Susanne Knabe-Nicol and the Last Mile of Evidence-Based Policing

Evidence-based policing has a problem its founders rarely dwell on: most of the evidence never reaches the people who are supposed to use it. The studies get done and the papers get published, and then they sit behind journal paywalls, written in a language — regression tables, confidence intervals, effect sizes — that a busy response officer has neither the time nor the training to decode. Lawrence Sherman built the science; Alex Murray built the institutions. But a randomised controlled trial is only as useful as the number of officers who ever hear about it. Dr Susanne Knabe-Nicol has spent the better part of a decade on that last problem: not producing the evidence, but carrying it the final mile, from the journal to the frontline.

She is better known by the name she gives the work — the Police Science Dr — and her website is one of the most genuinely useful and interesting things in British policing right now: a place where a busy officer (like myself!) can wander in between jobs and come out twenty minutes later knowing what the research actually says.

From PCSO to PhD

What makes Knabe-Nicol unusual is that she has stood on both sides of the gap she now works to close. She began at the bottom of the service, as a uniformed Police Community Support Officer in London, and went on to spend more than ten years in policing in the roles that sit between operations and analysis: regional intelligence analyst, major crime researcher, custody investigator, and a run of improvement and evaluation posts. This is the unglamorous machinery of a modern force — the work of turning data into decisions — and she did it for long enough to know exactly how little of the academic literature ever makes it onto an officer’s desk.

The academic track ran alongside, and then ahead. She took a BSc in Psychology at the University of East London, and — tellingly, given what came later — an MSc in Interactive Multimedia at the University of Westminster, before an MSc and then a PhD in Investigative Psychology at the University of Liverpool, the home of that discipline in Britain. Her published work is in the investigative tradition: chapters on geographic profiling and on behavioural investigative advice, both in Professor Laurence Alison’s Professionalizing Offender Profiling; a contributor to Blackstone’s Handbook for Policing Students; and a peer-reviewed paper on detective skills development published in Cogent Social Sciences in 2024. Today she lectures in Criminology, Policing and Investigations at Middlesex University, where she leads the BSc Criminology with Policing & Investigations programme.

The combination is the point. Officers trust her because she has done the job; academics trust her because she has the doctorate. Very few people in British policing can credibly claim both, and that dual standing is the foundation everything else rests on.

The research nobody reads

The central, awkward truth of evidence-based policing is that producing more evidence does not, on its own, change anything. A good study, published in a good journal, is typically read by a few dozen other academics and almost no practitioners. The barriers are stacked: the papers are paywalled, so officers cannot get to them; they are written for peer reviewers, so officers cannot easily read them; and they are long, so officers — working shifts, carrying a queue of jobs — cannot find the time even when they want to. The knowledge exists. The delivery system does not.

Knabe-Nicol’s insight was to treat that as the real bottleneck. The frontline does not need to be lectured about the value of research; it needs research in a form that fits a fifteen-minute gap between jobs. An officer who would never download a thirty-page article will happily watch a short video or read a summary that tells them what the article found and what to do about it. So she started turning the articles into videos.

What Police Science Dr actually does

Police Science Dr — tagline, where police research meets police practice — is the platform she built to do this at scale. It is hard to overstate how well it does the job: the site is generous, browsable and genuinely interesting even when you arrive with no particular study in mind. It turns research into media the frontline can actually consume:

• Short, research-based videos that summarise a study or a topic in plain English, with the practical “so what” made explicit.
• The Police Science Dr Podcast, subtitled making research accessible to the police practitioner — interviews and explainers with the researchers themselves.
• Downloadable transcripts that come with full references, key learning points and timestamps, so a viewer can cite the source, log it as continuing professional development, and go back to the original if they want the detail.
• The Police Science Dr Academy, a growing set of structured, police-relevant courses.

The stated ambition is larger than any one video: a single global platform where researchers and practitioners meet, so that good evidence has somewhere to land and officers have somewhere to look. It is, in effect, the missing distribution layer for everything Sherman and Murray spent their careers producing.

Why it helps

The value is easiest to see if you list the three things that normally stop an officer using research, because the site is built to remove each one. Access: the studies are paywalled, so she reads them and reports back. Time: the studies are long, so she compresses them into minutes. Translation: the studies are technical, so she renders the method and the finding in language a non-specialist can act on. None of this dilutes the evidence — the references travel with it — but it changes who can reach it.

That matters more now than it once did. British policing is part-way through making itself a graduate profession, with a heavier emphasis on continuing development and on practice that can be justified by evidence rather than habit. A free, credible, plain-English feed of “here is what the research says, and here is what it means for your shift” is exactly the infrastructure that ambition requires, and almost nobody else is building it.

Why she belongs in this series

The story of evidence-based policing is usually told through two kinds of people: the ones who generate the evidence, like Sherman, and the ones who build the institutions to demand it, like Murray. Knabe-Nicol represents a third role that gets far less attention and is no less essential — the translator, the person who does the unshowy work of knowledge mobilisation, of getting findings out of the academy and into the hands that can use them. She is also a model of the “pracademic,” the practitioner-academic that the field increasingly depends on to bridge two worlds that do not naturally talk to each other.

If Sherman’s claim was that policing should be tested like medicine, the unglamorous corollary is that medicine only helps the patient if the doctor has read the journal. Knabe-Nicol’s wager is that the fastest way to improve practice is not another study but a better delivery system for the studies we already have. That is why the Police Science Dr matters, and why, in a series about the people who shaped evidence-based policing, the translator earns her place beside the experimenters.

Her work lives at policesciencedr.com — and if you take one practical thing from this profile, make it a visit. It is the rare policing website that repays browsing: useful when you need an answer, interesting when you don’t, and free either way. It has earned a permanent place in this site’s further reading list.