Professor David Weisburd of George Mason University and Hebrew University, Jerusalem has been selected by the Cambridge University Police Executive Program as the tenth winner of the Sir Robert Peel Medal for Outstanding Leadership in Evidence-Based Policing. As the first university professor to receive the award, he will deliver his Medal Lecture at the 2022 Cambridge Conference on Evidence-Based Policing at Cambridge University on Tuesday, 12th July.
The title of his Peel Medal lecture will be “Procedural Justice and Hot Spots Policing.’’ It will draw in part on the landmark experiment published in March 2022 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “Reforming the police through procedural justice training: A multicity randomized trial at crime hot spots.”
This experiment, conducted in three US cities by six co-authors, found that random assignment of an intensive 5-day training course in procedural justice for officers in 60 out of 120 crime hot spots led to major improvements in crime and policing outcomes. First, the hot spots policed by trained officers experience significantly lower crime counts. They also generated far better public perceptions (and observer ratings) of police conduct in those areas as fair and respectful, compared to similar officers in similar areas who had not been selected at random for the training.
Weisburd is also widely known for his “Law of Crime Concentration,” the 2014 Sutherland Award address in which he proposed a global pattern of crime hot spots in cities large and small in which most crime occurs—about 5% of public space in cities suffering over 50% of the crime. The 2010 Winner of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, Weisburd has worked with police agencies around the world to conduct experiments in crime prevention. The founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology, he has also served as President of the Academy of Experimental Criminology. The full conference at which he will speak at 11:00 am British Summer Time on 12th July can be viewed live by registering at: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_E12pcRA7T0SlMz_NTILVbQ
For any further questions about Professor Weisburd or his work please contact mst.administration@crim.cam.ac.uk.