There have been calls for research evidence to be drawn into police practice. We examine evidence-based practice in the policing and crime reduction agenda, drawing on the experience of implementing problem-oriented policing in the UK and beyond. We suggest that that the development of such an agenda has been hampered by certain factors. Evidence is not routinely used by police officers (or partnerships) developing strategies to deal with crime problems who prefer to deliver traditional (law enforcement) responses. There is a limited knowledge base on which practitioners can draw in developing responses to crime problems, and the nature of evidence about what is effective is contested amongst academics. Whilst welcoming the moves to incorporate evidence in policing, we caution against excessive optimism about what can be achieved and make some recommendations for those engaged in developing evidence-based practice.
IntroductionAlongside other areas of public policy and practice, there have been calls for research 'evidence' to be drawn in policing (ACPO/Centrex, 2006; Flanagan's Review of Policing, Policing Green Paper, 2008). The critical collection, analysis and presentation of evidence are, of course, part of the stock-in-trade of policing. Evidence is used, for example, to determine if an offence has been committed, to suggest who might have committed it and to try to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law. But this is not what is being referred to in 'evidence based policing'. Rather, 'evidence-based policing' is analogous to evidence-based medicine (see Nutley et al., 2002;Davies et al., 2000). As with its medical counterpart, evidence-based policing refers to the application of measures on the basis of robust evidence of their effectiveness in dealing with real (rather than supposed) problems. As Sherman says (1998: 3-4), 'evidence-based policing uses research to guide practice and evaluate practitioners. It uses the best evidence to shape the best practice.'Evidence-based policing assumes that we should adopt a sceptical attitude towards traditional ways of working for which there is no systematic evidence of effectiveness. The evidence-based movement in medicine has cast doubt on conventional wisdom; for example, making babies lie on the sides or stomachs, by looking for hard evidence about its actual effects rather than its assumed effects. It turns out that far fewer cot deaths occur where babies are put on their backs and this is now how new parents are advised to place their children in cribs and cots. In just the same way, evidence-based policing begins by calling for empirical tests of both established and innovative policies and practices.Various developments in policing have emerged as efforts to deliver evidencebased policing, amongst which the National Intelligence Model (NIM) is one clear example. This paper focuses, however, on problem-oriented policing (POP). It does so in part because POP has a longer history than the NIM, in part because there has been more researc...