Lawrence W Sherman
Biographic Data
| ID | 256677 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lawrence W Sherman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lawrence W |
| FAMILY NAME | Sherman |
| SIGNATURE | SHERMAN L W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7391-3562 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 70 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1305 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Did More Stop and Search by Police Cause Less Knife Injury in London? Evidence from 2008–2023
Transforming medical education in Liberia through an international community of inquiry
A critical component of building capacity in Liberia’s physician workforce involves strengthening the country’s only medical school, A.M. Dogliotti School of Medicine. Beginning in 2015, senior health sector stakeholders in Liberia invited faculty and staff from U.S. academic institutions and non-governmental organizations to partner with them on improving undergraduate medical education in Liberia. Over the subsequent six years, the members of t…
Goldilocks and the three “Ts”: Targeting, testing, and tracking for “just right” democratic policing
Research Summary Police are often criticized for doing “too much” or “too little” policing in various situations. These criticisms amount to testable hypotheses about whether “less” force, or intensity, or enforcement would have been enough, or whether “more” was needed. The rise of evidence‐based policing provides a starting point for public dialogues about those hypotheses, in ways that could help to build police legitimacy. Such dialogues can …
Shattering the paradox of guns and crime: Incidence, prevalence, and the 2020 Stockholm Prize
The apparent paradox of guns and crime is that gun homicide rates have been dropping for three decades in the United States while the number of guns in circulation has been rising. Those trends form an apparent paradox because guns are so much more lethal, given an attack, than other weapons, and in general, the more weapons in a state, the higher the rate of death from firearms. As both winners of the 2020 Stockholm Prize have shown, an addition…
Testing hot‐spots police patrols against no‐treatment controls: Temporal and spatial deterrence effects in the London Underground experiment
Our understanding of causality and effect size in randomized field experiments is challenged by variations in levels of baseline treatment dosage in control groups across experiments testing similar treatments. The clearest design is to compare treated cases with no‐treatment controls in a sample that lacks any prior treatment at baseline. We applied that strategy in a randomized test of hot‐spots police patrols on the previously never‐patrolled,…
Preventing Avoidable Deaths in Police Encounters with Citizens: Immediate Priorities
The global problem of fatal encounters between police and citizens is a massive challenge for both public health and public safety. This volume focuses on a wide range of ideas and evidence about what might be done to save lives in police-citizen encounters, at least in the United States. I focus on three ideas that could make the most difference, most quickly. Each of the ideas is supported by both substantial research evidence and a feasibility…
Evidence-Based Policing and Fatal Police Shootings: Promise, Problems, and Prospects
The promise of evidence-based policing is to reduce harm with better research for targeting, testing, and tracking police actions. The problems of using evidence-based policing to reduce harm are found in the emotional dimensions of ethics and risk. These problems are most pronounced with fatal police shootings, where the risks of injury to American police are often framed as a zero-sum choice in relation to the ethics of taking citizens' lives. …
Costs and Benefits of Preventing Crime
What are the cost savings from preventing a typical burglary, robbery, assault, or even a criminal career? Who benefits from these savings? How often do the benefits from preventing crime or criminal behavior exceed the resources spent on preventing or controlling crime? Is it more cost-effective to invest in early childhood programs or juvenile boot camps to reduce criminal offending? These are some of the important questions that face policymak…
Policing Domestic Violence 1967–2017
The U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice under President Johnson in 1967 called for a program of research that would support evidence‐based tracking, targeting, and testing of policing domestic “disputes.” During the past 50 years, the amount of research on domestic violence has grown. The findings from targeting studies reveal a steep pyramid from many low‐harm cases at the base rising to a tiny fraction t…
Reducing Fatal Police Shootings as System Crashes: Research, Theory, and Practice
Can fatal shootings by American police be reduced? If so, what theoretical framework would be most useful in saving more lives? What research agenda would that framework suggest? The purpose of this review is to answer those three questions. It applies the system-accident framework ( Perrow 1984 ) as a pathway to help police agencies reduce fatal police shootings, adapting it as system-crash prevention to encompass a wider range of systemic cause…
The Cambridge Crime Harm Index: Measuring Total Harm from Crime Based on Sentencing Guidelines
The logic of simply summing crimes of all kind into a single total has long been challenged as misleading. All crimes are not created equal. Counting them as if they are fosters distortion of risk assessments, resource allocation, and accountability. To solve this problem, Sherman (2007 , 2010 , 2011 and 2013 ) has offered a general proposal to create a weighted ‘Crime Harm Index (CHI).’ This article provides and explicates a detailed procedure f…
Kriminologie - Kriminalpolitik - Strafrecht: Festschrift für Hans-Jürgen Kerner zum 70. Geburtstag
Mit der Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Hans-Jürgen Kerner wird ein Jurist und Kriminologe gewürdigt, dessen Werk und Wirken bei hohem wissenschaftlichem Anspruch nie den Praxisbezug vermissen ließ. Die Interdisziplinarität seiner Arbeiten und das Bestreben, Kriminalpolitik aktiv mitzugestalten, waren und sind wichtige Aspekte seiner Arbeiten. Hans-Jürgen Kerners Schaffenskraft und die Weite seines wissenschaftlichen Œuvre spiegeln sich in run…
The Rise of Evidence-Based Policing: Targeting, Testing, and Tracking
Evidence-based policing is a method of making decisions about “what works” in policing: which practices and strategies accomplish police missions most cost-effectively. In contrast to basing decisions on theory, assumptions, tradition, or convention, an evidence-based approach continuously tests hypotheses with empirical research findings. While research on all aspects of policing grew substantially in the late twentieth century, the application …
Restorative Justice as Evidence-Based Sentencing
America's sentencing and corrections systems are in crisis. This text examines the intertwined and multi-layered fields of American sentencing and corrections from global and historical viewpoints, from theoretical and policy perspectives, and with close attention to many problem-specific arenas
Evidence and liberty: The promise of experimental criminology
Evidence and liberty are two great ideas in British history. One consequence of both ideas is experimental criminology, which applies research designs developed in Britain to matters of liberty affecting the entire world. The promise of experimental criminology is to generate better evidence about how to increase liberty. The crucial challenge to experimental criminology is the means by which research results, even when accepted as true, may be t…
Use Probation to Prevent Murder
Reintegrative Shaming, Procedural Justice, and Recidivism: The Engagement of Offenders' Psychological Mechanisms in the Canberra Rise Drinking-and-Driving Experiment
Advocates of restorative justice (RJ) hypothesize that the diversion of criminal cases to RJ conferences should be more effective in lowering the rate of reoffending than traditional prosecution in court processing because the conferences more effectively engage the psychological mechanisms of reintegrative shaming and procedural justice. This study uses longitudinal data from the drinking-and-driving study in the Australian Reintegrative Shaming…
Crime and juvenile delinquency
Victim Evaluations of Face‐to‐Face Restorative Justice Conferences: A Quasi‐Experimental Analysis
One major goal of face‐to‐face restorative justice (RJ) is to help heal the psychological harm suffered by crime victims ( Braithwaite, 2002 ). Substantial evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) has shown that this can be accomplished ( Strang, 2002 ) and more trials are underway ( Sherman & Strang, 2004 ). These outcomes are even more clearly, if less rigorously, demonstrated through retrospective interviews of victims about their fee…
The Use and Usefulness of Criminology, 1751-2005: Enlightened Justice and Its Failures
After a useful beginning in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as both an experimental and analytic social science, criminology sank into two centuries of torpor. Its resurrection in the late twentieth century crime wave successfully returned criminology to the forefront of discovering useful, if not always used, facts about prevailing crime patterns and responses to crime. Criminology’s failures of “use” in creating justice more enlightened by…
The Achievements, Frustrations, and Promise of the Social Sciences
Quick Read Synopsis
Experimental Ethnography: The Marriage of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
Experimental and ethnographic research methods are often described as mutually exclusive. This article suggests how they could be combined in the method of “experimental ethnography.” Building ethnographic methods into the separate branches of randomized controlled trials could substantially increase the range of conclusions that can be produced by experimental research designs, as well as by ethnographic methods. Experimental designs offer great…
Research and Policing: The Infrastructure and Political Economy of Federal Funding
Despite major progress in social science helping policeto prevent crime, federal funding for police research is atits lowest level in thirty-five years. Only a majorrestructuring of the political economy of criminology seemslikely to revive research with and for the police. Forabout $1 per American per year, federal funding for“Centers for Crime Prevention” could be established inall sixty-seven cities of more than 250,000 people and ineach of th…
Verdicts or Inventions: Interpreting Results from Randomized Controlled Experiments in Criminology
The social benefits of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) would be enhanced by general recognition of three problems of their interpretation and a redefinition of their mission in relation to program development and evaluation. One problem is that of "forest versus trees," or the sampling relationship between each test of a hypothesis and the conclusions drawn from all such tests taken together. A second problem is interpreting RCTs as testing t…
Hot Spots of Predatory Crime: Routine Activities and the Criminology of Place
A leading sociological theory of crime is the "routine activities" approach (Cohen and Felson, 1979). The premise of this ecological theory is that criminal events result from likely offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of capable guardians against crime converging nonrandomly in time and space. Yet prior research has been unable to employ spatial data, relying instead on individual- and household-level data, to test that basic premise. T…
The Specific Deterrent Effects of Arrest for Domestic Assault
The specific deterrence doctrine and labeling theory predict opposite effects of punishment on individual rates of deviance. The limited cross-sectional evidence available on the question is inconsistent, and experimental evidence has been lacking. The Police Foundation and the Minneapolis Police Department tested these hypotheses in a field experiment on domestic violence. Three police responses to simple assault were randomly assigned to legall…
Do Fair Procedures Matter? The Effect of Procedural Justice on Spouse Assault
In a reanalysis of the Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment, we examine whether the use of fair procedures on the part of police officers called to the scene of a domestic assault inhibits subsequent assault. Consistent with expectations, we found that procedural justice did suppress subsequent violence, even in the face of adverse outcomes. When police acted in a procedurally fair manner when arresting assault suspects, the rate of subsequent …
Crime, Punishment, and Stake in Conformity: Legal and Informal Control of Domestic Violence
Deterrence theories and labeling theories offer inconsistent predictions about the relative impact of legal and informal controls on the subsequent criminal activities of arrested persons. In a controlled experiment using police contacts for domestic violence offenses in Milwaukee, we test whether the effect of arrest on recidivism is conditional on key individual characteristics indicating a in conformity. Contrary to deterrence theories, arrest…
Reason for Emotion: Reinventing Justice With Theories, Innovations, and Research—the American Society of Criminology 2002 Presidential Address
Criminology was born in the age of reason to apply “reason” to justice, tempering the expression of moral indignation with the economics of deterrence. Modern criminology is now poised for reinventing justice around the emotions of victims, offenders, and society. One prime example is restorative justice. Others include wider use of biomedical mental health treatments for offenders, programs to make justice officials more aware of the emotional i…
Reintegrative Shaming, Procedural Justice, and Recidivism: The Engagement of Offenders' Psychological Mechanisms in the Canberra Rise Drinking-and-Driving Experiment
Advocates of restorative justice (RJ) hypothesize that the diversion of criminal cases to RJ conferences should be more effective in lowering the rate of reoffending than traditional prosecution in court processing because the conferences more effectively engage the psychological mechanisms of reintegrative shaming and procedural justice. This study uses longitudinal data from the drinking-and-driving study in the Australian Reintegrative Shaming…
Police Crackdowns: Initial and Residual Deterrence
Police crackdowns are sudden increases in officer presence, sanctions, and threats of apprehension either for specific offenses or for all offenses in specific places. Of eighteen case studies of crackdowns, fifteen appeared to demonstrate initial deterrent effects, including two examples of long-term effects. In most long-term crackdowns with apparent initial deterrence, however, the effects began to decay after a short period, sometimes despite…
The Impact of Research on Legal Policy: The Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment
Experimental research has recently shown a powerful impact on legal policy. An experiment demonstrating a deterrent effect of arrest on domestic violence has shaped public policy. Stimulated by efforts to publicize the results of the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (Sherman and Berk, 1984a), police departments were persuaded to adopt an arrest policy for misdemeanor domestic violence. Over one-third of respondents from U.S. police depart…
From Initial Deterrence to Longterm Escalation: Short‐custody Arrest for Poverty Ghetto Domestic Violence
Persons arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence are held in custody for widely varying lengths of time. To test the effects of this variance, we randomly assigned short (X̄= 2.8 hours), full (X̄= 11.1 hours), and no arrests (warning only) to a sample of 1,200 cases with predominantly unemployed suspects concentrated in black ghetto poverty neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Victim interviews and one official measure showed that short arrest had a sub…
The Rise of Evidence-Based Policing: Targeting, Testing, and Tracking
Evidence-based policing is a method of making decisions about “what works” in policing: which practices and strategies accomplish police missions most cost-effectively. In contrast to basing decisions on theory, assumptions, tradition, or convention, an evidence-based approach continuously tests hypotheses with empirical research findings. While research on all aspects of policing grew substantially in the late twentieth century, the application …
Misleading Evidence and Evidence-Led Policy: Making Social Science more Experimental
Increasing demands by government for “evidence-led” policy raise the risk that research evidence will mislead government rather than leading to an unbiased conclusion. The need for unbiased research conclusions has never been greater, yet few consumers of research understand the statistical biases with which science must always struggle. This article introduces the volume's discussion of those issues with an explanation of the major threats of bi…
Reducing Fatal Police Shootings as System Crashes: Research, Theory, and Practice
Can fatal shootings by American police be reduced? If so, what theoretical framework would be most useful in saving more lives? What research agenda would that framework suggest? The purpose of this review is to answer those three questions. It applies the system-accident framework ( Perrow 1984 ) as a pathway to help police agencies reduce fatal police shootings, adapting it as system-crash prevention to encompass a wider range of systemic cause…
The Use and Usefulness of Criminology, 1751-2005: Enlightened Justice and Its Failures
After a useful beginning in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as both an experimental and analytic social science, criminology sank into two centuries of torpor. Its resurrection in the late twentieth century crime wave successfully returned criminology to the forefront of discovering useful, if not always used, facts about prevailing crime patterns and responses to crime. Criminology’s failures of “use” in creating justice more enlightened by…
Evidence and liberty: The promise of experimental criminology
Evidence and liberty are two great ideas in British history. One consequence of both ideas is experimental criminology, which applies research designs developed in Britain to matters of liberty affecting the entire world. The promise of experimental criminology is to generate better evidence about how to increase liberty. The crucial challenge to experimental criminology is the means by which research results, even when accepted as true, may be t…
Three Models of Organizational Corruption in Agencies of Social Control
In this paper I examine the processes by which agencies of social control become organizationally corrupt, as one instance of the more general social problem of organizations adopting deviant goals. I define organizational corruption, and present three models of how it may develop: (1) the co-optation by social control agencies of the subjects of control; (2) the capture of social control agencies by external exploiters of the “power to regulate”…
Victim Evaluations of Face‐to‐Face Restorative Justice Conferences: A Quasi‐Experimental Analysis
One major goal of face‐to‐face restorative justice (RJ) is to help heal the psychological harm suffered by crime victims ( Braithwaite, 2002 ). Substantial evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) has shown that this can be accomplished ( Strang, 2002 ) and more trials are underway ( Sherman & Strang, 2004 ). These outcomes are even more clearly, if less rigorously, demonstrated through retrospective interviews of victims about their fee…
Attacking Crime: Police and Crime Control
Growing experimental evidence suggests police actions can reduce crime, increase it, or make no difference, depending on a wide range of conditions. Growing epidemiological evidence suggests police can focus their crime-control efforts much more sharply on high-risk places, times, offenders, and (to a lesser extent) victims. These twin findings suggest the value of a more intensive and sustained program of research and development for testing cur…
Perspectives on Police and Violence
Police and violence are central to our con ception of government, yet they form a troublesome paradox: in their efforts to stop violence, police must often be violent themselves. This paradox leads to the three related questions addressed in this volume. First, how can the police act more effectively and justly against violence in society? Second, how can we better understand and reduce the violence com mitted against police? Third, what accounts…
Selective Apprehension: A Police Strategy for Repeat Offenders
This study examines the effectiveness of the Repeat Offender Project (ROP), a specialized police unit in Washington, D.C. It documents how the ROP unit operated, what it cost, and how well it achieved its goal of “selecting, apprehending, and contributing to” the conviction of persons believed to be committing jive or more Part I offenses per week. A controlled experiment showed that the ROP substantially increased the likelihood of arrest for th…
Middle Management and Police Democratization: A Reply to John E. Angell
This article responds to John Angell's (1971) proposal to abolish police middle management. With use of the data from a seven‐city study of team policing (Sherman et al., 1973) and Tannenbaum's (1968) framework of control in organizations, the past obstructions and potential uses of middle management to police change are discussed. Rather than abolish or neutralize mid‐management, I propose to expand their support functions as a positive aid to c…
Experimental Ethnography: The Marriage of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
Experimental and ethnographic research methods are often described as mutually exclusive. This article suggests how they could be combined in the method of “experimental ethnography.” Building ethnographic methods into the separate branches of randomized controlled trials could substantially increase the range of conclusions that can be produced by experimental research designs, as well as by ethnographic methods. Experimental designs offer great…
Research and Policing: The Infrastructure and Political Economy of Federal Funding
Despite major progress in social science helping policeto prevent crime, federal funding for police research is atits lowest level in thirty-five years. Only a majorrestructuring of the political economy of criminology seemslikely to revive research with and for the police. Forabout $1 per American per year, federal funding for“Centers for Crime Prevention” could be established inall sixty-seven cities of more than 250,000 people and ineach of th…
Verdicts or Inventions: Interpreting Results from Randomized Controlled Experiments in Criminology
The social benefits of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) would be enhanced by general recognition of three problems of their interpretation and a redefinition of their mission in relation to program development and evaluation. One problem is that of "forest versus trees," or the sampling relationship between each test of a hypothesis and the conclusions drawn from all such tests taken together. A second problem is interpreting RCTs as testing t…
The Behavior of Law
An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children
Middle Management and Police Democratization: A Reply to John E. Angell
This article responds to John Angell's (1971) proposal to abolish police middle management. With use of the data from a seven‐city study of team policing (Sherman et al., 1973) and Tannenbaum's (1968) framework of control in organizations, the past obstructions and potential uses of middle management to police change are discussed. Rather than abolish or neutralize mid‐management, I propose to expand their support functions as a positive aid to c…
Policing America
The Community and the Police-Conflict or Cooperation
Fundamentals of Criminal Behavior and Correctional Systems
An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children
The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance.Ian Taylor , Paul Walton , Jock Young
Scandal and Reform: Controlling Police Corruption
The Behavior of Law
Faculty characteristics and course content in college programs for police officers
Shortchanging the Public
School environments as behavior settings
1979). School environments as behavior settings. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 18, The Complex Classrooms: A Research Focus, pp. 145-151
Causes of Police Behavior: The Current State of Quantitative Research
This paper is a first attempt to organize and codify the findings of quantitative research on four aspects of police behavior: detection, arrest, service, and violence. A framework of five explanatory approaches is used to organize the findings: individual characteristics of police officers; situational, organizational, and community characteristics; and legal variables. The findings generally show weak relationships between a wide range of the h…
Perspectives on Police and Violence
Police and violence are central to our con ception of government, yet they form a troublesome paradox: in their efforts to stop violence, police must often be violent themselves. This paradox leads to the three related questions addressed in this volume. First, how can the police act more effectively and justly against violence in society? Second, how can we better understand and reduce the violence com mitted against police? Third, what accounts…
Three Models of Organizational Corruption in Agencies of Social Control
In this paper I examine the processes by which agencies of social control become organizationally corrupt, as one instance of the more general social problem of organizations adopting deviant goals. I define organizational corruption, and present three models of how it may develop: (1) the co-optation by social control agencies of the subjects of control; (2) the capture of social control agencies by external exploiters of the “power to regulate”…
Scandal and Reform: Controlling Police Corruption
Higher education and police use of deadly force
Ethics in the Professions: Police: Should Police Target Repeat Offenders
Development of Children's perceptions of internal locus of control: A cross‐sectional and longitudinal analysis
Elementary school children between the ages of eight and thirteen were administered the Children's Nowicki/Strickland Locus of Control Scale annually for three years. As predicted, children's mean locus of control scores were found to be significantly different from one age group to the next (cross‐sectional analysis) as well as from one year to the next (longitudinal analysis). Older children had significantly more internal scores than did young…
The Specific Deterrent Effects of Arrest for Domestic Assault
The specific deterrence doctrine and labeling theory predict opposite effects of punishment on individual rates of deviance. The limited cross-sectional evidence available on the question is inconsistent, and experimental evidence has been lacking. The Police Foundation and the Minneapolis Police Department tested these hypotheses in a field experiment on domestic violence. Three police responses to simple assault were randomly assigned to legall…
Cooperative versus competitive educational psychology classrooms: A comparative study
Policing Communities: What Works
Communities vary widely in the ways in which police exercise discretion; in their resources; in their mixtures of public police, private police, and voluntary citizen policing; in the nature and severity of problems requiring policing; and in the physical geography that shapes options for policing. Yet communities vary relatively little in basic police strategy. Residential neighborhoods in American metropolitan areas are policed primarily by off…
Selective Apprehension: A Police Strategy for Repeat Offenders
This study examines the effectiveness of the Repeat Offender Project (ROP), a specialized police unit in Washington, D.C. It documents how the ROP unit operated, what it cost, and how well it achieved its goal of “selecting, apprehending, and contributing to” the conviction of persons believed to be committing jive or more Part I offenses per week. A controlled experiment showed that the ROP substantially increased the likelihood of arrest for th…
Reinventing Probable Cause: Target Selection in Proactive Investigations
Humor and social distance in elementary school children
Armed Robbery: Cops, Robbers, and Victims
Political science (51 works) · Psychology (48 works) · Criminology (47 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (41 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Law (33 works) · Law (26 works) · Policing Practices and Perceptions (19 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (16 works)