Evidence-Based Policing

Abstract

It is a hallmark of a science-based profession that its members conduct and publish research. In her 2012 address to the Police Superintendents Association for England and Wales, the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom called on the British police to do just that. Since the Home Secretary is equivalent to the Attorney General of the United States or the Minister of Interior in many other countries as the chief elected official responsible for policing, her injunction to publish research is a major reflection on the police profession. This volume is one response to her injunction. It will not be the last. Police research was once the sole domain of professional social scientists. No longer. Police professionals now make major contributions to research, just as practicing professionals do in other fields. Medical research is full of practicing clinicians, many of whom split their time between research and practice. Surgeons are first authors of important research articles, with their statisticians in second authorship spots. This volume reflects an aspiration to see the same pattern develop in policing in which research leadership moves from academics to professionals. The articles in this volume are therefore as remarkable for their authorship as they are for their contents. Fully half of the authors are current or former police professionals. Five of the seven first authors of these articles are police professionals. All of the police professionals hold master’s degrees in evidence-based policing from the University of Cambridge, and one (Peter Neyroud) is a Cambridge PhD candidate—after commanding thousands of police officers in two large British police agencies. They are all in the vanguard of the kind of evidence-based police profession that the U.K.’s new ‘‘College’’ of Policing (a professional membership and standard-setting body founded in 2012) is designed to promote, by identifying and applying the best evidence of what works in policing for over its core membership of 200,000 U.K. police professionals (see www.college.police.uk) and academics from universities across Britain. Authors in this volume are also active in the Society of Evidence-Based Policing (SEBP; www.sebp.police.uk), whose 2,000 members globally are linked to universities on four continents and whose winter 2015 U.K. conference included presentations from police-research partnerships from nine universities and police services.