Implementing Science in Police Agencies: The Embedded Research Model

The Embedded Research Model in Police Agencies

Abstract

Embedded criminologists enhance police departments' capacity to understand recurring crime problems by applying criminological research and analytical methods.
They transition from external partners to internal resources, participating in strategy meetings and research projects.
Embedded criminologists provide scientific evidence for police executives to consider in addressing pressing matters.
They also assist in determining the impact of implemented programs using rigorous evaluation methods.

Introduction

Partnerships between police and academics have become more collaborative in addressing crime.
Academics offer training in analytic methods, develop police science literature, and conduct problem analyses and research evaluations.
Police departments should internally support research initiatives but also collaborate with outside researchers.
Academic research is often disconnected from the realities of policing, where decisions must be made quickly, and finance and efficiency are crucial.
Academic research may deliver results too late or focus on issues of little interest to police managers.
To facilitate the implementation of science, strong institutional links and personnel exchanges between universities and police departments are encouraged.

The Embedded Criminologist

The article summarizes Anthony A. Braga’s experience as an embedded criminologist in the Boston Police Department (BPD) between 2007 and 2013.
Embedded criminologists maintain scientific objectivity while collaborating on program development, problem analysis, and evaluation research.
They inject scientific evidence into policy conversations to guide police executive decision-making.

Public Criminology and Embedded Criminologists

Criminology is becoming more invested in ensuring research is relevant to practice, similar to movements like 'public sociology'.
Public criminology calls for criminologists to engage policymakers, program implementers, and those affected by policies in the research process.
Policing has a history of public criminology, with scholars directly engaging police organizations.
Field experiments have led to significant changes in police practices.
Applied research in police agencies, including randomized controlled trials, increased between the 1990s and 2000s.
Relationships between research and practice are usually project-based, with social scientists focused on data collection and analysis.
Criminologists are typically not embedded in criminal justice organizations to transform them.
Criminal justice executives have historically undervalued research, though there have been exceptions, such as Lawrence Sherman and Joan Petersilia.

The Work of an Embedded Criminologist in the BPD

Braga had previously worked with the BPD on Operation Ceasefire, a gang violence reduction strategy.
Operation Ceasefire used a focused deterrence approach, concentrating resources on halting gun violence among street gangs.
Between the late 1990s and 2006, Braga continued to work with the BPD on action-oriented research initiatives.
These projects helped him develop a strong understanding of the BPD's organizational structure and strategies.
He also formed strong working relationships with BPD staff.
In December 2006, Edward F. Davis became the BPD Commissioner and appointed Braga as his Chief Policy Advisor.
Boston was facing an increase in serious violent crime, with a peak of 7,533 violent index crimes in 2006.
Shootings had increased by 133% from 2000 to 2006.
Davis aimed to tackle violence by analyzing underlying conditions, implementing evidence-based programs, and evaluating their impact.
Davis used BPD funds to acquire Braga’s time from Harvard University.
Davis wanted to better manage the small number of places and people generating the bulk of violence in Boston.
Braga’s role as Chief Policy Advisor was a transition from external research partner to internal command staff member.
This required a near full-time presence at the BPD, including an office, email address, and identification card.
Braga retained his academic affiliation with Harvard, making him an ‘insider/outsider’.

Being There

Serving as Chief Policy Advisor required regular presence at BPD meetings, including Bureau Chiefs meetings and Compstat meetings.
Bureau Chiefs’ meetings involved high-level conversations on management issues.
Compstat used data-based decision-making and management accountability to improve organizational performance.
Serving as Chief Policy Advisor also required field work, such as ‘ride alongs’ and ‘walk alongs’ with officers.
Constant contact with BPD personnel and knowledge of departmental happenings were crucial.
Real-time knowledge of current events was necessary for credibility in strategy meetings.
Front-line personnel had valuable insights on the underlying conditions causing problems.

Controlling Violent Crime Hot Spots

Commissioner Davis implemented the Safe Street Teams (SST) hot spots policing strategy in January 2007.
Braga helped develop this program, using violent index crime data to identify 13 violent crime hot spot areas.
Not all identified hot spots received a SST due to limited personnel.
A deputy superintendent oversaw the SST initiative, and each hot spot had a team of officers.
SST officers received additional training on community and problem-oriented policing.
Braga helped design the training curriculum and taught sessions on hot spots policing.
The BPD held quarterly accountability meetings with the SST teams to review crime trends and discuss responses.
Braga attended these meetings and participated in discussions.
The BPD wanted to ensure that the SST areas were indeed centered on the most persistently violent places in Boston.

Crime Hot Spot Stability Analysis

Some BPD staff were concerned that violent crime spatial concentrations might not be stable over time.
Braga analyzed the concentration and stability of violent crime in specific hot spot locations over time.
The analysis used methods from a longitudinal study conducted in partnership with the Seattle Police Department.
The analysis uncovered remarkable stability in crime trends at specific street segments and intersections.
With regard to robbery, from 1980 to 2008, about 1% of street segments and 8% of intersections were responsible for nearly 50% of all commercial robberies and 66% of all street robberies, respectively.
The steady lower line demonstrates that about 2% of the street units experienced 50% of the robberies during each of the 29 years under examination.
The top line shows the percentage of street units that experienced 100% of the robberies during each year of study.
For example, in 1980, all of the robberies that year occurred at just under 12% of the street units in Boston. Over time, the concentration of robberies increased rather dramatically. By 2008, all of the robberies during that year occurred at just 6% of the street units in Boston.
Only 5% of street units experienced 74% of the gun violence from 1980 to 2008.
88.5% of street units did not experience a single shooting event.
65 street units experienced 10 or more shooting events.
The worst 60 street units in Boston experienced more than 1,000 shootings between 1980 and 2008.
Both robberies and gun violence were highly concentrated at a small number of street corners and intersections in Boston, and this concentration remained remarkably stable over time.
While the analysis confirmed that SST officers were allocated to persistently violent locations, this exercise also revealed that there were many violent places in Boston that were not covered by the SST.
This provided an important opportunity to conduct a rigorous controlled evaluation of the SST initiative.
In 2009, the BPD received Smart Policing Initiative funding from US Bureau of Justice Assistance to formally evaluate its SST programme.
Braga et al. were able to use statistical matching techniques to identify equivalent comparison street intersections and block faces for inclusion in a rigorous quasi-experimental research design.

SST Program Evaluation

The evaluation revealed that the SST programme was associated with a statistically significant 17% reduction in violent Index crimes in the treatment areas relative to the control areas.
Most of this reduction in violent Index crimes was driven by a 19% reduction in robbery incidents and a 15% reduction in aggravated assault incidents.
A subsequent analysis of street units in two-block buffer zones surrounding the treatment and control street units revealed no evidence of significant violent crime displacement.

Reducing Ongoing Gang Violence

The BPD discontinued its Operation Ceasefire gang violence reduction strategy in January 2000.
By 2006, shootings had reached levels not seen in Boston since the early 1990s.
Davis announced that Operation Ceasefire would once again be the BPD’s main response to outbreaks of serious gang violence.
Gary French was promoted to Deputy Superintendent with oversight of the Youth Violence Strike Force.
French reinstated the Ceasefire approach as a citywide, interagency effort to disrupt ongoing cycles of gang violence.
Braga once again became a member of the Ceasefire working group.
The first contribution Braga made to the working group process was to complete a fresh problem analysis of homicides and gang-involved shootings.
Some BPD managers believed that the gun violence problem was very different than it was in the 1990s and was linked to increasing juvenile populations and prisoner reentry issues

Fresh problem analysis of homicides and gang-involved shootings

The problem analysis research revealed that the resurgence in gun violence during the 2000s was linked to the same underlying gang dynamics as the 1990s.
In 2006, slightly more than 1% of the city youth aged 14–24 years participated in 65 street gangs that were active in violence.
Street gang violence generated more than half of total homicides and gang members were involved in nearly three-fourths of non-fatal shootings as victims.
The gun violence offenders and victims were often very well-known to the criminal justice system with long criminal histories and many being under probation and/or parole supervision.

Social network analysis of detailed police records

Social network analysis of detailed police records was used to map the social networks of 763 individuals in one Boston community (Fig. 3), by using non-arrest observations to create links between individuals (the nodes) who were observed hanging out together (Papachristos et al., 2012).
Fully 85% of all shootings in this community occur within the observed network (<3% of total neighbourhood population)—nearly all of which are driven by 10 different gangs, also observed in the network.
The shooting victims occupied unique and ‘identifiable’ positions in the network.
The risk of victimization within the network spreads outwards from other shooting victims to infect their friends and associates.
Each ‘handshake’ closer one is to a shooting victim increases one’s own probability of getting shot by approximately 25%.
Focused deterrence strategies honor core deterrence ideas, such as increasing risks faced by offenders, while finding new and creative ways of deploying traditional and non-traditional law enforcement tools to do so, such as communicating incentives and disincentives directly to targeted offenders.
Research products that document these high-risk social networks and the violent behaviors of particular groups over time are very valuable in ensuring that these strategies are sustained in particular jurisdiction.

Gang ‘shooting scorecards’

Working with the BRIC, Braga and his colleagues developed gang ‘shooting scorecards’ to help guide Ceasefire implementation.
Shooting scorecards are rank-ordered frequencies of the criminal groups that commit the highest number of shootings and experience the greatest number of shooting victimizations during a specific time period.
Shooting scorecards, especially when supported by a management accountability system (in this case, the Ceasefire working group meetings and broader Compstat sessions), can be very helpful in ensuring that the groups most active in gun violence, and the groups that offend after the deterrence message has been delivered, receive the enforcement attention they merit.

Gang shooting scorecard data

Gang shooting scorecard data were then used to conduct a rigorous quasi-experimental evaluation of the impact of the post-2007 Ceasefire intervention on gang violence in Boston.
Between 2007 and 2010, the BPD and its criminal justice, social service, and community-based partners conducted Ceasefire interventions on 19 violent gangs.
The formal programme evaluation estimated that the re-invigorated Ceasefire focussed deterrence strategy generated a statistically significant 31% reduction in shootings involving treated gangs relative to shootings involving matched comparison gangs.

Translational criminology

Beyond his close involvement in two key BPD violence reduction programmes, Braga was regularly called upon to summarize and explain the available scientific evidence on the nature of crime problems and the impact of evaluated crime reduction programmes.
In these settings, Braga disseminated criminological findings as general information that BPD command staff could consider as they made decisions on how to proceed in dealing with a particular problem or policy dilemma.
During the interim period, Braga would be sure to educate himself on the most recent research in whatever substantive area the meeting would focus.

Maintaining scientific integrity

There are divergent views on how closely programme evaluators, such as external or in this case internal academic researchers, should be involved with practitioners in programme development and implementation.
As David Olds argues in his essay in support of ‘disciplined passion’, balancing scientific integrity with the practical challenges associated with programme evaluation in real-world settings needs to be addressed through higher standards for reporting trials, better peer review, improved investigator training, and rigorous collegial support of those who choose this line of work.
Braga’s experiences as an embedded criminologist in the BPD support their findings.
By being involved in programme design and implementation, Braga was much better positioned to conduct more rigorous controlled evaluations. However, it is important to be wary of bias issues and adopt safeguards when serving as an internal researcher.
To ensure that Braga was not unintentionally biased in his approach and interpretation, he invited external colleagues to participate in the design and execution of all problem analysis and programme evaluation work completed for the BPD.

Conclusion

The Boston experience suggests that police departments do benefit in tangible ways by adding criminologists to their staffs.
Controlled evaluations of both programmes suggest immediate violence reduction impacts
Equally impressive, total arrests decreased by 37% during the same time period (from 24,745 arrests in 2006 to 15,625 arrests in 2012).
Inviting a criminologist to work on the inside of a police department in a stable position enhances the capacity of the agency to understand and address these challenges by virtue of adding a skill set not held by other police staff.