling serious violence.
The committee provides an independent expert advisory function, able to consider proposed new uses of data and the way it is analysed and shared, to inform decisions or action.
The role of the committee is not to make decisions, but recommendations. These recommendations will help the partner organisation that holds the data to make the final decision on its use.
To make its recommendations the committee will apply a range of ethical considerations including risks, benefits, confidentiality, equality and transparency.
The committee rotates the chairing of the meeting across its membership, which is made up of experts in the field of data science, academics specialising in data, ethics and philosophy, and members of the community.
The committee also provides transparency, by including community representatives and by the publication of new use cases, summaries of meetings and any recommendations made.
The Terms of Reference and an Ethical Framework are being finalised by members and will be published on this page shortly.
Membership of the Thames Valley Violence Reduction Unit Ethics Committee:
One of the advantages of the Committee is its flexible structure, with a set of core voting members but also the ability to bring new members with specific areas of expertise to aid consideration as necessary.
Core voting members include:
- Community Representative – Sylvia Simmonds
- Community Representative – Chris Lloyd: Senior Lecturer in Law in the School of Law, at Oxford Brookes University. His teaching, research, and community outreach work specialises in criminal law and criminal justice. Chris is widely published across a range of journals and contributing to academic texts. Chris also sits on the Strategic Independent Advisory Group and the Stop& Search Independent Advisory Group for Thames Valley Police.
- Community Representative – Eric Twigg: During a 40-year career in IT, roles included technical, marketing finance and large-scale project management and most recently as a project and business ‘troubleshooter’ consultant, working across the public sector. As a volunteer, roles include support to social services, with Thames Valley Police and on the local Neighbourhood Action Group.
- Community Representative – Alice Kunjappy-Clifton
- Independent law and technology – Dr Kyriakos Kotsoglou: Senior Lecturer at Northumbria Law School & Research Fellow at the University of Lausanne – Ecole des sciences criminelles. Kyri has published widely on multiple aspects of criminal evidence and legal theory
- Independent Computer and Info Science – Dr Mark Warner
- Independent subject matter expert: Dr Daniel Whiting, Psychiatrist and clinical researcher in the Department of Psychiatry
- Ethicist – Prof Mark Sheehan
- Representative of partner agencies whose data may be used – as necessary