Increasing numbers of police professionals have decided to practice evidence-based policing. Yet many of these “early adopters” encounter opposition from their colleagues. Advocates of evidence-based policing (EBP) increasingly ask whether, or how, an entire agency can be transformed at about the same time, rapidly creating a “tipping point” for “totally evidenced” policing—defined as a steady growth of evidence-based decisionmaking on as many practices as possible. Such tipping points may require (1) a powerful advocate for EBP; (2) an “evolutionary” dimension to add on to any “smothering paradigm” that resists the addition of evidence to decision-making; and (3) strong external demands for change. Several attempts to create “totally-evidenced” decisions across entire agencies are under way. This article describes a hypothesis for how they might succeed, consisting of a 10-point plan to be implemented simultaneously.
ArielB.FarrarW. A.SutherlandA. (2014). The effect of police body-worn cameras on use of force and citizens’ complaints against the police: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 1–27 (Published online November 19, 2014).
2.
BlandM.ArielB. (2015). Targeting Escalation in Reported Domestic Abuse: Evidence From 36,000 Callouts. International Criminal Justice Review, 25, 30–53.
3.
BowdenS.BarnesG. (2015). Targeting Non-Domestic Violence Inside Houses of Multi-Occupancy. International Criminal Justice Review, 25, 54–63.
4.
BragaA. (2015). The 2014 McCord lecture of the academy of experimental criminology. Journal of Experimental Criminology (forthcoming).
5.
BownS. R. (2003). Scurvy: How a surgeon, a mariner and a gentleman solved the greatest medical mystery in the age of sail. London, England: Penguin.
6.
ButlerS. (2012) Final jeopardy: The story of Watson, the computer that will transform our world. New York, NY: Mariner Books.
7.
DroverP.ArielB. (2015). Leading an Experiment in Police Body-Worn Video Cameras. International Criminal Justice Review, 25, 80–97.
8.
GladwellM. (2000). The tipping point. New York, NY: Little, Brown & Co.
9.
Hogan-HoweB. (2012). “Total Policing.” Lecture Delivered to the Cambridge Police Executive Programme, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge [Video]. Available fromhttp://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1282731
10.
InnesM. (2013) Rebooting the PC. London, England: Policy Exchange.
11.
KahnemanD. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York, NY: Farar, Straus & Giroux.
12.
KahnemanD.TverskyA. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society, 47, 263–229.
13.
KoperC. S. (1995). Just enough police presence: Reducing crime and disorderly behavior by optimizing patrol time in crime hot spots. Justice Quarterly, 12, 649–672.
14.
KumarS. (2015). Reducing Homicide With Hot Spots Police Patrols: A Rollout in Trinidad. Somersham, England: Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing.
15.
JohnsonS. (2006). The ghost map: The story of London’s most terrifying epidemic-and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world. New York, NY: Penguin.
16.
LewinK. (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2, 34–46.
17.
LumC.KoperC. S.TelepC. W. (2011). The evidence-based policing matrix. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 7, 3–26.
18.
MazerolleL.Personal Communication, University of Queensland, December 14, 2015.
19.
MillensonM. (1997). Demanding medical excellence. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
20.
MorabiaA. (2006). Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis and the evaluation of bloodletting. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99, 158–160.
21.
NeyroudP. (2012). (Year one Report on PhD dissertation). Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England.
22.
PopperK. (2014). The logic of scientific discovery. London, England: Routledge. (Original work published 1959)
23.
RoseG.HamiltonR. A. (1970). Effects of a Juvenile Liaison scheme. British Journal of Criminology, 10, 2–20.
24.
RousseauD. M. (2006) Is there such a thing as “evidence-based management”?. Academy of Management Review31, 256–269.
25.
ShermanL. (2011). “Professional Policing and Liberal Democracy” The 2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal Lecture. London: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce London. (November 1, 2011).
26.
ShermanL. W. (1978). Scandal and reform: Controlling police corruption. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
27.
ShermanL. W. (1998). Evidence-based policing. Washington, DC: The Police Foundation.
28.
ShermanL. W. (2002). Evidence-based policing: Social organization of information for social control. In WaringE.WeisburdD. (Eds.), Crime and social organization advances in criminological theory (Vol. 10, pp. 217–248). New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.
29.
ShermanL. W. (2007). The power few: experimental criminology and the reduction of harm. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 3(4), 299–321.
30.
ShermanL. W. (2009). Evidence and liberty: The promise of experimental criminology. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 9, 5–28.
31.
ShermanL. W. (2013). The rise of evidence-based policing: Targeting, testing, and tracking. Crime and justice, 42(1), 377–451.
32.
ShermanL. W. (2015). Evidence-based policing in 100 discoveries. Somersham, England: Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing (Cambridge-ebp.net).
33.
ShermanL. W.HarrisH. M. (2014). Increased death rates of domestic violence victims from arresting vs. warning suspects in the Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment (MilDVE). Journal of Experimental Criminology: 1–20 (published online 2014).
34.
ShermanL. W.GottfredsonD. C.MacKenzieD. L.EckJ.ReuterP.BushwayS. D. (1998). Preventing crime: What works, what doesn’t, what’s promising. Research in Brief. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.
35.
ShermanL. W.WilliamsS.ArielB.StrangL. R.WainN.SlothowerM.NortonA. (2014). An integrated theory of hot spots patrol strategy implementing prevention by scaling up and feeding back. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 30, 95–122.
36.
WilsonJ. Q. (1968). Varieties of police behavior: The management of law and order in eight communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
