Beyond the Evidence: Organizational Learning from RCTs in Policing

Abstract

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in policing potentially play an important role in meeting the policing challenges of the 21st century. The value of RCTs in policing is usually understood as providing hard scientific evidence of ‘what works’. Yet, the transformative potential of RCTs may lie beyond the evidence. In our article, we engage the theory of organizational learning (OL) to explore how RCTs implemented by police can play a powerful role in organizational change. Although we recognize that a wide variety of methods of social science evaluation contribute to organizational change, we focus specifically in this article on RCTs—either as tests of theory or as evaluations of the impact of organizational innovations, policies, programmes, strategies, or tactics. Our article suggests that better understanding the collateral benefits of field experimentation in policing can help to advance the evidence-based policing agenda. Field experimentation processes, we conclude, can increase organizational flexibility and catalyse transformative organizational learning processes. These changes have the potential to reverberate across the organization, well beyond the direct experiences of undertaking an RCT.