Police and Crime Control

This article examines the growing gap between evidence and practice in democratic policing, primarily in the English-speaking nations (especially the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia). Section I describes the framework for evidence-based knowledge about policing for crime control, with recent advances in some of the tools for generating such knowledge. Section II describes our knowledge about the effectiveness of two very different approaches to policing: the traditional "standard model," and the newly emergent "customized policing" model. Section III addresses two specific issues in the future of policing: what can be done to close the gap between research evidence and police practice, and how can that strategy be accomplished?.