Evidence-Based Policing

“Most of us have thought of the statistician’s work as that of measuring and predicting . . . but few of us have thought it the statistician’s duty to try to

bring about changes in the things that he [or she] measures.” —W. Edwards Deming

[I was excited to find an old fellow-traveller from years ago, Larry Sherman, quoting Dr. Deming in this publication from the Police Foundation along with some key concepts that closed the abstract — “management accountability and continuous quality improvement.” These two concepts will be vital to the continuing forward progress of American policing. While Sherman ties this in with Compstat, it is most surely applicable to every effort to improve policing — and improve it continuously!]

---

Evidence-Based Policing

By Larry Sherman, Police Foundation

— Abstract —

“The new paradigm of ‘evidence-based medicine’ holds

important implications for policing. It suggests that just doing

research is not enough and that proactive efforts are required to

push accumulated research evidence into practice through national

and community guidelines. These guidelines can then focus in-

house evaluations of what works best across agencies, units,

victims, and officers. Statistical adjustments for the risk factors

shaping crime can provide fair comparisons across police units,

including national rankings of police agencies by their crime

prevention effectiveness. The example of domestic violence, for

which accumulated National Institute of Justice research could

lead to evidence-based guidelines, illustrates the way in which

agency-based outcomes research could further reduce violence

against victims. National pressure to adopt this paradigm could

come from agency-ranking studies, but police agency capacity to

adopt it will require new data systems creating ‘medical charts’

for crime victims, annual audits of crime reporting systems, and

in-house ‘evidence cops’ who document the ongoing patterns

and effects of police practices in light of published and in-house

research. These analyses can then be integrated into the NYPD

Compstat feedback model for management accountability and

continuous quality improvement.”

---

READ the full publication HERE.

from Improving Police http://ift.tt/2gtU0PW