Busting Myths About Evidence-Based Policing: Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue

• Author: Natalie Todak,Laura Huey
• DOI: 10.1177/10986111211037655
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Busting Myths About

Evidence-Based

Policing: Editorial

Introduction to the

Special Issue

Natalie Todak

1

and Laura Huey

2

Keywords

Police, policing, evidence-based policing, methodology, research.

Editorial Introduction

Over twenty years ago, Lawrence Sherman cast a critical eye across the field of

policing, describing what he considered to be a dismal state of affairs (Sherman,

1998). Police practices, programs, and policies, he argued, were often built on

little more than anecdotal experiences, personal beliefs, and informal group

consensus regarding what police ought to be doing about crime. Indeed, the

field has historically engaged in a recurring cycle of adopting and quickly

abandoning costly, untested initiatives, to make room for new, well-hyped,

but equally baseless models. Drawing on an emerging paradigm within the dis-

cipline of medicine, he crafted a piece for the Police Foundation’s Ideas in

American Policing lecture series in which he offered a prescription: evidence-

based policing (EBP).

EBP combines science with police expertise to produce knowledge of “what

works”—that is, which programs, policies, and practices are identified through

1

Department of Criminal Justice, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, United

States

2

Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Natalie Todak, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1201 University

Boulevard, Birmingham, AL 35294-4562, United States.

Email: ntod@uab.edu

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111211037655

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2022, Vol. 25(1) 3 –6