Ideas in American - Police Foundation

Ideas in American Policing

POLICE

FOUNDATION

Number 17 December 2013

Embedded Criminologists in Police Departments

Anthony A. Braga, Ph.D.

Introduction

Past partnerships between academics and police practitioners have sometimes been characterized by role conflicts, such as researchers reporting the "bad news" that an evaluated program was not effective in preventing crime (Weisburd 1994). For academic researchers, success or failure mattered less than commitment to the development of knowledge on what does or does not work in preventing crime. For the police, this news could be interpreted as their personal failure, and the skepticism of academics may be viewed as irritating. In recent years, partnerships between police and academics have become much more collaborative and

focused on working together in addressing crime (IACP 2004; Rojek et al. 2012). Academics have much to offer to police departments. In addition to providing training in analytic methods and concepts and

developing a body of police science literature, academics can conduct problem analyses and high-quality research evaluations in partnership with police departments. Police departments should position themselves to

Ideas in American Policing presents commentary and insight from leading criminologists on issues of interest to scholars, practitioners, and policy makers. The papers published in this series are from the Police Foundation lecture series of the same name. Points of view in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Police Foundation. The full series is available online at .

? 2014 Police Foundation. All rights reserved.

Anthony A. Braga, Ph.D., is the Don M. Gottfredson Professor of Evidence-Based Criminology in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and a Senior Research Fellow in the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard University. Dr. Braga is a member of the Police Foundation's Research Advisory Committee.

support research initiatives with well-functioning internal crime analysis and research units, as collaborations with outside researchers can be quite potent and should be encouraged.

In this essay, I describe my experiences working as an "embedded criminologist" (a term coined by Petersilia 2008) in the Boston Police Department (BPD) between 2007 and 2013. In contrast to more traditional academicpractitioner research partnerships, becoming embedded within a police department involved taking the step from external partner to internal resource. Embedded criminologists maintain their scientific objectivity and independence in carrying out scientific inquires within police departments. However, embedded criminologists also function as an important part of the police organization by collaborating on the development of programs, through problem analysis and evaluation research and by interjecting scientific evidence into policy conversations to guide police executive decision making. My experiences with the BPD suggest that embedding criminologists in police departments is highly beneficial to police and academics alike. In summary: ? Embedded criminologists

enhance the capacity of police departments to understand the nature of recurring crime problems through their knowledge of research

and high-powered analytical models and methods. ? Embedded criminologists assist police departments in determining whether implemented programs are generating the desired impacts through their training in rigorous program evaluation methods. ? Through their participation in internal strategy meetings and ad-hoc research projects, embedded criminologists provide scientific evidence germane to problems, policies, and programs that can be considered by police executives as they decide how to address pressing matters. ? By working as an internal researcher, criminologists can make strong contributions to research and policy by gaining access to rich data and powerful insights on the nature of crime problems and the strategies pursued by the police departments. ? When they leave the ivory tower and work with practitioners, embedded criminologists reap the considerable personal rewards of making a difference in the real world.

Academic-Police Practitioner Research Partnerships

There is a long history of working relationships between law enforcement agencies and academic researchers in the

United States. Indeed, modern police practitioner-academic researcher partnerships were set in motion by August Vollmer, who was a criminologist and reform-minded chief in Berkeley, California from 1905 to 1932. As part of his efforts to professionalize the police, Vollmer developed educational relationships with faculty at the University of California, Berkeley to educate police officers on an assortment of subjects such as public administration, sociology, and criminology (Vollmer and Schneider 1917). Over the course of the next several decades, these educational relationships evolved into research collaborations. As Rojek et al. (2012) describe, police executives began to open their doors to academics during the 1950s, gave them access to department records, and allowed them to interview, survey, and ride with police officers. The resulting research became the foundational literature in the study of policing.

As American police departments became more invested in the idea of community and problem-solving policing over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, they started to embrace working partnerships with community members and a wide range of other governmental and non-governmental actors. Police departments slowly began to engage academic researchers as important partners in their efforts to be more effective in addressing community concerns. Federal

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funding initiatives, such as the U.S. Department of Justice's Project Safe Neighborhoods and the Bureau of Justice Assistance's Smart Policing Initiative, provided support for police practitioner-academic partnerships that could both raise the quality of police crime prevention projects and improve the existing knowledge base on effective crime prevention practices. While not yet common features of modern police departments, these partnerships have certainly become more prevalent. A recent national survey of police departments found that nearly one third of responding agencies had participated in a research partnership in the past five years (Rojek et al. 2012).

Police departments have strong needs for research on a wide variety of complex organizational and operational challenges. For the purposes of providing a concise framework, I will simplify these needs into two broad categories of research activities that are relevant to the work I have performed for the Boston Police Department as a research partner and then as an embedded criminologist. Police departments need solid scientific evidence to (1) understand the nature of the crime and disorder problems they seek to address and (2) establish a knowledge base on effective police crime prevention and control practices. In layman's terms, police executives need to understand "what is going

"To be effective in controlling crime and disorder, research suggests that police responses need to be focused and tailored to specific problems."

wrong?" and "what should we be doing about it?" Police departments are called upon to handle a broad array of societal issues. Indeed, the police are the most visible face of government in many neighborhoods, offering services 24 hours a day and seven days a week, and encouraging citizens to "call the cops" when problems arise. To be effective in controlling crime and disorder, research suggests that police responses need to be focused and tailored to specific problems (Weisburd and Eck 2004; Braga 2008).

Policing scholars and police executives will immediately recognize these two broad categories as capturing key aspects of the work pursued by police officers implementing "problem-oriented policing" strategies: the analysis of crime problems to reveal underlying criminogenic conditions, and the assessment of implemented responses to determine whether recurring problems were reduced (Goldstein 1990; Braga, 2008). Others will hone in on the idea of program evaluation as

a central activity of "evidencebased policing" (Sherman 1998) and the broader move towards evidence-based crime policy. It is important to note, however, that the scientific evidence that police executives need to support their decision making includes high-quality descriptions of the situations and dynamics that cause problems to recur. Evaluating programs to establish "what works" in policing is clearly important. But it represents only one type of research product valued by police managers and line-level officers alike.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (2004) has established the goal of developing police practitioner-research partnerships for every law enforcement agency in the United States. There are a small number of academics with experience and expertise in working with police departments on research projects, especially when compared to the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies regularly counted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Indeed, there is a relatively small cadre of criminologists who have

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partnered with police departments in the past and currently maintain highly productive research relationships. Clearly, more scholars are needed to carry out this very important work.

Public Criminology and Embedded Criminologists

The field of criminology seems to be increasingly more invested in the idea that scientific research should be relevant to the world of practice. Similar to movements in other academic disciplines, most notably sociology (Buroway 2005), "public criminology" refers to the call for criminologists to write and conduct policyrelevant research studies. This ensures that those who make crime policy, those who implement crime and justice programs, and those who are affected by those policies and programs are engaged in the production and interpretation of the work (Uggen and Inderbitzin 2010; Loader and Sparks 2010).

Policing has a long history of public criminology with scholars such as James Q. Wilson (1968) and Herman Goldstein (1977) conducting seminal studies on police behavior and the problems of policing, by directly engaging police organizations and the managers and line-level staff that comprise them. Indeed, since its inception, the Police Foundation has played a key role in a series of important field experiments that have led to profound changes in the way police departments do their core business (e.g. Kelling et al. 1974; Police Foundation 1981). And, as described above, academic-police practitioner research partnerships have now become much more common in police departments throughout the United States.

While there have been concerted efforts in criminology in general and policing in particular to bridge the gap between research and practice, these relationships are usually

"Becoming an embedded criminologist was akin to moving from "talking the talk" as a research partner to "walking the walk" of actually making positive contributions to the day-to-day working of the BPD"

project-based with social scientists focused on collecting data, completing analytical work, and presenting results. Criminologists are typically not embedded in criminal justice organizations nor tasked with the responsibility of working with practitioners to transform organizations by developing, implementing, and testing innovative programs and policies. Criminal justice executives have historically not valued research enough to invite criminologists to observe and contribute to the inner workings of their agencies. One noteworthy exception is Professor Joan Petersilia of Stanford Law School, who served as the Special Advisor for Policy and Research in the California Department of Corrections (CDC) as well as Chair of the Governor's Rehabilitation Strike Force under then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger between 2004 and 2008. In this role, Petersilia (2008) participated in California's historic attempt to reform its prisons and ensured that research findings were central to decision-making and to shifting the department's focus towards prisoner reintegration.

Like Professor Petersilia's opportunity in California, I was fortunate enough to be invited to become an embedded criminologist in a large urban police department. I had previously enjoyed a long and productive research partnership with the Boston Police Department where we agreed

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upon projects of mutual interest and, in the tradition of public criminology, collaborated on the framing of research questions and interpretation of results. As suggested by Petersilia (2008: 339), becoming an embedded criminologist was akin to moving from "talking the talk" as a research partner to "walking the walk" of actually making positive contributions to the day-to-day work of the BPD. The next section describes this evolution and the work I performed as part of my duties as an embedded criminologist.

The Evolution of a Research Partnership with the Boston Police Department

I began working with the Boston Police Department in late 1994 when employed as a research associate in the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard University. With the support of a grant from the U.S. National Institute of Justice, I was hired to work on The Boston Gun Project by David M. Kennedy, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Anne M. Piehl, now a professor of economics at Rutgers University. The Project was a problem-oriented policing enterprise expressly aimed at reducing homicide victimization among young people in Boston in the 1990s. The trajectory of the Project, and the resulting

Operation Ceasefire intervention, is by now well-known and extensively documented (Braga et al. 2001; Kennedy 1997, 2008; Kennedy et al. 1996). Briefly, a working group of law enforcement personnel, youth workers, and Harvard researchers diagnosed the youth violence problem in Boston as one of patterned, largely vendetta-like hostility amongst a small population of highly criminally-active, gang-involved offenders. The Operation Ceasefire intervention used a focused deterrence approach to halting outbreaks of gun violence among feuding street gangs by combining resources from criminal justice, social service, and the community.

Between the late 1990s and 2006, I worked closely with the BPD on a series of actionoriented research initiatives intended to enhance the quality of data available from official homicide reports (Braga et al. 1999), to disrupt illegal gun markets (Braga and Pierce 2005), and to prevent recidivism by high-risk offenders released from the local jail to Boston (Braga et al. 2009) as well as other crime prevention projects. These research projects resembled the more traditional collaborative arrangements that characterize the bulk of academic?police practitioner research initiatives. However, these projects allowed me to develop a very strong understanding of the internal BPD organizational structure,

their crime control and prevention strategies, and their external operational environment. Most importantly, I was able to form strong working relationships with BPD command staff, midlevel managers, and street officers. Over time, most of the officers became very comfortable with my operational questions, requests for data, and general presence at strategy meetings connected to these projects. In short, I had become a trusted research partner to the BPD.

Becoming Embedded

The evolution of my role from trusted research partner to embedded criminologist in the BPD has its roots in prior research projects conducted in Lowell, Massachusetts, a small city of some 105,000 residents located about 30 miles northeast of Boston. In 1997, I formed a collaborative relationship with Edward F. Davis when he was the Superintendent of the Lowell Police Department (LPD). Over the next six years, with colleagues, I worked with the LPD on a series of analyses of gang violence problems and conducted a quasi-experimental evaluation of a problem-oriented intervention to guide their gang violence reduction efforts (Braga et al. 2006; Braga, Pierce et al. 2008). In 2004, Davis expressed a desire to make a substantive contribution to the policing field by conducting a more rigorous test of the effects of problemoriented policing strategies on

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