Alex Murray and the Society That Asked Policing to Prove What Works

For most of its history, policing has rarely tested whether what it does actually works. Officers patrolled because patrolling felt like policing, responded fast because responding fast felt urgent, and investigated after the fact because that was the job. Whether any of it reduced crime was a question almost nobody asked, and fewer still tried to answer with anything resembling a controlled experiment. Alex Murray is the British officer who decided that was no longer good enough, and who built the institution to change it.

That institution is the Society of Evidence-Based Policing, which Murray founded in 2010. It was the first organisation of its kind anywhere in the world. What follows is the story of the man behind it: a homicide detective and counter-terrorism commander who came to believe that the craft of policing had to be married to the scientific method, and who has spent fifteen years making that argument from inside the service rather than from a university common room.

From army child to homicide detective

Murray grew up around the world as the child of an army family, an upbringing that tends to produce either restlessness or adaptability, and in his case seems to have produced both. He read for a degree in criminology and geography at the University of Birmingham, graduating in 1996, and then joined West Midlands Police.

The early career was conventional in the best sense. He worked CID and uniform across Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, became a senior investigating officer running murder inquiries, and moved into counter-terrorism. He qualified as a commander for specialist firearms operations, public order and counter-terrorism, the kind of roles where decisions are made fast and the cost of getting them wrong is measured in lives. None of this is the biography you would expect from someone who would go on to be policing’s most prominent advocate for randomised controlled trials. That is rather the point. Murray’s case for evidence has always carried more weight precisely because he made it as an operational officer, not as an academic looking in.

Cambridge, and the question that would not go away

The turn came at Cambridge. In 2008 Murray completed a Master’s degree at the University’s Institute of Criminology, on the Police Executive Programme run by Professor Lawrence Sherman, the American criminologist who more or less invented the modern field of evidence-based policing. His thesis examined police legitimacy within Muslim communities, work he later developed into a peer-reviewed paper, Evidence-Based Policing of U.K. Muslim Communities, co-authored with Katrin Mueller-Johnson and Sherman and published in the International Criminal Justice Review in 2015.

“The basic premise of evidence-based practice is that we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts.” — Lawrence Sherman, Ideas in American Policing, 1998

Sherman’s argument, which Murray absorbed and then carried back into operational policing, is deceptively simple. For decades policing had run on what Sherman called the “three Rs”: random patrol, rapid response and reactive investigation. None of the three had much evidence behind it. Sherman proposed replacing them with what he later branded the “Triple-T” — targeting the small number of places, times and people that produce most harm; testing what works through controlled experiments; and tracking whether the effect holds. The intellectual framework was Sherman’s. What British policing lacked was anyone to build the machinery that would put it into practice. Murray decided to be that person.

Founding the Society

In 2010 Murray and a small group of like-minded officers founded the Society of Evidence-Based Policing. Sherman was elected its honorary president; Murray served as its founding chair. The aim, then as now, was to help officers and staff use, produce and communicate the best available evidence about what actually reduces crime and harm.

What is striking, looking back, is how unfashionable this was at the time. And what made the difference was not only the argument but the man making it. Murray has a quality rare in senior officers: a genuine willingness to be challenged, and an ease with people at every level of the service. Officers who encountered him in this period describe someone who would stay behind after a conference session to talk with a constable as readily as a chief, listening with evident interest rather than performing patience. He built the Society the same way he had built investigations: by getting people invested in the outcome, not by telling them what to think. The prevailing culture treated experience as the only credential that mattered, and academic research as something done to the police rather than with them. Surveys of officers in this period found that the overwhelming majority had never spoken to a university researcher, and that many line managers regarded engagement with research as a poor use of time. Into that culture Murray proposed something close to heresy: that an officer’s instinct, however hard-won, was a hypothesis to be tested rather than a fact to be acted on.

He has been candid about what that means in practice, including the discomfort of it. “Some things will work, some will backfire and some are simply ineffective,” he has said of evidence-based practice. “Failure is a good thing — including trying to evaluate something but seeing that you can’t.” That is not the language of a service that prizes never being wrong. It is the language of a scientist, and Murray’s insistence that policing adopt it is the through-line of his whole public career. For him the case rests on something more than efficiency. “The heart of evidence-based policing is about integrity,” he has put it: a claim that doing what works, and being willing to find out that you were not, is finally a question of being straight with the public you serve.

“The core of evidence-based policing is to move away from ideology and politics and focus solely on what is proven to be effective.” — Alex Murray

The Society did not stay small. It grew into a registered charity with thousands of members, and it stopped being uniquely British. Sister organisations now operate in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, most of them modelled on the body Murray started. The annual Cambridge conference on evidence-based policing, where Murray has briefed everyone from the Home Secretary to the Indian National Police Academy at Hyderabad, has become the field’s main gathering. The Society has not been above a stunt to make the point: it once ran a 24-hour evidence-based policing conference, a relay of talks handed around the globe through every time zone so an officer anywhere could always find a session running — research as something the police do together, rather than something done to them. In 2013 he was elected to the Hall of Fame of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University in Virginia, the discipline’s closest thing to formal recognition. Sherman, not a man given to loose praise, has described him as a “tireless advocate of evidence-based policing”.

What it looked like on the ground

The risk with a figure like Murray is that the advocacy floats free of practice. It did not. In partnership with Cambridge he ran a randomised controlled trial in Birmingham that set up dedicated teams to manage repeat victims of anti-social behaviour, the sort of low-level but relentless harm that wears communities down and that traditional policing has always struggled to take seriously. The point of doing it as a trial, rather than simply rolling it out because it sounded sensible, was to find out whether it worked rather than to assume it. That is the discipline Murray has spent his career trying to make ordinary.

He carried the same instinct upward as he was promoted. He served three years as temporary Assistant Chief Constable for crime in the West Midlands, with responsibility for investigations, forensics, criminal justice and intelligence. He moved to the Metropolitan Police as a Commander, leading specialist crime teams working on cyber, human trafficking, child abuse and economic crime, and later took the Met’s brief for serious violence. He spent time attached to the Home Office. In each role the question he brought to the table was the same one he had brought back from Cambridge: how do we know this works, and how would we find out if it did not?

The AI lead, and the National Crime Agency

By the 2020s Murray had risen to temporary Chief Constable of West Mercia Police. Then, in March 2024, the National Police Chiefs’ Council appointed him to a job that had never existed before: the first national policing lead for artificial intelligence. The logic was not hard to follow. A service learning to ask “does this work?” needed someone to ask it of the most consequential new technology in a generation, and Murray’s whole record was that question made flesh.

He set out three priorities for the role — improving productivity, making policing more effective at cutting crime, and tackling the criminal use of AI — and he has been notably plain about the politics of it. “Our use of AI is not about government trying to make us do things,” he told Policing Insight. “It’s about protecting people.” The framing is characteristic: pragmatic, public-facing, suspicious of technology adopted for its own sake rather than because it demonstrably helps.

Later in 2024 Murray left West Mercia to become Director of Threat Leadership at the National Crime Agency, the body that leads Britain’s response to serious and organised crime. And in June 2026 the arc closed on itself: he was named interim director of PoliceAI, the new £75m national centre, hosted by the College of Policing, charged with testing, commissioning and governing AI across all 43 forces. The man who spent fifteen years asking policing to prove what works now runs the body that has to ask it of the most consequential technology to reach the service in a generation. He had been awarded the OBE in 2017, by then already a decade into the work for which he is best known.

The influence, in proportion

It would be easy to overclaim here, and the subject of this profile would be the first to object. Murray did not invent evidence-based policing; Sherman and a generation of experimental criminologists did. The Society he founded does not run British forces, and plenty of policing still proceeds on hunch and habit, as anyone who has read an inspectorate report knows. The culture he set out to change in 2010 has shifted, but it has not been remade.

What can be said is narrower and more durable. Before 2010 there was no organised body in Britain through which a serving officer could find out what the research actually said, argue about it with peers, and take it back to the front line. After 2010 there was, and it spread across the English-speaking world and beyond. The College of Policing’s What Works Centre for Crime Reduction, the growing use of harm-weighted targeting, the slow normalisation of trials and evaluation inside forces — none of these is solely Murray’s doing, but all of them grew in soil he helped turn over. He built the place where the argument could happen, and then spent fifteen years making sure it kept happening.

That is the quieter kind of influence, and the more lasting. The detective who once asked who committed the crime ended up asking a harder question of his own profession, and refusing to let it look away from the answer.

---

Sources and further reading

• Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, Hall of Fame: Alex Murray, George Mason University.
• Society of Evidence-Based Policing, About us and Our people.
• Alex Murray, Katrin Mueller-Johnson and Lawrence W. Sherman, “Evidence-Based Policing of U.K. Muslim Communities”, International Criminal Justice Review, 2015.
• The Behavioural Insights Team, “Innovation in Policing: a guest blog from Chief Superintendent Alex Murray”.
• Police Professional, “Global first as leading police thinkers gather for 24-hour evidence-based policing conference”.
• Police Science Dr, Alex Murray on Evidence-Based Policing.
• The Police Foundation, Evidence-based policing: leadership insights.
• Regional Organised Crime Unit, “NPCC welcomes first-ever lead for Artificial Intelligence”, March 2024.
• Policing Insight, “Alex Murray: ‘Our use of AI is not about government trying to make us do things — it’s about protecting people’”.
• Wikipedia, Evidence-based policing and Lawrence W. Sherman.