Ep. 92 Evidence-Based Policing with Jerry Ratcliffe (host of the Reducing Crime podcast)

Join hosts Jose Sanchez and Jenn Tostlebe as they engage in a compelling conversation with Professor Jerry Ratcliffe, a seasoned professional in the field of criminal justice. They dive into the complexities of policing resources, the challenges of policy-making,  and the importance of evidence-based policing. Ratcliffe's rich experiences and deep insight derived from his career with London's Metropolitan Police and academic tenure at the Temple University set the backdrop for an enlightening discussion.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Music.

(00:14):
Hi everyone, my name is Jose Sanchez and I'm Jen Tosley.
Welcome to episode 92 of the Criminology Academy podcast where we are criminally academic.
In this episode, we are speaking with Professor Jerry Radcliffe.
Special topics highlighted in this episode include evidence-based policing,
intelligence, lead policing, and dissemination of research.

(00:36):
Jerry Radcliffe is a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple
University. He is also a former British police officer.
He's a criminal justice professor and host of the popular Reducing Crime podcast.
After an ice climbing accident and a decade long career with London's Metropolitan
Police, he earned a first class honors degree and a PhD from the University of Nottingham.

(00:59):
He has published over 90 research articles and nine books, including most recently
Reducing Crime and Companion for Police Leaders.
Radcliffe has been a research advisor to the FBI and the the Philadelphia Police
Commissioner, an instructor for the ATF Intelligence Academy,
and he is a member of the FBI Law Enforcement Education and Training Council.

(01:19):
So with that being said, let's bring Jerry in. Thank you for joining us today,
Jerry. We are very excited to talk to you today.
It's great to be with you guys. Nice to see you. All right.
So we want to start off by talking about some of the stuff you've written,
a few books. And if this wasn't just a one-hour-ish long podcast,

(01:40):
we'd like to talk to you about all of them. But unfortunately, we can't.
That's already a level of masochism that nobody else has even dreamed about. So, yeah.
Even I'm like, really? There's a couple of those books I've thought just about. But yeah, good for you.
And also because I'm kind of really just mostly familiar with intelligence-led
policing and evidence-based policing, mostly because these are some of the things

(02:03):
that I talk about with my students.
In our Intro to Criminal Justice class. And so I want to actually start with
intelligence-led policing.
And so the first big broad question is, what is intelligence-led policing?
And is it the same thing as like hotspot policing or predictive policing?
Like, what are we talking about here? Okay, so that's the question that's going

(02:25):
to dominate the rest of the podcast. We're just going to end up talking about that.
Look, these things continue to merge and change. You know, when intelligence
led policing was first, people were first thinking about it and discussing it.
It was on the back of a major crime surge that has taken place in the 1980s and the early 1990s.
And the police were basically running around chasing crime.

(02:50):
And not really getting out in front of it. And reactive policing really doesn't
do a very good job of protecting the community and protecting the public.
So they're having discussions about, well, look, there are the small tail of the distribution.
Now, we shouldn't be talking about statistics, but there are a small group of
people who are a little excessive in terms of their criminality.

(03:11):
And there are a small group of people who, frankly, from a policing perspective,
probably deserve the police's love and attention to do something about the level
of crime, their disproportionate impact on communities.
And it was a desire to get back and be more proactive and really be focused
on the people who are causing the most harm to the community,

(03:32):
be a little bit more precise than that.
We know that a lot of crime is committed by opportunists, but there are also
specialist offenders who really take it as almost as they're living.
So it was more about using analysis analysis and criminal intelligence to direct
police investigations.
And it's not as much just about helping an investigation get enough evidence

(03:53):
to criminally prosecute somebody,
but really also thinking about where the priorities should be,
especially because we know that a small group of, for example,
repeat victims disproportionately victimize it. We can do something to reduce their victimization.
There are serious repeat offenders who deserve being being looked at.
There are organized crime and criminal groups, and I know you've both been involved

(04:15):
in gang research at one part of it.
But from the front end, from the policing perspective, we have a couple of decades
of research that shows that gang involvement increases your offending,
it increases the violence of your offending, it increases the proclivity of
your offending, and your criminal careers are longer.
So there's definitely work there that needs to be done. And finally,
increasingly recently, it's
also been about understanding who and what are causing crime hotspots.

(04:39):
So it's really not just an investigative aid, but it's thinking about directing
limited admitted investigative resources to the places and the people that the
hot places and the hot times and people that really deserve that level of attention.
So because it also involves a little bit of hotspots, I guess there's an overlap
there with hotspots policing.
Hotspots policing has been studied for 20, 30 years.

(05:00):
And there's a wealth of research evidence that finds when police doesn't,
in varying different ways, but when police concentrate their efforts in the
energies where crime is most heavily concentrated, they can have an impact on reducing crime.
Yeah, so predictive policing kind of relates to that.
It became a thing around about 2003, 2005, and it was a thing for a few years.

(05:26):
I think it's kind of started the enthusiasm for it starting to wane a little
bit because as we understand more and more about crime hotspots,
they can be driven by short-term fluctuations in what's going on in the neighborhood and the community.
But if a lot of it is long-term problems, I mean, I go to a lot of police meetings,
I go to a lot of ComStat meetings, police have got maps of crime and they're

(05:47):
showing, this is what happened last week, or this was what happened the week before.
And I'm sitting there thinking, yeah, I would really like to see the map that
shows where it's been a continual problem for the last five years,
because those are the areas that really we should be trying to help the community the most there.
So intelligence-led policing then is kind of, Would you say it's a big,
broad umbrella term, and then you have these other elements underneath it,

(06:11):
like hotspots policing?
Yes and no. I prefer more to think about them as Venn diagrams,
where it's a relatively broad term, but it takes pieces of other areas that
could probably help direct it.
When I wrote the book Intelligence-Led Policing, it was first published, I think, back in 2007.
I think I pretty much came up with one of the first definitions of it,
actually used a lot of subject matter experts. But I'm thinking,

(06:33):
well, if I'm coming up with a definition, that's definitely not a good sign.
I'm just an academic in the United States.
But I think when people hear about it, they get a little concerned.
They hear the word intelligence and they think it's all about surveillance teams and wiretaps.
And everybody's getting excited about the wire. And, you know,
it feeds into the conspiracy theorists delight.
It's like, no, Dwayne, living in a trailer in the middle of Iowa.

(06:56):
We're not listening in on your every phone call conversation.
You're just not that exciting. So it's got that from the military and from the
national security perspective.
It's got that kind of Gucci word of intelligence.
But it's really about using data and knowledge about the criminal environment to best choose.
The priorities for police services and police departments that have limited

(07:17):
resources, you know, and how to use them in a way that seems proportionate for the problem.
You know, Duane is, you know, who might have a still and be illegally cooking
up a little bit of alcohol in the back of his trailer.
No, we're not going to have a drone and a surveillance team and any of that
kind of stuff coming after you. You're just not that excited.
So some sense of proportionality has to flow into all of this stuff as well.

(07:40):
Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting how some of of these terms, illicit reactions.
Like I know when some people hear like predictive policing, like the first thing
that comes to mind is like minority report.
Which was a great movie, you know, and I enjoyed it like everybody else.
Had I known how much of a pain in the backside it was going to be because it's
the obligatory reference everybody comes up with when they mention predictive policing.

(08:02):
But we've looked at predictive policing in some of the work that I've published
with my colleague, Ralph Taylor, a lot in some of the work we haven't got around
to publishing because we keep getting excited by new and interesting things that distract us.
But we've looked at the predictability of crime.
And while we find a portion of it can be predicted by short-term fluctuations

(08:22):
in what's going on in and around areas, overwhelmingly, the majority of the
best place to look for where crime is is where it's been before.
And so if you look for long-term crime hotspots, there's a reason that there's
an opportunity that's being exploited by offenders.
It's something about the behavior of offenders. It's something about the behavior of the victims.
It's something about the place. And generally, those things don't change that

(08:45):
much over time, certainly not over weeks and months.
So long term crime hotspots really continue to be the places where I think we
need to pay most attention, because that's where the opportunity structure is.
So there's a section at the beginning of your book, Intelligence-Led Policing,
that is titled Reimagining the Police.
And this is something Jose and I were talking about that, you know, this is,

(09:10):
an idea that seems to be very popular lately. How do we reimagine the police?
What does that mean? What is their role in society?
And so we are just curious what exactly reimagining the police is,
or what has it looked like across time, at least in your opinion? And maybe this is...

(09:31):
Everyone would have a little bit of a different answer, but... Oh, yeah.
I mean, if you guys can figure out the answer, please do let me know.
I'm happy I'm happy to hand over the entire podcast episode to you if you figure that one out.
I'm just in the process now of starting to draft a third edition of the book.
And I'm going through the section of how much it's changed in the last seven
or eight years since I wrote the second edition.

(09:52):
And, you know, there's clearly a first phase where we had to really think about policing smarter.
And that really took place early 1990s. There was what's called the demand gap.
So if we go back to the 1960s, and we track how many more police officers there
are in the United States from the 1960s, by the time we hit the early 1990s,

(10:15):
there were about 60% more police officers on the streets of the United States.
Crime change from 1960 to the mid-1990s, violence increased by over 300%.
So there was this big gap between the available resources that used to be probably
fine and the crime problem that had to be dealt with.
And so it's in the 1980s and the 1990s, certainly the 70s, but really into the

(10:39):
80s and the 90s, you see so much of this innovation coming up.
You see the growth of community policing, you see the growth of prominent policing
and Herman Goldstein's work, Mike Scott and folks like that.
That you see in the UK, starting in the UK with the growth of intelligence-led
policing, and then that became a thing after 9-11 in the United States.
So you see this whole range of innovation because basically by the 1990s,

(11:02):
crime was considered by many to be sort of out of control.
And the available resources just weren't there to do it. So it wasn't about
having more resources. It was about working smarter.
It's funny because I feel like I've lived through a part of this because I ran
away from home when I was 17 and
joined the Metropolitan Police as a young cadet when I was 17 years old.

(11:23):
And it was in 1984. So I'm now entering my depressingly 40th year involved in
policing in some fashion.
And I did 11 years as a sworn officer right through that period.
So it's interesting to see how things have changed.
Back when I started, we had no spatial analysis. We had pins in maps.
There was no hotspots policing.

(11:44):
We did random patrol. role. And we did all the things that we now know weren't great.
So there was only really one way to go and that was to improve.
So at least I think we've come some way in that.
But then there's a second phase. I think the reality is there's a second phase
and it started to some degree with Ferguson and the death of Michael Brown,
but it certainly kicked off with the awful murder of George Floyd.

(12:08):
And so where people are reimagining policing now, it's less about being smart,
but it's about we're hearing about defund and de-policing alternative response
models, which possibly have some support.
I'm doing some work in that right now with the transit police in Philadelphia.
That is driving a lot of the challenges for policing. So it continues to be

(12:28):
a difficult time in policing.
We know that it's good to get out ahead. head. We know there's research evidence
says that prioritizing work on gangs, on serious repeat offenders can actually
reduce their offending.
But police departments are smaller, they're hemorrhaging experience,
they have retention problems, they've got loss of personnel,
and you need experience to be able to run and manage complicated investigations.

(12:49):
A good example is in the UK. In the United Kingdom,
one of my podcast guests was telling me that it registered informants that the
police use to understand very difficult to penetrate criminal organized crime
groups are down to a fraction of where they were a decade ago.
So there's just a loss of experience to do some of this work.

(13:10):
So we definitely, we continue to be in phases.
It's constant change, right? That's the only constant.
Yes. And so with this second movement, then that really kicked off for sure
after George Floyd, would you say that intelligence led policing is still popular in policing today?
Or is there a movement away from it? Or is it just changing in the nature it's

(13:34):
being done or thought about?
That's a really good question. I think there's always going to be change.
And I think police departments, as I say, are struggling right now,
where some of these investigations can be time-consuming.
There's pros and cons to this. On the pro side, they're much more focused.
So if you're thinking about rather than just going into a neighborhood and pedestrian

(13:55):
stopping and searching, everybody in the neighborhood tried to be more focused
about who are the serious repeat offenders who we should be focusing on.
It's much more precise and ideally has less of a collateral impact on the community, which is good.
The downside is people are much
more more reticent just about policing generally at this point in time.
And as I say, police departments really just struggling with the personnel.

(14:18):
Most of the big police departments are down hundreds and hundreds of officers.
And at some point that has to give. And at some point you have to choose where
you're going to invest your resources.
So in investigations, that's fine.
You can do that. Then at that point, you're starting to lose people who are
out patrolling the streets doing the proactive work.
And do you want to do proactive prevention on the streets?

(14:41):
Or do you want to improve your reactive investigation after there's been a crime?
And I work a lot with policymakers and they struggle with this because they
know the benefits of both, but they have to provide a service to the public
with very limited tools.
Yeah, that's very complicated.
Oh, yeah. I mean, I sit in rooms with people who have to make really difficult

(15:02):
decisions and I don't envy them in the slightest. No, I don't either. there.
As Thomas Sewell said, you know, there are no solutions. There are just trade-offs.
And that, you know, you're making decisions in these rooms or you're trying
to help people make decisions in these rooms.
They're going to have life or death impacts. If you choose to prioritize in
one area, the very nature of that, you're taking away policing resources from other places.

(15:27):
And that could create criminal opportunities and people can get hurt.
So the people that are making Making these decisions, we shouldn't underestimate
the amount of challenge and thought that they often put into it.
Yeah, that's a really good point, because you see on social media,
like so-and-so said this or did this.
And then you always have someone in an uproar.

(15:47):
But, you know, take a step back, think about all of the challenges and the thought
that has to go into those difficult decisions.
Yeah, and it's really easy to be a keyboard warrior, isn't it?
I think there are times when people, you know, I've also been in meetings,
I'll be honest, where people have made really dumb decisions and not listened
to advice. So a piece of all of this is also nobody should get a blanket pass.

(16:11):
But for those people that, you know, really putting a lot of thought and effort
into understanding crime problems, using intelligence, using data and analysis
to make the best decisions they can, I'm leaning towards giving them the benefit of the doubt.
And that's really hard to ask these days because policing is really not a very popular area.
And the public these days, and I think to some degree people in criminology

(16:33):
and the public and commentators and activists generally, have zero tolerance for genuine mistakes.
And when you're dealing with decisions that can chop and change on an instant
on the street, I tend to give people at least the benefit of the doubt because
I'm not the one in the arena having to make these decisions and having to stand
by them. and they can go wrong.

(16:54):
You know, police chiefs can, it's often said that many police chiefs are one
bad shooting away from unemployment.
And so their career is on the line when they're making decisions about sending
police officers to a high crime area.
Police officer gets involved in a split second decision, makes a poor decision
in a nanosecond, it goes wrong and half a dozen people are losing their jobs.

(17:14):
So spending, you know, there are two areas where I think criminologists would benefit from.
It's spending more time on the streets and it's spending a bit more time spending
with decision makers who have to make some of these really difficult decisions.
Yeah, I think people really underestimate how hard some of these things are.
It's easy to be like, well, what I would do.

(17:35):
Is X, Y, and Z. And we're just going to start from scratch and rebuild everything.
And sometimes I read these suggestions that people have. I'm like,
oh yeah, because no one in the history
of mankind ever thought about this solution that you just proposed.
And maybe, just maybe, it's not feasible for who knows how many reasons, right?

(17:56):
Like people seem to forget that like you can't just wish things or like type things into existence.
Yeah. And if they were that much of an expert, then I don't see them joining up. Yeah.
So kind of going back to intelligence led policing for a little bit on,
you know, obviously, like pretty much anything in policing, it's drawn a lot of criticism.
And some people argue that it has led to over policing of minority neighborhoods

(18:21):
or that there's issues with intelligence led policing being unreliable because
the people entering the data are still human.
And so there's human error and bias that's introduced in the data.
And so we just wanted to get your thoughts on really how would you respond to
the criticisms of intelligence-led policing?
Yeah, some of them are justified and some of them I think are unreasonable.

(18:44):
Yes, absolutely. Some of these databases are not going to be 100% reliable.
They would be great if they were. You always work in a limited information environment,
you know, targeting serious repeat offenders.
Well, you know, guess what? some of the really good people who are involved
in transnational organized crime don't actually like to advertise their activities
and tell the police exactly what they're up to.

(19:06):
So a lot of it is, you know, trying to make the best decisions that I think
police officers try to do so based on limited information.
When the question comes around bias, I always find this a little bit fascinating.
You know, we say, well, should we do predictive policing, where a computer software
program that is able to look at all the reported crime from the community is

(19:27):
able to suggest these these are the areas where you seem to have crime problems.
Okay, well, that might have bias, but compared to what?
And that's the key question. What is the level of bias of this compared to the alternative?
And often the alternative is a sergeant who spends most of his or her time in
the police station, never spends any time on the streets, never does any crime

(19:47):
reports, just picking where they think what's going on.
Now, that has inherent biases through it, left, right, and center.
So when we talk about the bias in the system, And we have to think,
well, bias compared to what?
Now, you can, of course, make some rookie errors looking at crime systems.
If you're sending police to areas that are crime hotspots, for example,

(20:09):
based on drug arrest data, then you're making a rookie mistake.
And there are no police departments that I work with who make this kind of level
stupidity because you can find drug arrests wherever you send the cops.
So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We've long known that you shouldn't use drug arrests. You shouldn't use any police-originated.
Data like stop information for who to focus on and who to prioritize.

(20:33):
That being said, I'm sure there are still police departments that do it.
And so some of these criticisms that people come up with aren't unreasonable
and the like that some departments really don't do their due diligence in understanding this.
The other bias we have to understand within the system is one of the most robust
and reliable biases, especially in big cities, predominantly in big cities that

(20:56):
I've studied on the US East Coast is the bias around violent victimization.
So in Philadelphia, I can tell you the black-white population is around the
same, it's a few percent difference, but on the whole, it's not that different.
But if you're black, it's horrific. You are three times more likely to be a
victim of violence, and you're nearly four times more likely to be a victim of gun crime.

(21:17):
Now, if you're the police commissioner and you're the mayor,
what do you do with that information.
If people are complaining about over-policing, what's the solution?
Not to send police there because what you're going to get is,
compared to city rates, you're going to get an overabundance of police activity on the Black community.
That's the part that I struggle with when it's really easy for people in the

(21:41):
activist community to use naive statistics.
They'll look at the demographics of the entire city and then they'll say,
well, based on the demographics of the entire city, the police are doing three
times as many stops of black people than white people, or they're doing three
times as many arrests as black people and white people.
And they will compare to this naive citywide statistic.
And that's not really a reasonable metric, because the starting point is,

(22:05):
I think, what the police department are trying to do to reduce violent victimization.
And that doesn't mean pulling back from black areas, or put back from minority areas.
The challenging part about sort of hotspots policing is hotspots policing doesn't
tell you what to do. It just tells you where.
At that point, we bring human beings into the decision who decide what to do.

(22:28):
Now, there are many different things you can do in a crime hotspot,
some of which might be really beneficial, some of which are going to be harmful.
Again, some of which will be effective and some of which won't be effective.
Again, coming back to Thomas Hall, there are no solutions. There are trade-offs.
You could increase stops, which happened during the Philadelphia Foot Patrol experiment.
There's a trade-off that has a negative impact on the community,

(22:49):
whereas the benefit of that violent crime decreased by 23%. It's a lot of people
not getting shot, robbed, and murdered.
And so what does the evidence tell us about intelligence-led policing?
Like, is it something worth investing in, or should we be looking at other avenues? Yes.
Well, that almost invites the standard academic answer. It depends. Okay.

(23:14):
In the second round of reimagining policing, I think everybody is looking for that silver bullet.
I would like that perfect solution that has no negative implications.
Well, I don't think it really exists. There are trade-offs.
You know, you decide to spend more money on one thing than another with the
hope that But spending money on B is give you better results than spending money on A.

(23:39):
But because we live in complex social environments, it's really difficult to
know where those things are.
The evidence overall for focusing on serious repeat offenders is pretty good.
If you go back to the congressional report that was headed by Larry Sherman,
but had many luminaries like John Eck and Sean Bushway, Doris McKenzie,
and many other great names involved in it that was published in 1998. 1998.

(24:02):
We already knew then that there was benefit to focus on serious repeat offenders.
We know that there's benefit in crime hotspots.
It's one of the best researched areas of policing, and we know it's really effective.
There are dozens of studies, there are only two or three that have really not
found a result. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence benefits it.

(24:22):
Reducing repeat victimization, fantastic story out of the UK from the 1980s
and a housing project of just targeting people who are multiple victims and
improving their crime prevention in their homes,
drop burglary across the whole housing project by huge amounts.
So we know there's good scholarly evidence to support these things.

(24:43):
Does that mean they should be used uniformly and invested in more so?
That depends on the return on the investment.
There's a principle of proportionality here, which is if I'm using surveillance
resources and wiretaps, I really want to be going after serious,
repeat, organized criminals.
I don't want to be doing it on the numb nuts who might be selling a bag of weed
on the corner. Okay. So should they be expanded?

(25:05):
Yes, perhaps. No, if it's going to be towards targets who frankly aren't worth
the time and the investment,
or there may be better ways to divert that person rather than just send them
into the criminal justice system, which is what policing interventions tend
to do with the, you know, even though there's an increase in diversion work at the moment.
And I think that's really interesting and that's worth looking into more.

(25:27):
All right. So speaking of evaluations and evidence.
This term evidence-based has become, you know, a big word in criminology and
kind of a buzzword that people are really interested in and wanting to look at.
And as a correction installer, evidence-based interventions and programming

(25:50):
is all the rage right now.
And it means different things to different people.
And so here at the Criminology Academy, we love definitions,
which you may have gotten that hint by now.
But what does evidence-based mean to you, especially when it comes to policing? Okay.
So generally, I use the idea that an evidence-based approach wasn't mine.

(26:14):
It was a definition that came from some folk in the UK.
But an evidence-based policing approach involves police officers and staff.
Creating, reviewing, and using the best available evidence to inform and challenge
policies, practices, and decisions.
Now, what I like about this definition is it's not some airy-fairy academic theoretical concept.

(26:37):
It's police officers and staff who are involved in the production of knowledge
in the same way that evidence-based medicine really only works if medical practitioners
as they're involved in it, that we simply don't have enough policing scholars,
not just people interested in studying policing,
which has become toxic in the last few years, for sure.

(26:58):
It's hard to find a policing scholar these days, but also policing scholars
with a skill set to actually provide an evaluation skill set to be able to actually
help police departments answer the questions, is this actually helping?
And so we are limited by the availability of researchers. purchase.
So what we end up with is that we have to put more of the onus on police officers and staff.
So it's not just using the evidence base. Are they familiar with the evidence

(27:22):
on gun buyback programs? Should they be supporting them? The answer is no.
Should they be doing hotspots policing? Yes.
But also reviewing what the evidence is and understanding how it might work
in their context, but also creating it.
There are so many things that we don't know about what works and what doesn't in policing.
And it's interesting this phrase, what works, what doesn't, what's promising,

(27:45):
which came from the congressional report.
At some point, we have to add in there what's potentially harmful as well.
What are how we some of the aspects of what we might
do in policing might actually make things worse and it's hard to
say that i think people come into policing like any public service with
good intentions but that's one of the hard parts about engaging in evidence-based
policing is you go and help police departments as i often do and okay i can

(28:09):
tell you whether this works or not are you okay with the fact that it might
tell you it's made things worse and you know it's easy easy to say that as an
academic because my career is not on the line.
You can say that to a policymaker. It's like, oh, yeah, well,
I mean, I could only get fired.
That's their livelihood and their mortgage and their kids going to school and
their holiday in Cancun.

(28:29):
You've taken away all of that from them because you found that what they did.
So you have to understand that that's why that sometimes it's difficult to get
evidence-based scholarship up and running because those of us who sit on the
outside don't share any of the burden or the risk.
So we've got a lot to do in policing.
I love the idea of its police officers and police staff getting involved in it.

(28:53):
Inform and challenge policies, practices, and decisions.
I often say that there are only two things police officers hate,
how we're doing it right now, and change.
So it's like, well, this really sucks. Have you got a better way of doing it?
Yeah, maybe. Should we test that?
Oh, I'm not so sure. No, thanks. So it's very challenging.
But evidence-based policing really is vitally important to moving the entire

(29:15):
criminal justice system evidence-based policy forward.
We know that there are some really landmark examples of things that are harmful.
That are evidence of the failure or the fallacy of good intention-based policy.
Scared Straight is one example. We now know, I just published recently more

(29:38):
evidence that gun buybacks don't work.
Now, they're not a huge ask. They're not a huge drain on the city.
But they do detract from having people think about more effective policies.
And that's just as bad. So yeah, it has become flavor of the month.
I think there are some within academia, some within criminology are not fans
of it, because there is a hierarchy of evidence. There is a hierarchy of research evidence.

(30:00):
We know some things better at discovering evidence than others.
And scholars who do not do that kind of work are a little bit miffed and are
pushing back against evidence-based policy.
And I understand that. But I really think if we are to provide a service to
the community, a lot of us are at public universities or partly public funded universities.

(30:22):
And if part of our role is to help the community and improve the crime situation,
I think we have an obligation to try and provide the best evidence on what works
and what doesn't to improve public policy.
Yeah, I feel like we could devote an entire episode or even a series of episodes
just on this evidence-based term and like what counts as evidence,

(30:43):
what is the hierarchy of evidence. ends.
And the challenges of working with policymakers and practitioners with evidence base.
Because Jerry, like you said, I've run into a lot of people in the corrections
area who they are very supportive, but they do run into this question of,
well, what happens if we find that our program is actually making things worse?

(31:05):
That's not going to look great for us, but we want to do better.
And so they run into this kind of head-butting of what do we do? How do we go about this?
So a few of the things that I've done. So I've been very lucky.
I've had the opportunity to be at the big table in some of the policy makers
environments, which is a real privilege.

(31:26):
And some of the things I've kind of said is there's always a degree of negotiation.
As I used to say to police commissioner Chuck Ramsey when he was in Philadelphia,
look, if I find something bad, I'll tell you. If I find something good, I'll tell everybody.
And what I actually found was that people in policing are used to bad news.
What they really hate are surprises.

(31:46):
So they hate academics that come in, rape and pillage them of all their data.
And then two years later, they read an academic journal article that tells them they suck.
Now, what I've often found is that when you go back to policymakers and you
say, well, look, here are the findings, what they can often do is provide context
and nuance that allow you to understand the nature of why it failed.

(32:10):
An example I'll come to, I did a study of shootings in Philadelphia.
Holly George-Renger back in around 2007, 2008.
And it was about police officers after a shooting, putting a marked police car
on that corner and whether it reduced retaliatory shootings and other shootings in the neighborhood.
And it didn't. And I went back and spoke to the police. I said,
well, look, here are the results.

(32:31):
And the deputy commissioner at the time, her name was Pat Fox.
She was able to say, well, fair enough, but here is why it took place.
And she actually gave me enough information and detail that she didn't mind
me publishing it. She was okay with the idea that for my living, I have to publish.
She just didn't want it coming out without some context for why it failed.
She was used to the bad news, but needed a way to explain it.

(32:54):
And I think if we approach policymakers like equivalent research partners, we can often,
find a way to be able to publish even negative results in a way that aren't
necessarily career limiting for them. Yeah.
And allow us to, for the field to know what doesn't work.

(33:15):
And I think we just have to treat them reasonably. It's when we do hit and runs
and we just publish two years later and we completely screw people.
I think at the very least that's discourteous and borderline unprofessional.
The other side to it is that sometimes you can't get high-level research done.
There just isn't the political will for things like randomized controlled trials,

(33:35):
not the evidence. The definition is for police officers and staff to create,
review, and use the best available evidence.
And the emphasis there is on best. And sometimes I've been in situations where
I've said, really, it'd be great to study this as a randomized control trial.
And the decision makers have said, I just don't think we have the political
capital or desire to be able to push that through.

(33:59):
So there's always a degree of compromise.
So you might not get the best, but you might be able to do research that's good enough.
And helps the field learn, and at least learn something out of the experience.
There is, you know, as Jose said, there's a hierarchy of evidence,
and we could ruin everybody's podcast listening by talking about that.
But I've had to come down the hierarchy of evidence a few times,

(34:20):
because it's just not been possible to do the study I would like to do.
But the study still been beneficial and helpful, because it's at least above
a kind of threshold level, at least I've been able to find comparison groups or areas.
So good enough research isn't a bad thing. Right.
So like pretty much since I got here, I was working on and here at CU Boulder,

(34:41):
started working on this evaluation of this gang reduction program in Denver.
And the program manager was very like evidence based, oriented.
He wanted the program to be evaluated. And we got federal money.
We implemented a randomized controlled trial.
But of course, we had to make some concessions. So it wasn't like a perfectly

(35:04):
implemented randomized controlled trial. You know, like it wasn't double blind.
We were randomizing at not an optimal point in time. You know,
people were saying is that we should randomize after the people that had been
referred to the program had been vetted by the administrators.
But they're like, no, we can't do that.
Like we can't ask our outreach workers to develop relationships with these kids

(35:25):
and then tell them, sorry, they've been randomized for a control group.
So we're like, okay, so we'll do randomization at another point in time.
And so, you know, we worked with the agency to implement the best study that
we could do that satisfied their needs still met the standard that we had set
for ourselves in the evaluation but then like i'm not even a few months into the evaluation,

(35:49):
the manager leaves because he was playing hardball with city council.
And so he leaves, the position is vacant for several months,
COVID hits, an interim manager gets put in place.
She suspends the study for eight months until a new manager comes in.
And we still conducted the best study that we could. That's just how it goes.

(36:14):
Jose, I'm laughing because almost everything you said was triggering for me.
I think I'm going to have to go and have a bit of a lie down now. Oh no.
I've been there so many times in these kinds of studies. COVID,
I think the best way to think about so many of these things is you take your,
especially when you design these really good experiments, the first thing you

(36:35):
do when you get the grant is you take the project proposal paperwork,
you put it in a metal trash can, you set a light to it, and then whatever pieces
of paper you can pull out of the smoldering wreck of it becomes what ends up being implemented.
There's a General von Malkin, my apologies to the German-Austrian-Prussian listeners
who I probably killed the description of his or the
pronunciation of his name from the late 1800s has

(36:58):
said no plan survives contact with the enemy and I
don't mean the end he was a military general but I don't think really
in terms of enemy in terms of you know the community but more just you know
as soon as you design this perfect experiment you put it out into the field
it's the real world and you know theoretical people just get this wonderful
environment where they get to sit in their office so those of us who work in

(37:18):
the real world it can be an an absolute dumpster fire.
And I've had similar experiences with key members of the team,
a police chief who was a supporter, resigned.
Another member of the team, day one, is like, I'm going to go and join another police department.
Other people, you know, contracts failed. The university dropped the ball on
some paperwork and we had to stop fieldwork.
COVID came in, fire and brimstone, cats and dogs marrying each other.

(37:43):
It was just chaos from start to finish. And you fight through it and you do the best study you can.
And a couple of times I've completely abandoned an RCT, but we ended up doing
qualitative research and learning huge amounts from hundreds of hours of fieldwork
in places like Kensington and Philadelphia.
And the nice part about qualitative research in that regard is,

(38:04):
while it's not really often looked at as sort of robust research evidence of
what works and what doesn't, it can hugely inform your understanding of when
you do get results, why they work and why they don't.
And I think that's a key part from the lesson that I got from Pat Fox,
the Deputy Commissioner, to understand why a Priorities Corner program in Philadelphia

(38:26):
didn't work because there were implementation issues.
And you only learn that from doing qualitative research or doing field observations.
We've used that in my work. We've used hundreds of hours of qualitative observations,
just sitting in a police van, helping deal with people who are in an opioid
crisis to inform projects that we have now just completed,

(38:48):
which did become a relatively robust and randomized control trial.
You learn from this and eventually you get better at anticipating where all
the landmines are in the research process. So it's never wasted. Absolutely.
So something that we're curious about is you mentioned you're a policing scholar
in the United States, but you were a police officer in England before you became an academic.

(39:14):
You mentioned that you've done work with law enforcement in countries like El
Salvador, all over the US.
And so we're curious about how really how American policing stacks up to policing in other countries.
Are some of the issues and criticisms that surround American police officers
unique to the US or is that something that you find in other countries as well? Wow.

(39:40):
Again, you've come up with a question that will last. Okay, for listeners,
the remainder of this podcast will be 12 hours and multiple volumes and episodes to be finished.
I didn't think about trying to address that one. So I think if there's a key
piece to this, policing is different everywhere.
So in the United States, we have 17,000 to 18,000 police departments.
About half of them have got 10 sworn officers or less.

(40:02):
We've got a few big cities that look very much like other countries.
Other countries, you've got places where they have a national police.
In El Salvador, they have the PNC, which is a national police.
In New Zealand, they have a national police. In Japan, they have a national police.
In Denmark, they have have a mix. In Canada, they have a mix.
They have the RCMP and they have provincial and they have city police.

(40:24):
It's a mess. There is no rhyme or reason to how the policing world is organized.
So to make comparisons is really very difficult. The policing environment,
wherever you go within the United States, even within the region,
you know, I'm doing work right now with the New Jersey State Police and they're
dealing with all these cities that have very different policing policing environments.

(40:45):
So the environment is very different politically, socially, legally,
it just all looks different.
What I think is often fascinating is that I'll go to community meetings in San
Salvador and El Salvador, and I'll go to community meetings in Philadelphia,
and people are often complaining about the same stuff.
So I got to meet with members of the community in Honduras, and you think,

(41:05):
okay, they're going to be talking about police corruption and shootings.
But then after a while, it gets down to, and the traffic's really bad.
The traffic is is really bad. And I'm going, hold on, that's what people are
saying in Kensington and Philadelphia.
But it's because it's what grinds people down on a day-to-day basis.
And so even though the policing environments are very different,
what's surprising in that I've been very, very fortunate to have the opportunity

(41:28):
to work around the world, be a police officer for more than a decade in the
UK, and then to travel the world.
And people very kindly have me come and speak in other countries.
And I always try and go on ride-alongs where I can and go and get some experience in those places.
But what's fascinating is that even though the policing environment is different,
the criminal environment is often similar.
So people still take an opportunity as the one big driver for crime.

(41:52):
People take advantage of criminal opportunities.
It doesn't mean that even if they're relatively wealthy compared to people in
another country, people who are relatively poor in the United States are wealthy
compared to people who are relatively poor in El Salvador.
People who are wealthy in the United States will take advantage of criminal
opportunities if they think they can get away with it.

(42:14):
So the criminal environment is largely driven by, as an environmental criminologist,
routine activities, theory, rational choice, opportunity theories.
And that's incredibly similar where you go. Now, the social environment changes to some degree.
But the bottom line is, there's lots of people who are willing to try out crime,
sometimes at a low level, sometimes at a high level.

(42:35):
They take advantages in weaknesses in our systems and opportunities.
That's incredibly similar. So it means that lessons that we learn in one place,
just because the policing environment is different,
doesn't mean that we can't translate those lessons to be learned in other places,
because the criminal environment and the criminal opportunity structure isn't that dissimilar.

(42:57):
Yeah, it's really interesting. And it makes me, because you do trainings in
all of these different places, right? With police departments? department?
Yeah, well, a chunk of it is I reached full professor and I have no aspirations
to become a dean for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, nobody in their right mind would ever have me as a dean.
And secondly, it just looks like incredible amounts of tedious paperwork.

(43:18):
So I thought, well, what do I want to do for the rest of my career?
I really enjoy the opportunity to work with practitioners.
I probably spend more time with practitioners than with academics.
And so, well, I'd like to improve and help the policing field.
So it's not just about publishing another another journal article in the journal
that is going to be behind the paywall that nobody can ever read.

(43:38):
So I try and as much as possible to take some of the lessons that we've learned
about how to think about problem-oriented policing, how to think about intelligence-led
policing, reducing harm in communities and evidence-based policing,
and take those to policing groups and communities.
And I do training around the world and try and help them better understand,
so make their careers more rewarding and help them sort of get to their retirement

(44:00):
thinking, thinking, actually, I didn't do a bad job.
So my writing style has changed as well. So since I became a full professor,
I'm now trying to write academic books for a practitioner community.
So a couple of very recent books I've written, Reducing Crime,
A Companion for Police Leaders, and Evans-Based Policing, The Basics,
they're small books on pictures for people who are busy and have got stuff going on.

(44:24):
But I try to write in a style that makes it accessible, accessible because we've
all been through the agony.
You know, it's similar for working with undergraduates. The professor that assigns
an academic journal article really is that, yeah, that's almost malicious.
So, you know, reality is that the practitioner community who are doing the actual
work to try and keep us safe are not reading scholarly work because we don't

(44:48):
make it accessible to them.
Now, we can either bitch and moan as academics about that and how uninformed
they are, or we can actually help them and reach out to them in ways that take
scholarly academic work,
but convey it to them in a way that makes it accessible to them.
And that for me is podcasts it's writing
in a way that's much more accessible and it's getting out based

(45:10):
based on training and i travel a lot i'm a very very understanding
partner shelly bless her but it's getting out there and actually kind of selling
this stuff so that they hopefully can have the benefit on the communities that
they hope they would yeah absolutely and that just got one last question on
this topic when you're doing these trainings if you know the policing environment is different,

(45:33):
but the crime environment is similar.
Are your trainings pretty similar when you go to different countries or do you
change them a lot depending on context and culture?
A little of column A, a little of column B. So the principles and the ideas
of how people work and function, very, very similar.
Police departments, while they seem very different, actually hierarchy organized,

(45:55):
they're often organized around geography and space. They defer accountability
to field commanders who are in charge of a geographic area.
I mean, it's a tough job if you think about it. You spent your life being a
patrol officer dealing with individual cases, and then you might become a detective
dealing with an individual case, and then you become a sergeant,
which is mainly supervising your officers.
And then suddenly you become a lieutenant or a captain, and now you're in charge

(46:19):
of a geographic area of all the crime in a space with 50,000 people in it.
What about your previous career prepared you for that? that.
It's, I mean, it's brutal.
So I try to do my work pitch towards mid to senior level people.
We're just trying to learn how best to work in a new environment of their leadership
role. So the principles are often very similar.

(46:40):
That being said, where possible, I try and tweak what I do.
Obviously, if I'm talking about El Salvador, then I'm not going to draw on examples
that require significant resources or an effective criminal justice system.
In actual fact, there's value in pointing out to people sometimes the limitations
of the criminal justice system as a way to encourage people or help them understand

(47:02):
how severe those limits are and.
The range of those limits is different. But on the whole, we can't rely on the
criminal justice system.
So they have to think about more problem-oriented solutions to crime problems
because they're much more effective.
They rely less on policing resources, and they don't require a criminal justice
system to really be fully effective and functioning because in many countries

(47:23):
in Central America and other parts of the world, you simply don't have that resource to draw on.
So yeah, there's a degree of tweaking that takes place because you want to be
respectful of your audience. All right.
So we want to close out the podcast by asking you.
So I think what people are going to realize, this is a little bit of a crossover,
not in a true sense, but kind of talking about disseminating our work in a way

(47:47):
that is accessible to people.
You are the host of your own podcast, Reducing Crime, which launched about five years ago or so.
Unlike us, you actually have a mix of practitioners and academics where we mainly focus on academics.
But first, what motivated you to start the Reducing Crime podcast? podcast.

(48:10):
And then, you know, one of the things that you were just talking about is how
as academics, we tend to be pretty bad about disseminating our information to the public.
And so just maybe some suggestions or advice that you might have on how we can be better about it.
But don't be starting to podcast people. You know, Jerry and I are staking our claim in this area.

(48:33):
Oh, yeah. So, I mean, congratulations on your podcast. It seems to be going
from strength to the strength.
I had no idea where the Reducing Crime podcast would be.
I just finished writing a book, Reducing Crime, a Companion for Police Leaders.
It was deliberately sort of... I don't want to make it sound like it's not thoughtful
and academic, but I wanted to write for a very different audience.

(48:55):
Because I saw that when you work in policing, you get some training at the academy.
And then at the end of your career, if you make it to the high levels of the
organization, organization, you might get to go to some seminars and some networking
events and some conferences.
But the people who do the real work in the middle career stages have a lot of
leadership and have a lot of decision making about crime get next to nothing.

(49:16):
So I wanted to write for them. But then I started thinking, well,
also, how do I reach people with giving them more information,
keeping them up to date or just getting them more engaged?
And so I thought about doing a podcast. I had no idea if anybody was ever going to listen to it.
I mean, fortunately, I have phenomenal guests because without that,
it would just disappear.

(49:36):
I mean, people have thought listening to an hour of me rambling to you guys
now can imagine endless episodes.
But yeah, so I'm in my mistake theory of the Reducing Crime podcast.
By the time we hit the summer, it's astounding to me. By the time we hit the
summer, I'll have hit a quarter of a million downloads.
Wow. Congratulations. which is just astounding to me that people are prepared to put up with it.
And what I find is interesting is I get messages from practitioners who always

(50:00):
find a nugget or something useful because I have really interesting guests.
And sometimes I can see people use it for class because you can see spikes in
listens for certain episodes.
But yeah, I wanted to make it as different as possible. I try to have a different episode every time.
So if you get an academic one episode, you'll get a police practitioner in the net.
And I try to focus on people who do practical, realistic

(50:21):
useful stuff but just to make it as
different and as imaginative as possible it
does help that you know being a little bit more older and kind
of senior i know lots of people and i get to travel because
i like to do face-to-face podcasts but a fantastic it's all based on the fantastic
range of very international guests everything from academics to undercover officers
i've recently had an officer who was undercover with white supremacists and

(50:46):
then you go from that to an academic talking about hotspots policing or social
network analysis. It just jumps around. It's great fun.
But yeah, it does help. I can mix up my audience a little bit more probably
because I do spend a lot of time traveling.
And I guess to paraphrase Tyrion Lannister, I know people and I drink.
So yeah, it's been great. And it tells you something about, I suppose,

(51:09):
how hungry the field is if we look at academic citation counts for journal articles,
and then compare that hundreds of thousands of people listening to a podcast,
it tells you something about where people are accessing information.
And that leads, Jose, into your second question, if I can carry on kind of rolling
on. We have to engage more with policymakers.

(51:30):
It's absolutely great to me to get emails or to get text messages or direct
messages from people saying, I'm going to try that in my police department because
of something they heard on a podcast.
And unless they're actually doing a study, you never hear them say that,
oh, I read this journal article, I paid $70 to get it because it was behind a paywall.
And it was just, you know, we don't as academics do a good job.

(51:53):
It requires criminologists, I think, to do research that's actually practically useful.
And I think that's a a problem in the field. There's a lot of esoteric navel
gazing, but if you ask practitioners whether they can use it,
there's just not enough of that work out there.
And then it means, it makes a difference that we actually reach out to them to make it accessible.
If I can, I can give you an example of some work that I recently did.

(52:14):
I evaluated a gun buyback program in Philadelphia with a graduate student of mine.
And we published the study, but it's in a medical journal, injury prevention,
and probably a few practitioners, highly unlikely anybody's going to to read
it. So, well, okay, that's nice.
But we also wrote an op-ed piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
So a month after the journal article came out, I had an op-ed piece in the Philadelphia

(52:36):
Inquirer where she said, you know, here's the study.
Here's the reality of it's just not working here in Philadelphia.
But if we want to do something different, here are some suggestions.
A month after that came out, a city councilor submitted a resolution and had
it signed off requiring the city to examine the St.
Louis Consent to Search program, which is one of the the things I suggested
to the city to explore and examine its feasibility.

(52:59):
So October study comes out, November and up ahead, and then December comes the city resolution.
Now, I don't see that happening enough, which is a shame because I think there
are scholars out there doing really good work.
But if it just disappears into academic journal articles only,
and we still have to do those for
our credibility, if we want to influence policy, that's not where to be.

(53:21):
But, you know, I think a lot of academics are also not that fussed about influencing
policy, which I also think is a shame.
I'm going to stare and go, why are you doing this if it's not to actually make the system better?
Yeah, that's great that you saw change. and that seems very quick.
So what an op-ed can do to really make a difference?
Right. I mean, I've not spoken to the council member, but it's got to be more

(53:44):
than coincidence, right?
It's got to be, I would say. I don't think that council member suddenly thought
of a program for the 1990s and thought, that's what we need and completely independently.
Perhaps they did. So who knows? But yeah. Yeah. Was it Sherlock Holmes that
said there are not the same as coincidences?
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, the policy world, I obviously have

(54:06):
a bias creeps into everything I say.
I'm a bias because I get to work with practitioners and policymakers.
So I think that works important. I'm an ex-police officer. So I think that works
important. Obviously, my bias creeps into all of this kind of stuff.
But it would, I think we don't do a good enough job in academia of training
people to actually think about having policy influence.

(54:27):
And so there's a whole field, there are whole areas of
criminology where people make a very tidy career
just shouting from a distance going you guys suck
without really having stepping out and
taking a risk and making concrete suggestions or making
any effort to be in the room and actually help people get better and make better

(54:47):
decisions and honestly if you just shout at people from afar that doesn't really
encourage them to make better policy suggestions that's not how people function
you have to be in the room you have to gain their trust.
You have to understand their world and understand the challenges and the pressures and the constraints.

(55:08):
And a lot of the times the compromises that they have to make just to get anything
done, then when you can do all of that, you might be able to help them make
a slightly better decision.
And I think we could do with more people in academia who try and do that.
Absolutely. yeah and i think that's
a perfect note to end the podcast in

(55:30):
on thank you jerry so much for taking time
out of your day to talk to us it was a great conversation
is there anything you'd like to plug i know we talked about your podcast reducing
crime is guessing that's available anywhere people can listen to podcasts absolutely
yeah the reducing crime podcast is available anywhere and if people are interested
in more about evidence-based policing i have a relatively cheap book that came

(55:51):
out and a website to support it.
So you can find more information about that at evansbasedpolicing.net.
And if people have any questions, where can they find you?
There are two Jerry Ratcliffe's on the internet. I'm really easy to find.
There are two Jerry Ratcliffe's on the internet and the other is a sports writer
and a journalist from Virginia.
And I'm afraid that's not me. So yeah, I'm easy to find on just about every

(56:15):
social media. Though No, I will say I keep some of it to myself.
So Facebook and Instagram are for my private life, but Twitter or X or whatever
the hell we're calling it these days.
Yeah, that's the public facing Jerry.
Awesome. Well, thank you again. It was great speaking with you, meeting you virtually.
Likewise. Thanks for having me, guys. I appreciate it. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening.

(56:40):
Don't forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes,
or let us know what you think of the episode by leaving us a comment on our
website, thecriminologyacademy.com.
You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at The Crim Academy.
That's T-H-E-C-R-I-M-A-C-A-D-E-M-Y. Or email us at thecrimacademy at gmail.com. See you next time.

(57:06):
Music.