Evidence-Based Policing and Lawrence Sherman in the Media

In July 1998, less than a year after I became a crime analyst, Lawrence Sherman wrote an article published in the Police Foundation's  Ideas in America Policing called "Evidence-Based Policing." It can be found at this link. According to Wikipedia, the term was first defined by Sherman that year. In the same year and month, Sherman was co-author of an article in the NIJ Research Brief called "Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising," which can be found at this link. 

(It is my theory that you will not be able to have an evidence-based police without an accepted, adequate,  and integrated crime and intelligence analysis function in each police agency.)

On March 10, 2021, Wired magazine featured Lawrence Sherman in an online article called "The radical idea to reduce crime by policing less, not more," by Josh Jacobs, which can be found at this link.

Excerpt from the article:

In Sherman’s view, police too often act on instinct and hunches rather than on the basis of evidence. He describes policing like medicine of the past, before the field was reshaped by randomised trials. Sherman has accused British police of treating computers like “electronic filing cabinets” and feels officers over-rely on arresting people even when this is counterproductive. “The police are responding to too many cases where they’re not needed and therefore aren’t available to proactively identify who is at greatest risk of serious harm and to intervene with those victims, offenders and places,” he says. “So if we could stop doing a lot of the senseless errands [that officers run] and start investing much more time in planning where police can do the most good based on statistical analyses, we would have a much safer population as well as a healthier one.”

A March 6, 2021 YouTube interview featuring Professor Sherman can be found at this link.

Visit the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing at this link. Information about the "Targeting Risks of Serious Violence: The Cambridge Online Course for Police Analysts" can be found at this link.

Visit the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing at this link.

The recent Opening of 2021 SEBP Conference - Prof. Sherman & Commander Murray can be found at this link.