The Aspiration of Scientific Policing

Over the past three decades, policing scholars have increasingly emphasized research that investigates the impact of well-defined policing strategies on crime, trust, and other community outcomes. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (2018) provides a thorough, balanced, and wide-ranging review of what this body of research has taught us. In the process, it invites critical questions about the “evidence-based policing” agenda that inspires this work. I argue that this agenda has distorted our understanding of contemporary policing more than it has clarified it. Despite the growing methodological sophistication of contemporary scholarship, its conceptualization of policing practice cannot come to terms with the inherent complexity of police work, and the consequentialist moral framework it relies on is a poor match for the intricate normative structure of policing. In places, however, Proactive Policing also suggests the possibility and value of a very different research agenda—one that seeks to refine the framework of values that police and those who hold them accountable rely on to guide their continually evolving practices.