Section · 7 articles
Profiles of the people whose ideas and work have shaped modern policing — the researchers, reformers and practitioners worth knowing.
Alex Murray spent a career investigating murders and running counter-terrorism operations, then built the institution that asked British policing a harder question: does any of this actually work? A profile of the founder of the Society of Evidence-Based Policing.
A former Home Office crime analyst who became one of British policing's most practically useful academics: Professor Jason Roach gave the service self-selection policing, a psychologist's eye for offender decision-making, and a career-long insistence that research should help the officer on shift. A profile.
The SEBP's real value isn't lobbying or publishing — it's lowering the bar so that any officer with a good idea can test it, get support to do so properly, and share what they find. Here is what it is, what it actually does, and why that matters.
A profile of Dr Susanne Knabe-Nicol — the 'Police Science Dr' — who left a decade inside policing to fix the problem that holds evidence-based practice back: the research that could change how officers work, but that almost no officer knows exists
A London beat officer turned Philadelphia professor, Jerry Ratcliffe spent a career arguing that policing should aim its scarce resources at the few places, times and people that produce most of the harm — and then test whether it worked. A profile of the criminologist behind intelligence-led policing and the Reducing Crime podcast.
In 1981 Lawrence Sherman ran a domestic violence call as a scientific experiment, and policing was never quite the same. A profile of the American criminologist who argued that the police should be tested like medicine — and who taught the officers, Alex Murray among them, who carried the idea into British policing.
In 1829 a Home Secretary persuaded a suspicious country to accept the first modern police force — unarmed, in plain blue, and answerable to the public rather than the Crown. A profile of Sir Robert Peel and the idea that still underwrites British policing: that the police are only ever the public in uniform.
