EMMIE and the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction

Abstract

The United Kingdom has made significant investments in promoting and facilitating evidence-based policy and practice. In this chapter our focus is on the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction (WWCCR) and in particular EMMIE. EMMIE is a framework denoting five categories of evidence that are important to inform policy and practice decision-making: Effect, Mechanism, Moderator, Implementation and Economics. As part of the WWCCR, EMMIE was used to populate a toolkit for police and others with crime prevention responsibilities to draw on in deciding what to do to address crime problems (the "Crime Reduction Toolkit"). Across the range of interventions for which systematic reviews had been undertaken, the toolkit summarizes the quality of both the available evidence and findings in relation to the five domains comprising EMMIE. An appraisal of systematic reviews using EMMIE revealed substantial gaps in the crime reduction evidence base, whose repair will require primary studies and reviews that draw on a wide range of studies using diverse methods. CitationSidebottom, A. and Tilley, N. (2022). EMMIE and the what works centre for crime reduction: Progress, challenges, and future directions for evidence-based policing and crime reduction in the United Kingdom. In Piza, E. and Welsh, B. (eds.) The Globalization of Evidence-Based Policing: Innovations in Bridging the Research-Practice Divide (pp.73-91). London, UK: Routledge Press.

Failure

“…Despite an interest in international travel, U.S. criminologists fail to pay significant attention to program development and evaluation research in English‐ and non‐English‐speaking countries. One poignant example is EMMIE (Tilley & Sidebottom, 2021) (http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10141017/), an attempt to examine existing research with the lens of a rigorous outcome evaluation. Do examples from Europe “fit” the U.S. crime and criminal justice problems?…”

Understanding and preventing the advertisement and sale of illicit drugs to young people through social media: A multidisciplinary scoping review

“…The implications of the studies reviewed motivate the urgency of mitigating the risks for young people posed by the proliferation of harmful substances on social media. Adopting a 'what works' approach [119,120] to this problem is not only an obligatory step within the policy cycle but will also be essential to fostering inter-agency cooperation between researchers, regulators, law enforcement, charities and technology companies [47]. We believe that knowledge sharing will be crucial to the move towards proactively addressing illegal and harmful content on social media [16,36,121].…”

Policing the future?

“…These examples above are evidence of a cultural shift that occurred in the 2010s in UK law enforcement. This is supported by the growing attention to evidence-based policing (EBP) through the establishment of the WWCCR(HM Government, 2013b;Sidebottom & Tilley, 2022) and documents such as the Policing Vision 2025, which calls for "changes to the culture and leadership of the service are vital if policing is to innovate at the pace required" (Association of Police and Crime Commissioners & the National Police Chiefs' Council, n.d.). The inception of the WWCCR, as well as the comments above by Officer D, are evidence of change that has occurred in both the formal and informal realms towards evaluation of existing policing practices and an openness to change.…”