Dr. David Weisburd - Police Need Cookbooks, Not Just Theory - George Mason University

The CopDoc Podcast - Season 9 - Episode 160

What if police departments made decisions based on solid evidence rather than gut feelings? Dr. David Weisburd, a dual faculty member at George Mason University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has spent decades proving that scientific approaches can revolutionize policing.

From his unexpected start evaluating one of America's first community policing programs in 1984, Weisburd discovered something remarkable: crime isn't random. His groundbreaking "law of crime concentration" demonstrates that approximately 5% of streets produce about 50% of crime in cities worldwide. This discovery challenged conventional wisdom and launched the hotspot policing movement that continues to transform law enforcement today.

Contrary to what many might assume, Weisburd's research in high-crime neighborhoods reveals that residents overwhelmingly want more police presence, not less. When surveyed, only 6-7% of people living in these areas wanted fewer officers. What they actually desire isn't the absence of police but officers who treat them with respect and dignity—a finding that led Weisburd to conduct successful experiments combining focused policing with procedural justice training.

Despite these advances, Weisburd argues that policing research remains drastically underfunded compared to fields like medicine. While the NIH receives around $45 billion annually, criminal justice research gets merely $200 million. This disparity explains why we lack what Weisburd calls a "cookbook" for police—practical, evidence-based guidance for officers working in different contexts and communities.

Throughout our conversation, Weisburd shares stories from his international work, the challenges of conducting research during times of conflict in Israel, and his vision for a National Institute of Policing that would elevate law enforcement science to the level it deserves. Whether you're a police professional, researcher, or concerned citizen, this episode offers rare insight into how evidence-based approaches can build safer, more just communities.

Listen now to understand why police science deserves billions, not millions, and how research can help departments navigate today's complex challenges with greater effectiveness and legitimacy.

Contact us: copdoc.podcast@gmail.com 

Website: www.copdocpodcast.com

If you'd like to arrange for facilitated training, or consulting, or talk about steps you might take to improve your leadership and help in your quest for promotion, contact Steve at stephen.morreale@gmail.com

Transcript

Episode Introduction

Intro-Outro 0:03

Welcome to the CopDoc Podcast. This podcast explores police leadership issues and innovative ideas. The CopDoc shares thoughts and ideas as he talks with leaders in policing communities, academia and other government agencies.

Steve Morreale 0:21

And now please join Dr Steve morreale and industry thought leaders as they share their insights and experience on the cop doc podcast well, hello everybody coming to you from boston, and normally I would be talking to dr david weisberg in israel, one of the places that he lives, but he is here in the united states, so I I'm glad to talk with him. I've been back and forth with him, given all the troubles that have gone over in Israel, and he is back here. He is a member of two faculty, one at George Mason, the other at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I want to say hello and welcome David.

David Weisburd 0:59

Well, thank you very much, and it's good to be with you here, steve.

Steve Morreale 1:10

I'm glad to you have such a storied history In my mind. You're a thought leader. So many of the people who listen are from all over the world, literally. It amazes me, David, that I started this about four years ago and there's people I can't believe it. I pinched myself from 96 different countries I didn't even know there were that many, but 96 different countries and you just came back. We talked about it off mic there. You just came back from an event at Cambridge University, but you have been involved in policing research for a long, long time Sociology degree from Yale. How the hell did you get involved, in your interest, in policing?

David Weisburd 1:44

Well, it wasn't a straight path actually. Okay, I did train with Albert J Reese Jr, who was probably the preeminent empirically based policing scholar of his generation, but I knew his work on policing. We talked about policing often Before I finished my PhD. I needed to get a job, and so it was really too early to get an academic job and Stan Wheeler, who was one of my two mentors Stan Wheeler and Albert J Rees Jr he had connections with a place called the Vera Institute of Justice, which I'm sure you know.

Steve Morreale 2:17

Yes, of course.

David Weisburd 2:19

He called them up and said I have this great researcher, young researcher who could do great work. And they said well, we have this policing program that we're going to start evaluating and it was a community policing program in the 72nd Precinct in Brooklyn. And so I came in and they interviewed me and Al was one of my mentors and I had good research skills and they said that'd be great. And I had good research skills and they said that'd be great. So I was invited to be the evaluator for the pilot community policing program in New York City.

Steve Morreale 2:51

What year was that David?

David Weisburd 2:53

That was 1984, I believe it was one of the first community policing programs in the country. It wasn't the first. There had been one or two others. Other people were talking about community policing, like Herman Goldstein, but it was literally one of the first and I didn't know what a good opportunity this was right. It seemed like fun to me because a lot of my work has been quantitative empirical analysis and this was going to be walking the street with cops.

Steve Morreale 3:21

Much more qualitative.

David Weisburd 3:23

So this really begins the journey, like they bring me on.

Steve Morreale 3:28

Did you catch the bug, as they say?

David Weisburd 3:32

it was very interesting and more than that, my previous Yale. It was very ivory tower. I didn't really have much experience in the real world of criminal justice and here I was all of a sudden way in that world, like in the in the trenches right.

David Weisburd 3:47

In the trenches and the job I had. Really, if I think about it now, I spent four days a week for a year walking the streets with New York city cops who were assigned to be community policing officers. And the cops there were nine beats and there were nine officers, a sergeant and his assistant, and each cop had a beat which is about 20 square blocks and those beats were defined as a sort of problematic areas of the 72nd Precinct in Brooklyn, and Malcolm Gladwell does a good job of introducing this in his book Talking to Strangers, where he talks about how bad the 72nd Precinct was at that time, as opposed to now, where a lot of it is gentrified, strongly gentrified. But anyway, that's how I started. That's how I got my immersion in the world of policing.

Steve Morreale 4:31

Well, that'll do it, and obviously you have become a legend, but I think you're one of the thought leaders I think you were one of, with Lawrence Sherman and Jerry Ratcliffe in some cases, but one of the early adopters, or advocates it would be a better word for evidence-based policing. And now look at what's happened and think about when you started talking about evidence-based policing. When did that first roll off your tongue? And all the upward push to make it become more mainstream? We're still having trouble. So what's your take on that? This?

David Weisburd 5:08

evidence-based policing. Yeah, I think you have to be a little careful, because it's not that police scholars weren't always looking at evidence. Oh, of course not. People were doing studies Jerry Skolnick and others, george Kelling, there were a bunch of. There were a bunch of people who were doing a work in policing, beginning in the 1970s and maybe even earlier. Jerry's work, I think, started in the 60s. So there was important scholarship. But the idea of really developing a rigorous science for the development of policing begins to take hold, I think really in the mid-1980s, 1990s and Larry Sherman was the person who gave its name which was evidence-based policing.

Steve Morreale 5:56

If you don't mind me interrupting. Clearly, we have evidence-based medicine and that works pretty well. Why aren't we adopting it here?

The Rise of Evidence-Based Policing

David Weisburd 6:02

Well, that was Larry's point, I think, and we had started working together in the late 1980s. A long time ago, the late 1980s, we were talking a lot about these issues. That was when we did the Minneapolis hotspots experiment, one of the first large truly randomized trials in policing. We were totally committed to the idea that science can inform policing and, by the way, the police could be affected, which before that I think there was an attitude the police couldn't be affected. It was pretty much the main narrative. I think hard to believe now, but that was the narrative.

David Weisburd 6:32

But it's interesting to have all these connections work because at the time that Larry wrote that article I was running research at the Police Foundation of Washington. I was also at the Hebe University and I started a series called Ideas in Policing because I wanted the Police Foundation to be the place where people came for ideas of policing and I invited Larry. We spoke about what he would talk about and he said evidence-based policing. I said, larry, that'd be great. It's like nowhere the language has been out there. And then he writes this report for the Police Foundation, this Ideas in Policing series.

Steve Morreale 7:03

And I love that. By the way, I use it in almost every class, including yours, so thank you.

David Weisburd 7:07

And this has become a major, the major starting point. So the trajectory started before that. I'm trying to think of when. What was the date of that article? I believe it might have been in the late 1990s, but so things were beginning in this area of work before that. But Larry was the person who and he's interviewed Larry Larry was the person who sort of brought it all together the evidence-based policy, this idea that the police should be thinking about evidence, should be making decisions on the basis of evidence.

Steve Morreale 7:37

That makes some sense. It makes a lot of sense. I mean, you were very involved with RCTs randomized controlled tests and how those could work.

Steve Morreale 7:45

But when you start talking about evidence-based policing and I have been dragged into it and now I am an advocate. Maybe I'm a late bloomer, but I've been in the business for 35 years and 20 years in academia After that, you were just at Cambridge University and delivered a keynote you told me at the Society of Evidence-Based Policing what is your sense of the people around you, larry and Peter and Jerry, about the momentum now? Is it beginning to get more traction or are you seeing it get more traction? Are people's ears beginning to recognize the term?

David Weisburd 8:21

Yes, I don't think the trajectory is quite so clear.

David Weisburd 8:26

I think in the late 1980s, early 1990s you began to have a bunch of more rigorous empirical work being done in policing.

David Weisburd 8:37

Larry Sherman and I did the Minneapolis hotspots experiment, which involved randomly allocating 50, 110 streets to treatment and control, just like in a medical experiment, and that was the model Indeed.

David Weisburd 8:47

When we did that study we said how could we convince people the police could be effective in reducing crime? We said, well, we have to do something really big and different. And experiments had credibility from medicine. So medicine affected criminology in this way, not only in the nature of the idea of evidence informing issues but also in the nature of the type of war. And I think from the early 1990s you begin to see a pickup in recognition. The National Academy of Sciences in the early 2000s sponsored a report on policing that was funded by the cops office and then NIJ and that came out with a bunch of strategies, including hotspots policing, that seemed to be effective, based on strong empirical evidence. And I think in that period it was picking up and picking up and both sides of the aisle, republicans and Democrats, both said yeah, if we can get rigorous evidence so that we make better decisions that would be great.

David Weisburd 9:46

And then you have a continuation of that trajectory, laurie Robinson, another person you should probably consider interviewing, if you haven't already, who works in government and gets the Office of Justice programs to move towards an evidence-based idea. I'm not sure the dates exactly, but during the Obama administration they established a committee, a scientific committee, for the Office of Justice Programs. So all this is happening and there's a lot of. It seems to be growing and growing and growing, and it seems to be getting support from both sides of the aisle, for the obvious reason you mentioned before. Shouldn't we be basing our decisions on evidence? By the way, a well-known, a famous economist, once said that the policy policymakers don't like evidence because it makes making decision making harder.

David Weisburd 10:35

It's like if you have evidence makes it harder, just make it on your gut feeling. But at that point and it may have come with the first Trump administration evidence-based policy in general sort of started falling away. Remember I was in a meeting of DHS Department of Homeland Security and I said but that would advance evidence-based approaches to Homeland Security. And the guy said something like oh, we don't use that. So many times we don't use evidence-based policy.

David Weisburd 11:04

What a shame to hear that, I think, since then there's been a decline in the political arena and, funny enough, an increase in the policing arena, whereas I think in policing this begins to pick up in the early 2000s as well. I mean, I went to a Campbell collaboration meeting where Peter Naird was giving the keynote and Peter, who I'd never met before, I hear him say every police officer should know the work of David Weisberg and I was like, wow, that's a new one. I'm very happy about that. But I think that for me that marks, in the early 2000s, a change in which police began to say not just a cop here and a chief here and this kind of thing, but policing as a whole should be more concerned with science and evidence, and I think that trajectory has continued to develop. Evidence-based policing are a good example of that.

Steve Morreale 11:57

And it started in what worked in Cambridge and Rene Mitchell coming back and creating the American Society and on and on, which is amazing. By the way, we're talking to David Weisberg. He is a professor at George Mason and over at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, so you are a dual citizen and you've been back and forth. What kind of work are you doing at Hebrew University? That might differ as you look at policing in Israel.

David Weisburd 12:28

Look, I think that let's call it the ebbs and flows. There was, four or five years ago, a commissioner of the Israeli police who I didn't know it. It's actually a funny story. I was invited by the minister of public security at the time, who was in charge of policing or at least gets to work on the appointment of the commissioner of Police for Israel National Police Force, and he had this long conversation with me about what should the new police chief be like and this and that. And I told him that the police chief should be aware of evidence and science and its importance in police decision making, evidence and science and its importance in police decision making. And I said, and I think it's also quite critical for that person to be aware of different communities and the different sensitivities they have, what we can do to try to bring communities along in policing, to work with the police and see them as legitimate. And then he went and picked a commissioner who had been the deputy director of the Shabak.

David Weisburd 13:22

The Shabak is the secret service, like the FBI, but actually more secret, a lot of work with terrorism, which is more, I guess, dhs, but anyway. And I said, what are you choosing this guy for? And I didn't know that. This guy was secretly taking courses at the Institute of Chronology and knew my work well for about two years before he was appointed. So he knew an awful lot about scientific work in policing. And he walked into his administration with an idea of making science an important part of police decision-making and for three years or it may have been four years actually he developed programs, computer systems, he created an advisory board for the police. But he's also the guy that, let's say he didn't get along with the rest of the government and his term wasn't extended, which is quite common. And after him that sort of tremendous push to evidence-based policing sort of fell away.

Crime Concentration and Hotspot Policing

David Weisburd 14:23

Of course in Israel with the October 7th massacre and its subsequent war with Hamas, it's become very difficult for the police to do anything, to be frank, besides just responding. The police were the major force between the terrorists and tens of thousands of people killed, and there were police officers with handguns standing there with these guys with with calico costs and rockets and other things, stopping them by putting their police cars in the street, just standing there, not letting them through and getting killed by the way. So the police in this case were great heroes, but it's again, again, an example of ebbs and flows. Uh, and one of the questions in my mind is how do we stop that? And I actually think one way to do it is the way that what's been going on in the US and in the UK, which is that the police themselves are starting to recognize the importance of evidence-based policing.

Steve Morreale 15:13

Yeah, well, it has to start from the ground, and I think that you have a number of questions, but it seems to me that if you're going to push towards evidence-based policing and I see a lot of police chiefs starting to move in that direction, but some of the smaller police chiefs don't get it or they become almost uncomfortable because you hear evidence, you hear science it's really outside the norm of local policing in my mind, although I think the LEADS program at NIJ has begun to change that. That practitioner-academic merging, would you agree? I mean, you must know some of the lead scholars that have come out and whether, to me, I wish at my age that it was there when I came through the ranks, because I would have loved it. But talk about that a little bit.

David Weisburd 15:58

Well, those kind of programs I think are great and I'm not sure they're going to be continued.

Steve Morreale 16:02

Well, I know, I know, I know.

David Weisburd 16:03

But yeah, there's no question. And what you said about the small police agencies Look, the speech I gave at Cambridge was about the fact that the reason evidence-based policing is not more greatly integrated into the world of police practice is not only because there's resistance from the police, it's because the scientific body of evidence is necessary to provide information and instruction for street-level crime. Police and other police is not there In the example of smaller police agencies. You know, most police agencies are smaller than 100 officers and in that case very little research has been done on small agencies, right? So we don't have that kind of guidance. More generally, what I said was that we have developed a cookbook. We're missing a cookbook and that cookbook. A cookbook and that cookbook would provide the information that would bring policing down to the real level of science, the real level of policing. There is a cookbook in medicine, they develop cookbooks in medicine and that's what we have to do now. One of the problems is that the and the nih has a budget of at least had a budget of about $45 billion Maybe it would be a little less, but even $40 billion and the budget for research on crime in the US from the government is $25 million, $50 million when you get extra funding. There's other funders, but it gets up to $200 million or something like that. Same thing in the UK.

David Weisburd 17:35

So it's great to talk about evidence-based policing, but you know where is the evidence base to support the evidence? Everyday activity? Now we do have evidence and hotspots, policing and other issues, but there's a long way to go and and personally at least, I think that the job of the police are getting involved in this with us is to go to the government and say look, we need big science here. This is like, this is like laboratories created to break something to get to the next. So we need that here. But I think the cost of policing costs trillions of dollars a year, don't we want to invest billions, perhaps providing the information the police need? So that was my point that we need big science in policing. The problem with evidence-based policing at the moment is not only that, there's some resistance, less and less over time. I think that we need to develop this cookbook, yeah.

Steve Morreale 18:34

That would provide the information that would allow us to really implement evidence-based policing. So we're talking to David Weisberg, and a couple of things that I noted here was it seems to me that when we're talking about policing as it is for the last five years, ever since Minneapolis, the police department has gone through challenges all over the world really about the way they treat people and their behavior and procedural justice, and because of that, there's less people they're having trouble recruiting and what used to be have the time to be proactive. Much like your community policing was way back in Brooklyn. In Brooklyn was that that was a proactive approach as opposed to a reactive approach.

Steve Morreale 19:09

But I also wonder this look, as someone who is I call myself a pracademic, that I've got practical experience, but I have academic training that understanding how dense these reports are that we have to write when we're conducting studies and we're doing analysis, it is really over the heads of so many people and so what is required is a way to apply it and to synthesize it the cookbook that you're talking about, to have some translational there so we can put it into. You know, when you're writing for some journals, there are some big words you use that most cups don't usually use. So how do we do that? How do we synthesize this really important work to bring it down to a cookbook level?

David Weisburd 19:58

See, the cookbook has multiple elements to it. By the way, why don't I think of the cookbook? I love it. We grew up in the same period. I used to watch Twilight Zone. Yes, I did, and there was a Twilight Zone. It was called how to Serve man. Do you remember this?

Steve Morreale 20:13

Yes, I do.

David Weisburd 20:14

And what happens is that a Martian comes down to Earth and he says we want to help get rid of disease and this, and that he goes to the UN and the NSA is tasked with translating this book they found, and the title of the book they translate was how to Serve man. And what the Martians start doing is they start bringing people up in their spaceships to mars or wherever they're from, and and everybody people are signing up and this and that, and the scientists who's heading this research project. They get him to get on the ship and as he's walking to the ship, a colleague of his who is working on the translation comes to the front of the line and yells to him as he's getting on the ship it's a cookbook, it's a cookbook, right? So they're, they're, they're taking away all disease and feeding people so they can. And the last scene is is is food opening up in this like room where he's sitting like a cell, and it says you might as well eat, mr doctor. So-and-so, look, it's a cookbook.

David Weisburd 21:18

The cookbook has two elements to it. One is the scientific evidence supporting practices and policies and bringing it down to the level that you need in policing. Police need to know not only that hotspots works or that there are hotspots. They need to know. Are there certain types of policies If I want to have reduced violent crime hotspots? Are there certain types of policies If I'm in a big city or a small? There are a million questions you could ask.

Steve Morreale 21:43

These are all different ingredients, right.

David Weisburd 21:46

These are the ingredients, and there's a lot of them, and a budget of $45 billion a year for health allowed them to do a lot of them. The other side of that cookbook is translation. What some people call translational criminology is translation, and translation is about bringing that information, once it's been vetted, down to practitioners so they could use it, and both of those activities are part of the cookbook, in my view, and they're both necessary. And we're at the beginning. We need much greater government funding for all these things or foundation, whatever it is. There needs to be a greater investment, and the police need to be part of claiming that investment. Police can't just go to Congress and say give me more guns, give me more batons, give me more of this and that, more technology. They need to be saying create a science agency so that policing can be at the level it needs to be to protect American citizens and do so in a democratic framework.

Steve Morreale 22:50

A couple of things that come to mind, and one of it is it seems to me that there's some reluctance in one way, because there's never one size fits all right, and you understand that if we use the cookbook analogy, right, you need a little of this, a little of that for Minneapolis, but you might need a little more salt and pepper I'm stepping down the road with it or not as much, or we don't need as much of the dose that we put. So, everybody, how do we make this work? Let me throw this at you. Here's a semi curve ball.

Steve Morreale 23:21

Police chief comes up to you, knows who you are and says I like what you're saying, but I'm not sure it's going to work for me. How can you convince them to give it a try? How can you convince them that they should work with researchers? Because it's like the doctor you'd have got to have a good bedside manner, have to have some skills. So there's such a resistance and a reluctance with some police departments allowing academics in. You know that there's a little resistance to that. And the other thing is our research sometimes takes so long, it frustrates police. Because I need an answer now. I need to deal with the issue now, not three years from now when you're done with the study.

David Weisburd 24:05

Yeah, I think there are two parts to that. Peter Nader and I have written about this that there has to be a change of the training, of how we create our police officers and police leaders. There has to be a recognition on their part of the value of science. It has to be a realistic recognition. By that I mean that you have to be realistic when you're in a city and leading a place, or political considerations or other issues. But they have to know that evidence is important. That's a cultural thing, if you like, and the societies with evidence-based policing I think are doing some very good work with that. The police have to value science is the only way I can think of saying so let me ask you a question, david.

Steve Morreale 24:51

This is the one thing that strikes me. I think sometimes the fear that we have to overcome is what does science mean? As it relates to policing, you're going to come in and you're going to do a study. You're going to do an RCT, a randomized controlled trial. It's almost like we're going to try this here and that here. We're going to compare them, right Is that? How do I want synthesize your concept of science when you get that information, that data, and then you analyze one against the other?

David Weisburd 25:27

Let me start with a story that may be helpful here. Yeah, I was on a panel at something called the Israel Democracy Institute in Israel and we were talking about policing. Someone came up and said to the deputy commissioner you should know about the work of David Weisberg, because his work suggests that displacement is not an inevitable outcome of targeted policing. And the police chief then went on to say well, my gut feeling tells me that he's wrong Right Now. My response to that was not to be insulting or anything like that. My response was look, when I go to the doctor, I don't like to go to doctors that are like 20 years old, you know.

Steve Morreale 26:14

Yeah, you need some experience.

David Weisburd 26:15

I like my doctors to have gray hair like me.

Steve Morreale 26:18

Me too boss.

David Weisburd 26:19

But at the same time, if my doctor starts off by saying I don't care about what the scientific literature says on these drugs, I'm not going to use them. I want my doctor to have gray hair. In other words, I want my police officers to have clinical experience. You learn things on an everyday level for everyday decision-making that are not going to be research-based, that are partially learned along the way. They work for different people in different ways. Clinical experience, as you noted earlier, I mean some guy who may be kind of non-threatening looking can have a certain way of behaving with people. Someone who's very threatening looking needs to have a different way to behave. Now, science can form that, of course, but some of that is just a clinical experience. But at the same time, I want the police to know what science says about what works best, about how to do it. So, just like I would say in medicine, don't go to a doctor that refuses to read the literature.

Steve Morreale 27:21

Right, he won't know then about the side effects or what's going to work. Yeah, what the?

Race, Policing, and Procedural Justice

David Weisburd 27:23

dosage might be. Someone told me I don't know if this is true, but but NIH really started getting going when a senator had a daughter who took was a formaldehyde, a drug for pregnant women to reduce pain, or something. Was a thalamicide, a drug for pregnant women to reduce pain, or something? It turned out it caused birth defects. His daughter's child had these things and then he found out that they were giving out this drug and no one had ever done any research on it. Someone told this story he would say in Yiddish, a bubba mitzvah, a grandmother's tale, but nonetheless someone told me that this became sort of a life-motivating thing for him to make sure that there are no more grandchildren like that who are born deformed or others. So I think we have to use the same idea here, that the research is there to help make decision-making better. It's not there to supplement or take over from the everyday clinical decisions that officers make in the field.

Steve Morreale 28:18

What did David Weisberg do and your colleagues to make changes in policing over the years that you're most proud of? In other words, what finding is important to you to have moved the needle in policing?

David Weisburd 28:35

Yeah, let me say I was always surprised at how interested the police were in me and I've had great experiences with police departments all over the world, meeting people, learning about what they're doing. Look, I think most people would say, though, my academic record includes a lot of different things. I've done a lot of work all the time on the concentration of crime at place and hotspots, policing. I've done other things, done lots of experiments with the police, not on this, but have been the most influential things that I've done, and they're influential for a group of reasons the basic research which led to my idea of the law of crime concentration about 5% of streets produce about 50% of crime in cities throughout the world.

Steve Morreale 29:20

The place-based policing theories right.

David Weisburd 29:22

That provides a sign that there's basic research and there's a value to research. This is a basic research finding that says crime is as the FBI put it the fish are concentrated in some parts of the sea. We send our boats to the fish Shouldn't we do the same with crime.

David Weisburd 29:38

That basic research finding, which has been replicated now in 30, 40, 50 studies and I just finished another study for the National Science Foundation of 70 American cities, is extremely strong science. Crime is extremely concentrated. About 1% of the streets produce about 25% of the crime. That's a logic that provides an underlying logic to the idea that we ought to be focusing in on specific places right?

Steve Morreale 30:06

Yes, because so many people, including police, get very upset when they are concentrating on a particular area where crime it's crime ridden and then they're accused of racism or they're attacking minority populations.

David Weisburd 30:21

How do you counteract that? Let's get to that in a second, because let me just finish another point related to this and I'll come back to that. So that was the basic research finding and then in the late 1980s, finishing in the early 1990s. There's another funny story, serendipitous. I was at Rutgers University a junior faculty member, without tenure, and I was put in charge of a committee to invite a distinguished visiting professor.

Steve Morreale 30:45

Was that in Newark at the time? Rutgers Newark? Yeah, because I used to work in Newark so I know it very well.

David Weisburd 30:49

Yes, it's a great school, made lots of important contributions.

Steve Morreale 30:53

Yes.

David Weisburd 30:54

So I go to the meetings and no one else shows up. The other faculty are my age now and they were flying all over the world. So my age now and they were flying all over the world. So I go back to the Dean who was Ron Clark, who's an important person in this area of work, and I say no one else is coming to the meeting. He said, david, you just speak to the people and you come to me. Tell me who we should choose. So there I was, this young whipsnack call up and I speak to Jerry Skolnick, who from that conversation became friendly with afterwards. And there was one or two others and Larry Sherman.

David Weisburd 31:23

It turns out that Larry and I both had the same mentor at Yale, albert J Reese Jr. And it turns out that I had just come from the Vera Institute of Justice, this community policing study, and that study. I saw that these bad areas of town, the areas weren't bad. There were one or two streets that were bad. Larry was doing work in Minneapolis finding the same thing, and I also saw that the police could be effective. And Larry said, yeah, I think the police can be effective.

David Weisburd 31:52

So the two of us set out as young Turks to change the narrative of policing the narrative of policing at the time, david Bailey, all these scholars, the police cannot be effective in preventing crime. There are a whole group of studies, george Kelling's study in Kansas City, studies of calls to service and all sorts, and Larry and I we can do this. We just have to focus on the hotspots. And that led to the Minneapolis hotspots experiment. And that experiment has had tremendous impact because it's led to 70 or more other rigorous studies, mostly all coming out with the same conclusion that hotspots of policing is effective. And another contribution there was what about displacement? And my Jersey City displacement study sort of upended that. Now there are a series of studies also that shows that doesn't inevitably happen. So that's just, steve, I didn't mean to interrupt you before, but that's just that's the package, if you ask me what I think.

Steve Morreale 32:41

What are you most proud of and what impact have you had?

David Weisburd 32:43

That's showing the concentration of crime and showing the police could prevent crime without displacement in focusing. You ask about the question of race and these sorts of issues, very complicated American society has had a long history of such complications and added to that have been other people of color, I guess people would say today Hispanics, asians and others who have immigrated over the last century and before that Jews and Irish, etc. There's always been a problem for the police. The first answer I would have for that is beware. Here's what I mean by beware. I did a study in Phoenix on hotspots, the top streets that were in the top three and a half percent of violence and drug crime, and I asked people who lived on those hotspots do you want and this was a year ago or more, so it was still when people were feeling pretty sensitive about these issues and concerned about defund the police.

David Weisburd 33:38

And over-policing, as people would say, absolutely, and I asked these people who live in the street, these streets that have high crime. I said do you want more police, do you want the same number of police or do you want less police? Only 6% or 7% of the respondents said they wanted less police. The largest number I believe more than half wanted more police and the rest wanted the same level of police number. I believe more than half wanted more police and the rest wanted the same level of policing. People who live on these streets at hotspots of crime that in larger cities can have hundreds of calls to the police for crime in a year. These people know they need the police. They don't want to defund the police, but at the same time, the way the police treat people at these places is extremely important. So the first issue hotspotting does lead to increased policing of areas that tend to be poor and disadvantaged minority because there's more crime there, not necessarily because the police are focusing there, and I think there's a lot of people who criticize official police data.

David Weisburd 34:38

I'm doing a study now. Most data the police use to identify hotspots comes from citizens, not the police. So most of these hotspots are being identified by citizens who report crimes to the police. So it's not conspiratorial is what I'm saying. It's the reality of American society. The poor, you know, people of poor and disadvantaged are more prone to crime problems of poor and disadvantaged are more prone to crime problems. People who are people of color are more prone to be in these areas, especially blacks, and so you know, you got to be careful. It's a, I'd say, on the one hand you will have more focusing, but on the other hand, that's just the reality of the crime problem.

David Weisburd 35:20

And the other people that live there don't want less police. They want the police to treat them with more respect and dignity, and that's true, right, that's what they want, I think. Beyond that, malcolm gladwell made a very good point in his book on on talking to strangers. He said that this approach of hot spotting can actually improve the situation in, uh, poor and disadvantaged neighborhoods or minority neighborhoods. Why? Because my work is about the fact that in the poor areas of town, most of the streets are not crime. So the police should not be going and doing stops and question frisk on those streets. They should be going to those streets that are have very, very high crime rates. Those streets.

Steve Morreale 36:02

They should be going to those streets that have very, very high crime rates. Yeah, let the data point you to where the hot spots are, and then pay attention with resources, because the worst events happen.

David Weisburd 36:15

That's what Gladwell writes about. The worst events happen when you see a minority person in an area of town and you stop that person because you're making assumptions like what is this person doing, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Steve Morreale 36:25

Yeah, that they don't belong there. I mean, people will make that.

David Weisburd 36:28

I know that's a shame In this area where he talks about the Sarah Bland case I think her name was, but I'm forgetting the case he talks about. This person was in a place where there hadn't been a crime like ever. Why did you stop this person? Place where there hadn't been a crime like ever, why did you stop this person? Kind of thing. Anyway, that's what malcolm said. Yeah, there's another point to this.

David Weisburd 36:45

Science can help us deal with this issue good so, uh, I, I chaired the national academy of sciences panel on proactive policing and I uh, and in that panel we concluded that there was not scientific evidence that procedural justice policing will improve outcomes. But I was intrigued by that issue and I set up this experiment, which was supported by Arnold Ventures and the National Policing Institute and carried out by the NPI, and in three cities we randomly allocated 40 high-crime hotspots to treatment and control and in each of those cities we randomized between 8 and 12 officers to treatment and control, so fully randomized, both in terms of the police and in terms of the hotspots. The police officers who were assigned to the treatment hotspots got a five-day training in procedural justice and related themes. And this experiment, which is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and free to download, in only a few pages, though it is kind of dense.

Steve Morreale 37:51

That's good. That's good, people will read it then.

David Weisburd 37:54

Well, it's kind of like full of jargon and stuff like that.

David Weisburd 37:58

I understand Statistics, but nonetheless, what we found was, first of all, that we could train the police to.

David Weisburd 38:03

I understand and this would be a problem if crime went up in the control sites, but we find that crime incidents declined significantly in the treatment sites as opposed to the control sites. And finally, we asked people who lived on these streets what they thought of the police, and there are two questions that I thought were particularly important. One was do you think the police harass people on your street? And the other was do you think the police use unnecessary violence against people in your street? And in both of those questions there was a significant difference between the treatment area citizens and the control area citizens. The treatment area citizens were much less likely to say significantly less likely to say that the police harass or use violence against citizens. So there's an example of evidence-based research providing an answer. The answer is if you're going to focus in on high-crime hotspots, you ought to do some training to prepare your officers in how to deal with these more intense situations in ways that show respect and dignity to the public.

Technology in Policing and Its Challenges

Steve Morreale 39:18

I like what you're saying, and I actually was just looking at that, and so I'll take a look at that myself, but we're talking with David Weisberg and as technology is sort of ramping up. I mean, I'm involved in AI. I'm sure that you are at least beginning to understand what AI can do and might do if it's properly used. What technologies that police are using? Do you see value coming forward? Everything from body-worn cameras to drones, to you name it. What comes to mind, David?

David Weisburd 39:54

Well, Steve, that's a pretty broad question.

Steve Morreale 39:56

I know I asked him broad questions, but just your own gut reaction.

David Weisburd 39:59

Look, we know that the compilation of large data sets and the identification by police of places where there's more crime is important and will be helpful, and many police departments have been increasing over time their abilities to map crime, to identify where it is, to identify what it is, et, identify what it is, etc. I think that's a good move in policing. The next step of that has been some of these predictive policing programs and I also led a National Academy of Sciences panel or not panel, but workshop on predictive policing. And the problem is that sometimes the technology is not where we need it to be when we operationalize it, and I don't think there's strong evidence that predictive policing increases greatly our ability to deal with crime problems above traditional crime analysis, intelligent crime analysis. Now, having said that, it's pretty clear that predictive algorithms they can assist you. The problem comes here, number one recognizing that algorithms are algorithms and that they have limitations and policing such a limitation could lead to someone dying or being shot when they shouldn't be, like that woman who was killed when police went into their apartment which they thought was a drug hangout and was not. It's also the case that policing is a public service and that means the public will be very interested in how the police do things. An example of that would be that in LA there was tremendous community reaction to PredPol. There was tremendous community reaction to PredPol, which is an algorithmic predictive policing program, because that was a proprietary program and they did not release the weighting and data that they you know the points they were using to make such decisions.

David Weisburd 41:58

And I think this story about mapping and predictive algorithms is a story about technology more generally. You have to make sure the technology where you want it to be. Microsoft and these other companies, some of the older ones like Motorola, they want to sell the police things. It is a big business, it sure is, and that means that, to be frank, the government should be doing more to create standards, for example. There it is now. But I think that the story I've just told is the story of technology, that we have to be sufficiently critical of the technology. We have to use it. We know we can get some bang for a buck and we have to be critical to assess it and evaluate it to make sure that we're ready. And again turn to body cameras. Another important area is the literature is very much diverging there about you know how effective it is. But you know, if this is really that important, why don't we have 100 studies instead of five?

Steve Morreale 43:00

It's a big country so you could have it all over the country East, west, central, south.

David Weisburd 43:04

I've come to the point in my career where it's just I don't. I don't get it Policing. Its benefits and potential liabilities are so great. We ought to be paying attention to it in a way that can provide the information necessary to make good decisions, and we're not doing that.

Steve Morreale 43:21

It's the lack of standards too. You just talked about that. We've got police departments 18,000 in the United States. Everybody does it differently, every training is different from state to state, and it seems to me there has to be some standardization.

David Weisburd 43:33

Hey, we need a college of policing here. We need a national institute of policing with a budget of billions of dollars and it's incredible to me we can't make the case.

Steve Morreale 43:40

It is tough because it's such an important element of society, and what you were saying, too, is that when we're using this, it's not inappropriate for us to be transparent, to say this is what we're looking at, these are the areas that we're looking for right, this is the data set that we're using and this is what we're coming up with and we're testing it, which becomes important, and I think what you were starting to say, too, is crime analysis is starting to rise, and bigger departments have crime analysts, but smaller departments don't.

David Weisburd 44:10

Sometimes there is a financial problem. If the government would invest in predictive algorithms for them, that would make it work. And, to be frank, there's another problem we don't know the extent to which programs that may work in larger cities work in smaller police departments, of which there are thousands and thousands of them, and this is part of the gap. As I said, I think there has to be concerted effort among researchers, policymakers, police to make the case to society that we need a greater investment in the footprint of policing. People killed by the police, on the one hand, and treated badly, on the other hand, crime that has caused suffering of millions of Americans. This should make this as an important area as medicine and, by the way, one of the resistances to this is police who don't consider science that important.

Steve Morreale 44:55

And I think that's what I'm saying to try to make them understand exactly what this science means, that it's not a scary word, right.

David Weisburd 45:03

Yes, agreed, but part of this is academics who don't really invest themselves in this footprint. My career is made in academia on publishing criminology and things like this or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but not everything that is going to be relevant to police are going to work there. Larry, I think, did a good job with this Journal of Evidence-Based Policing. By the way, larry Sherman, we also have to start dealing with the real everyday life of policing. It has to be important how the service is delivered. It has to be important how it's organized, not only deterrence or things that academics like Organize, not only deterrence or things that academics like. There has to be a broader understanding of. We need an institute that would deal with policing, from its who we choose to how we train them to, across the whole array, and not every one of those pieces is going to be a traditional academic piece. We should reward it anyway. Well, it's it in medicine.

Steve Morreale 46:05

Yeah, and I think to myself too at some point in time. You know there has to be sit-downs and talking to police leaders to say what questions do you need? The answers to Whatever those are right, and then try to sort of prioritize them to say, well, let's pair you with somebody who might be able to help you answer those questions right, because you walk into a department, let's say, today the big shot, david Weisberg, shows up and he's going to talk.

David Weisburd 46:35

It doesn't happen like that.

Steve Morreale 46:36

I know it doesn't, but it's a fantasy. So you're walking in and you're talking to a group of Fairfax County police chiefs and and it's informal You're saying this is what I've done, this is what you might be able to do. Pair up with an organization, put in a grant, what questions are important for you? How would you lead that conversation? So I'm saying you're in a round table at a let's say, it's a police chief retreat for a county, right? So you've got 20, 30 police chiefs, David. But I've been through the ebbs and flows and I want to sort of suggest to you that this is valuable to you, but you need to help us understand the questions, the concerns you have about the organization so we can try to help you get evidence so that you can make better decisions.

Creating a National Institute for Policing

David Weisburd 47:36

That's interesting the way you said that, steve. I mean, if we had a national incident of policing, they would be convening roundtables of which they would invite police chiefs from different size departments to say what are my major problems? What am I having trouble with? How could research help me? See, it's not only about them providing a site for us to do research, it's about them using research right. So I think this is all linked to my idea of big science that we have to change the scale. And until we change the scale, it's going to be very hard to really accomplish evidence-based policing.

David Weisburd 48:13

And I guess you know you talked about end of career. So I look at my this stage of my career. I'm doing a lot of research, but I look at it sort of I don't. I never thought a year or two ahead. That was never my approach. I always looked like 10 years ahead. Now, 10 years ahead for me is becoming I'll give you an example In Israel. I'm extremely disappointed at the direction of the Israeli police and the pleasant commissioner and partially because of the war and other things, like nothing. The government is just Reactive.

David Weisburd 48:43

Reactive that's a good way. They're overwhelmed with all the things they're doing. And Reacted that's a good way. They're overwhelmed with all the things they're doing. And the present government partially because that it's the same government that was not happy with the police chief that I liked, I wouldn't say. They're oriented towards evidence-based work. They're very similar in some ways to this sort of populist ideas of the Trump administration. So I said you know what? I'm not gonna get anywhere talking to these guys right now and they're busy with things that are important that I want them to do anyway. So I've established two committees in Israel. One is the Committee of the Israel Academy of Sciences, which I'm a member of, and in that committee I'm creating a panel, like I've done in the National Academy of Sciences in the US, to look at the future of policing in Israel.

Steve Morreale 49:29

Good.

David Weisburd 49:29

And I look at this not as a cookbook but as a sort of guidance for when the war is over. Israel hopefully someday will return to normal and people can start thinking about local problems like policing in a more reasonable way way. And I've also working, I've also with the Israel Democracy Institute developing a program that will be something like the Harvard.

Steve Morreale 49:52

Executive Session. Yes, I remember those. No, they're not doing it anymore. I know those were great.

David Weisburd 49:58

They're invested in defunding criminal justice.

Steve Morreale 50:01

Well, so is the government.

David Weisburd 50:02

That's most of the things I've seen. They're on the different sides.

Steve Morreale 50:05

Yes, I know.

David Weisburd 50:06

I suspect.

Steve Morreale 50:06

I do.

David Weisburd 50:07

But this one would be oriented towards a new generation of police leadership that would start understanding about science and working with them, letting them ask the questions and come to some solutions.

Steve Morreale 50:18

Let me interrupt for a second and suggest this. So there were two things that come to mind. I spent some time in Ireland and Kathy O'Toole wrote this piece about the future of policing in Ireland and the difference between that, because I did a little bit of work with that. The president's report on 21st century policing was aspirational. There was no money, there was no regulation, there was no you need to do this. You might want to do this, but when it was over, when that was written in Ireland, that was basically handed to the legislature to say make these things come alive. And they're coming there, and so even in Israel, we can aspire to do it or we can say this is going to be legislated, we're going to provide funding to allow that to happen. I saw you shake your head. You understand what I'm saying. The difference.

David Weisburd 51:06

Yeah, but I think that the two programs I'm running are outside the government.

Steve Morreale 51:10

No, I know you have to do some convincing.

David Weisburd 51:12

So we have more convincing to do. I just, I guess I'm hopeful, you know. I think that things do ebb and flow and you don't fall apart when things don't go your way for a little bit. You keep working on it.

Steve Morreale 51:23

Well, the government, they're in cycles and I tell people all of the time we're in cycles. Where in the United States it's eight years, right, eight years at the most. You know, an administration will be there for eight years and we're going to ride that and then we're going to change that direction and we're going to go somewhere else the next time because someone else has a different idea.

David Weisburd 51:42

My goal is to create like there was in medicine until now, I think. And even now there is a consensus about the importance of science in advancing treatment of Americans. You know medical treatment, so I would hope that we could. I'd like to go back to 10 years ago, so when both liberals and conservatives on both sides of the aisle here there was a desire to have research. They may come to different conclusions about that what to do but there was the desire to know research and that'd be nice. But yeah, I think you do. It's like research itself. If I followed every fancy of government funding, I would never have made the contribution. You have to have some vision of what you want to do and stick it out.

Steve Morreale 52:24

I agree, Okay. Well, listen, we're winding down. I certainly appreciate it and I hope you enjoyed this as much as I do. You have so much to say and so much to offer, and certainly I wish you the best of luck as you go back to to Israel and try to make some things happen there. As you continue, you know it's great for you. You've got your feet in two different places right, well, it's great, but it's also exhausting.

David Weisburd 52:47

I know things in Israel have been uh, not being in a war and 90 situation, international issues and all these other things. They affect everyday life in one way or another. So it's, what can I say, being being in multiple places? Multiple places could be great, but it also can be exhausting.

Steve Morreale 53:05

Yeah, but it gives you such a wide perspective that most people don't have, so I appreciate it.

David Weisburd 53:11

Last month I'd been in Milan and Rome and in Stockholm and Cambridge, London, Washington.

Steve Morreale 53:18

Here you are.

David Weisburd 53:20

So it does and you meet people and talk to them. It does give you exposure and for me, my journey has been much more international than I would have thought when I started.

Steve Morreale 53:29

Well, I'm glad to have you. I'm glad I finally got you on the podcast. I do appreciate. May I ask how people would reach you if they're looking to react to some of the things you're saying?

David Weisburd 53:39

So it's pretty easy and you look on the Internet. I'm pretty visible either at George Mason or at Hebrew University or at the national policing Institute where I serve as a senior advisor, and my email is D W, e, I, s, b? U? R without the D at the end. At GMU period E D? U Great. I always give out that email cause it's short.

David Weisburd 54:02

I understand, so you have the last one, and if someone wants to reach out to me, I'm happy to get correspondence. Please be patient with me because I get a lot of emails, I know.

Steve Morreale 54:12

I appreciate that you have the last word, you're hopeful.

David Weisburd 54:18

Yeah, I think you have to be hopeful. I think it's tough and what I said before, it's a tough period for research and evidence-based policy, but it's not such a bad period for the police recognition. I think we're in a good trajectory and I think that that will affect funding in the long run. So I am very hopeful, not because of me and my colleagues, but because of you guys, and I mean you think yourself a pracademic. The prac part of that, I think, is going to be the key to evidence-based policing in the future.

Steve Morreale 54:46

I think you're right With the IACP and the NPI and PERF and all, and on National Sheriff's Association, if there's enough people are saying this is what we need, this is where we want to go. This is why, with people like you helping to deliver the message, that I think we could make some change. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

David Weisburd 55:04

Let's talk again in five or seven years.

Steve Morreale 55:16

No, thank you, thank you, thank you. Let's talk again in five or seven years, no problem. So, at the beginning, by the way, we both said and this will expose me as much as it exposed David Weisberg that we were both born in the same year, 1954. Amazing, amazing. So, brother, it's great to talk to you. Finally, I'll be back in touch with you.

David Weisburd 55:24

Thank you so much. Happy birthday in a month.

Steve Morreale 55:25

Thanks, my friend. Thanks very much. Have a good one, take care. You too. Say again Fun being with you. Thank you, it's another episode of the podcast Now on the Books. Keep tuning in for more episodes. Glad to have you listen from 96 different countries. Reach out if you have any ideas about topics or people. I should be talking to you. Thanks very much. Stay safe, have a good night.

Intro-Outro 55:48

Thanks for listening to the Cop Doc Podcast with Dr Steve Morreale. Steve is a retired law enforcement practitioner and manager, turned academic and scholar from Western State University. Please tune into the Cop Doc Podcast for regular episodes of interviews with thought leaders in policing.