Critical Reflections on Evidence-Based Policing

Nigel Fielding, Karen Bullock, Simon Holdaway, Nigel Fielding, Karen Bullock, Simon Holdaway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138595804
• eBook ISBN: 9780429948060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) has over the last decade made an increasing mark in several fields, notably health and medicine, education and social welfare. In recent years it has begun to make its mark in criminal justice. As engagement with EBP has spread, it has begun to evolve from what might be regarded as a somewhat narrow doctrine and orthodoxy to something more complex and various. Often criminological research has been at odds with the assumptions, conventions and methodologies associated with first generation EBP. In that context EBP poses a challenge to the research community and existing evidence base and is, accordingly, hotly controversial.

This book is a welcome and timely contribution to current debates on evidence-based practice in policing. With a sharp conceptual focus, the chapters provide a critical examination of the recent history of EBP in academic, policy and practitioner communities, evaluate key dimensions of its application to policing, challenge established understandings and pave the way for a much needed change in how research 'evidence' is perceived, generated, transferred, implemented and evaluated.

Section 1
Evidence-based policing in context

Introduction

Evidence-based practice and policing: Background and context

Karen Bullock, Nigel Fielding and Simon Holdaway

Introduction

The contributions to this edited collection seek to capture and extend the state of the art in respect of Evidence-Based Practice in policing. Evidence-based practice (EBP) is about utilising evidence to inform policy making and professional practice. Although such a principle is not especially new, it is closely bound up with the ‘modernising agenda’ of governments (Davies, Nutley, and Smith, 2000; Nutley, Davies, and Walter, 2002). Such agendas typically foreground business planning, performance management, and efficiency and value for money within public policy. In the UK the landslide Labour election victory in 1997 brought a modernising agenda which focused on developing more strategic, evidence-based, and outcome-focused policy making in order to generate more responsive, higher quality public services (Davies and Nutley, 2001; Nutley, Davies, and Walter, 2002).

Evidence-based practice has taken root somewhat differently in different areas of public policy (Davies, Nutley, and Smith, 2000). However, it is built on common foundations including establishing agreement about what counts as evidence, developing strategies for creating evidence in priority areas and associated efforts to systematically accumulate bodies of knowledge, disseminating research evidence to where it is needed and developing strategies to facilitate integration of evidence into policy and encourage the utilisation of evidence in practice decisions (Davies, Nutley, and Smith, 2000; Davies and Nutley, 2001; Nutley, Davies, and Walter, 2002).

Evidence-based practice has thus made a mark in several fields, notably health and medicine, but also in education and social welfare. Lately it has begun to extend this to the field of policing. EBP has established a firm institutional presence in the UK. In the case of health and medicine this is represented by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence,¹ in education and social welfare, the Sutton Trust,² and in policing, the College of Policing (CoP).³ At the time of writing, the UK Cabinet Office serves as EBP champion through its ‘What Works Networks’ – which promote the use of evidence to make better decisions to improve public services.⁴ The network has seven What Works Centres and two affiliate members, covering major areas of government policy which together receive over £200 billion of public finance⁵ (Cabinet Office, 2018). As the UK’s principal social science research funder, the Economic and Social Research Council has also invested in EBP. In 1999 it funded a Centre for Evidence-Based Policy, a result of concerns that Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) research was not sufficiently informing policy making (Nutley and Webb, 2000; Nutley, Davies, and Walter, 2002), and latterly ESRC has invested significantly in the What Works Centres.

There is not only an interaction across the policy, practitioner and research communities associated with EBP; such interactions have a substantial international dimension. EBP is firmly established in the North American policy community, across Western Europe, and to some extent in India, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore.

This collection aims to capture the origins and present standing of EBP, to contest some of its established assumptions, and to draw out how its goals and ideals can be achieved by moving beyond EBP as conventionally understood. Matters of philosophy, methodology, knowledge transfer, implementation, and evaluation are amongst those under debate. Ultimately they touch on what we regard as knowledge, how we treat its application to practice and how we understand the place of research and scholarship in relation to the real world. Before setting out the contribution of the volume, we consider briefly the historical development and context of EBP, situating evidence-based policing within it.

Evidence-based policy and practice in history and context

While basing policy and practice on evidence has made recent inroads, it is a long established approach (see for example Bulmer, 1982, 1986; Nutley and Webb, 2000; Parkhurst, 2017). Indeed, it might be argued that conducting analysis to inform policy is as old as the state itself (Nutley and Webb, 2000: 16). The specific character of the relationship between social policy and research was shaped by the expansion of both the state’s and society’s capacity to conduct research during the 19th and 20th centuries (Nutley and Webb, 2000: 16). Bulmer (1982), for example, situates the foundations of applied social research within an interest in understanding the condition of the poor in the 19th century. A number of government reports sought to ensure that government had sufficient research capacity during the 20th century (Nutley and Webb, 2000). For example, the 1917 Haldane Report made a case for the development of research capacity within government and for its separation from policy making in order that research had its own voice and was not subsumed by administration (Nutley and Webb, 2000). Later reviews (e.g. Rothschild, 1971) revisited these issues (Nutley and Webb, 2000).

The capacity of both academic institutions and the UK government to produce research expanded after World War II (Nutley and Webb, 2000). Demand for knowledge about social problems grew during the 1970s as a climate of pessimism about the prospects for central planning and social engineering to generate change developed (Nutley and Webb, 2000). Consequently, during the 1970s and 1980s the number of research organisations seeking to influence the political agenda expanded, resulting in a greater plurality of knowledge providers (Nutley and Webb, 2000: 18). Although the degree of commitment to shaping policy using evidence, research and analysis in the UK has waxed and waned depending on the priorities of the government of the day, social research has increasingly contributed to policy making and government receptivity to evidence (Bulmer, 1986; Nutley and Webb, 2000; Nutley, Davies, and Smith, 2000).

By the end of the 20th century a stated commitment to the principles of evidence-based policy and practice was clear and has been promoted since. As part of the New Labour government’s broader modernising agenda, a wide range of ambitious initiatives were launched to strengthen the use of evidence in public policy and practice. The research budgets of government departments increased and more analysts were recruited (Nutley, Davies, and Smith, 2000; Nutley, Davies, and Walter, 2002). It was boom time for contract research and consultancy, and good practice guidance filled websites, publications and workshop programmes (Solesbury, 2001). Why then, by the turn of the 20th century, did we witness this development?

Solesbury (2001: 4–6) saw several drivers for evidence-based policy and practice. First, a ‘utilitarian turn in research’ meant a (re)turn, driven in part by the expectations of funding bodies, to doing ‘useful research, research that helps us not just to understand society but offer[ing] some guidance on how to make it better’ (Solesbury, 2001: 4). The ESRC has increasingly emphasised that the research it funds should have wider social and economic impacts.⁶ Second, there was a ‘retreat from priesthood’ (Solesbury, 2001) – greater scepticism towards and questioning of the judgement of professionals. Whilst there may once have been an assumption that professionals were experts and their judgements could be trusted, this had become diluted by the end of the century as an increasingly educated, informed and questioning public sought reassurance that their taxes were being well spent (Davies, Nutley, and Smith, 2000: 1–2). Third, Solesbury (2001: 6) suggests that ‘pragmatism replaces ideology’, drawing attention to how New Labour’s agenda posed new knowledge requirements. This, he argued, was anti-ideological and pragmatic, suspicious of many established influences on policy, particularly within the civil service, and anxious to open up policy thinking to outsiders. Other factors in the rising role of evidence in policy and practice also included the explosion in availability of data of all kinds, and developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) (Davies, Nutley, and Smith, 2000: 2). Thus, the contemporary focus on evidence-based policy and practice has not arisen in a vacuum but within a wider social, political and economic context. The same is so of evidence-based policing, whose drivers we now consider.

Enter evidence-based policing

Science has not traditionally been valued in policing (Neyroud, 2009). This is not to say it has not played a role in shaping what the police do. In particular, police use of forensic evidence (e.g., the use of blood analysis, gunshot residues and pathology in improving investigations) has a long history and developed in conjunction with medical science (Weisburd and Neyroud, 2011). More germane to this volume, there has long been an interest in using data to guide the management and deployment of police. Problem-oriented policing (Goldstein, 1979, 1990) is a good example (Sherman, 1998; Bullock, Erol, and Tilley, 2006; Bowers, Tompson, and Johnson, 2014; Sidebottom and Tilley, this volume). Bullock, Erol, and Tilley (2006) described problem-oriented policing as a form of evidence-based policing. Research suggests that where problem-oriented policing is properly implemented, it can reduce the impact of crime problems and so can be considered an evidence-based response to tackling crime problems effectively (Bullock, Erol, and Tilley, 2006). Moreover, the language and processes of problem-oriented policing chime with those of evidence-based policy and practice, notably, the shared focus on effectiveness, reducing the impact of problems, focusing on those issues that concern the community, implementing what works and measuring outcomes and assessment (Bullock, Erol, and Tilley, 2006). But problem-oriented policing and evidence-based policing are not the same. Problem-oriented policing is a business model aimed at improving operation of the police organisation and so potentially much wider in scope than evidence-based policing (Bullock, Erol, and Tilley, 2006). There is no clear statement about the use of scientific evidence either in selecting strategies for responding to problems or in monitoring the implementation and results of those strategies within problem-oriented policing (Sherman, 1998). Similar points might be made about other policing innovations which have received some currency in recent years – intelligence-led policing, hot spotting, and COMPSTAT (Computer Statistics), for example, all draw on the notion that evidence should drive aspects of police practice. These innovations aimed at improving policing practice through marshalling evidence have in common an origin in responding to wider political and economic trends aimed at modernising and rendering the service more efficient.

Whilst not denying that the police service has innovated to incorporate evidence into practice, the more specific term ‘evidence-based policing’ is something of a newcomer to the vocabulary. The original use of the term is associated with Lawrence Sherman (Sherman, 1998) who defined it as a method of making decisions about what works in policing (Sherman, 2013: 1). Reflecting the EBP paradigm itself, he argued that evidence-based policing should use the best available evidence on the outcome of police work to implement guidelines and evaluate agencies, units and officers (Sherman, 1998, 2013). He aimed to drive change and introduce continuous improvement to police practice (Sherman, 1998). Sherman (1998) drew on the evidence-based medicine paradigm – characterised by a large body of randomized controlled experiments and the generation and application of rigorous scientific evidence–arguing that it had important implications for policing, notably that doing research was not enough and proactive efforts were required to push accumulated research evidence into practice (Sherman, 1998). For Sherman (1998: 6) many of the aforementioned developments did not go far enough, and he distinguished a role for evidence-based policing as follows:

What evidence-based policing adds to these paradigms is a new principle for decision making: scientific evidence. Most police practice, like medical practice, is still shaped by local custom, opinions, theories, and subjective impressions. Evidence-based policing challenges those principles of decision making and creates systematic feedback to provide continuous quality improvement in the achievement of police objectives […]. Hence the inspiration for this paradigm is not only medicine and its randomized trials, but also the principles of quality control.

(Sherman, 1998: 6)

In terms of the implications for practice, Sherman was ‘skeptical about experience, wisdom, or personal credentials as a basis for asserting what works’ (Sherman, 2002: 221), drawing attention to how:

the paradigm is especially skeptical about the value of experience alone to reveal probabilistic relationships of cause and effect, at least without the application of systematic rules to processing of information derived from experience. For every claim that X causes Y, evidence-based thinking asks only “what is the evidence?” and not “who says so?” The answer can then be graded from weak to strong, based on standard rules of scientific inference. A before-after comparison is stronger than a simultaneous correlation, and a randomized controlled test is stronger than a longitudinal cohort analysis. Strong evidence trumps weak, irrespective of how articulate or charismatic the person presenting the evidence may be. In this respect, evidence-based practice is no different from the basic epistemology of science.

(Sherman, 2002: 221–222)

Sherman’s role in promoting evidence-based policing is perhaps why an emphasis on experiments and assessing the rigour of scientific evidence has become associated with the evidence-based policing movement, yet it need not be like that – evidence-based policy and practice may incorporate wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• SECTION 1 Evidence-based policing in context
• SECTION 2 Evidence-based policing and police practice
• SECTION 3 Steps towards applying research evidence to policing
• SECTION 4 Conclusion
• Index