Research and Policing: The Infrastructure and Political Economy of Federal Funding

Abstract

Despite major progress in social science helping policeto prevent crime, federal funding for police research is atits lowest level in thirty-five years. Only a majorrestructuring of the political economy of criminology seemslikely to revive research with and for the police. Forabout $1 per American per year, federal funding for“Centers for Crime Prevention” could be established inall sixty-seven cities of more than 250,000 people and ineach of the twenty states with no cities that large. Bycreating much stronger grassroots engagement in research,both the consumption and the production of socialscience could be greatly strengthened to improve theeffectiveness and fairness of police practice.

Cross-agency coordination of offender reentry: Testing collaboration outcomes

“…These include limited resources, conflicting beliefs (e.g., philosophical and/or political), and confidentiality concerns (Florin et al, 2000;Hammett, Roberts, & Kennedy, 2001;Mitchell & Shortell, 2000). Issues of territoriality, conflicting goals, lack of trust, and differences in perceived status have also been identified (Gittell & Weiss, 2004;Himmelman, 2001;Sherman, 2004;Wolff, 2001a), as well as differences in decision-making styles and performance assessment (Berkowitz, 2001;Florin et al, 2000;Mitchell & Shortell, 2000;Provan & Milward, 2001). At the practitioner level, these challenges are primarily institutional restrictions (e.g., time constraints, staff turnover, or limited funding) that impede the ability to work collaboratively to address common problems (Taxman, Young, Byrne, Holsinger, et al, 2001).…”

The impact of program developers as evaluators on criminal recidivism: Results from meta-analyses of experimental and quasi-experimental research

“…Practitioners like teachers are encouraged to reflect on their own practice, and use their own qualitative assessments to shape their future efforts with students (e.g., Huebner 2000). This shares similarity with how agencies and organizations should self-evaluate, or what Love (1991) called Finternal evaluation._ Both Shepherd (2003 and Sherman (2004) have argued that one way to improve research in policing is to develop the Fpracticing researcher_ in law enforcement, similar to the clinicianYresearcher in medicine. In such a system, law enforcement agencies would conduct studies of their own strategies, and would also provide learning opportunities for officers.…”

Towards rational and evidence-based crime policy

“…Juxtaposed against those costs is a paucity of systematic attention to conducting any of the five major kinds of evaluations-needs, theory and design, process or implementation, impact, and cost-efficiency-typically used to justify, design, implement, and assess policies (Rossi et al, 2004). The situation stems in part from the influence of politics, as well as the lack of infrastructure to support evaluations (Cullen, 2005;Eskridge, 2005;Lipsey et al, 2005;Marion & Oliver, 2006;Sherman, 2004). Criminal justice systems, for example, typically have limited research capacity, and few criminology and criminal justice programs formally introduce students to evaluation research.…”

“…A fundamental and oft-made criticism of much crime policy research is, however, that it lacks sufficient rigor to identify effective policies (Berk, 2005;Farabee, 2005;Lipsey et al, 2005;Petersilia, 1991;Sherman, 2003Sherman, , 2004Sherman et al, 2002). Frequently, no control groups are used, or if they are, the groups differ, making comparisons suspect.…”