Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, I, too, would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning for a few moments on matters pertaining to the economics and search for efficiencies in policing.
I thought I might offer a few comments on my background and how I came to be involved in this work of policing. I'm a sociologist from the University of Chicago. I've been doing research, mostly evaluation research, in the criminal justice system for the past 30 years. Since about 1997, I've been involved in research and program development on community policing, strategic approaches to community safety, project-safe neighbourhoods here in the States, and now I'm working on what we call smart policing, which I'll get to in a minute.
In addition to my duties as a professor of criminal justice here at Governors State University, I'm currently the national director of training and technical assistance with CNA for the Bureau of Justice Assistance Smart Policing Initiative.
One of the movements that's under way in policing in the U.S. these days and probably elsewhere has to do with research and measurement. Despite several generations of progress and innovation in policing, precious little is known about what actually works in terms of police strategies and police tactics. There's a long history of what we would refer to as shallow analysis and weak research design in the assessment of police effectiveness. In the last 10 years we have seen some progress in these areas, but there is much more to be done.
I mention this because if we want to understand efficiencies, and if we want to understand the economics of policing, we have to measure things better, and we have to integrate good measurement into the culture of policing. For example, a study in the United States that was published in 2010 examined over 5,000 research reports on the effectiveness of police tactics. This study found that of those over 5,000 reports, only 11 of them had sufficient methodological rigour to warrant confidence in their findings. That was a very surprising result to me. How can we make decisions about efficiencies if we don't know with confidence which police approaches have the effects that have been intended?
I've been involved for the past four years in an approach to policing in the United States called smart policing. Smart policing is kind of a funny name. It's not the opposite of dumb policing. We think it represents a natural evolution in policing that relies heavily on scientific research methods. Simply put, smart policing encourages police agencies to collaborate with researchers in several key areas: crime problem analysis; development of a response; the development of solutions and interventions; monitoring and assessment of those interventions, which we typically call process evaluation, with real time feedback to the police agency on how things are going; outcome and impact evaluation; and very importantly, examining the issue of external validity. If a police tactic or strategy is implemented in one area and researched thoroughly and found to be effective, we have to ask ourselves whether it would translate to any other jurisdiction.
More specifically, police agencies that adopt a smart policing approach engage in one or more of the following approaches through a strategic planning process. One is the deep analysis of crime and public order and quality-of-life problems in their jurisdiction, which often involves the collection and analysis of new data. There's the development of place and offender-based prevention and intervention initiatives. I think more recently we are starting to see place and offender based strategies together. Also, there are improvements and enhancements in crime analysis and intelligence analysis, and rapid delivery of the results of that analysis to patrol, as well as technological enhancements of various kinds.
There are focused efforts at not only developing these new approaches but integrating them into the agency so that they are sustainable.
With respect to collaboration and outreach, I think we have coined a phrase on smart policing. We call it “in reach”. This means if you're introducing innovations into a police agency, you have to communicate and collaborate as much with individuals within your agency as you do with people outside of your agency.
I can also say that if you look at what's going on in smart policing, few of these practices in and of themselves are new or innovative. It's the engagement of the researcher that's different. It's the focus on the elevation of crime and intelligence analysis in the agency that's different. It's the utilization of technology to get better information to cops on the street that's different. It's the assessment of impact using rigorous research design that is different.
I'm not sure how my time is, but I could talk for a few minutes about a couple of applications of smart policing if there's time for it.