The Scottish Institute for Policing Research was established in 2007. It is a partnership between Scottish Universities and the Scottish police service. Nicholas Fyfe, Dean of the University of Dundee's School of Social Sciences, was the founding Director. Its key strategic aims are to develop policing research capacity in Scottish universities; using this capacity to carry out high quality research of relevance to Scottish police forces; developing knowledge exchange mechanisms to strengthen the evidence base on which policing policy is founded; and developing national and international links with other researchers, practitioners and policy makers.