The Society of Evidence-Based Policing: Nurturing the Idea That Every Officer Can Test What Works

The strongest case for the Society of Evidence-Based Policing is institutional rather than heroic: it gives practitioners somewhere to ask what the evidence says, learn how to test a problem and communicate what they find. That is a reasonable interpretation of the Society’s objects and current offer. It is not, however, evidence that the SEBP itself has caused a measurable change in British police culture. The article should keep those two claims separate.

What it is

The SEBP’s start date is not described consistently by its own historical sources. The original charity’s governing document records a constitution adopted on 1 November 2010, and CEBCP’s 2014 profile identifies Alex Murray as founder and chair. The current SEBP site describes the organisation as founded in 2012. The present organisation is a charitable incorporated organisation registered in November 2025. Current SEBP material identifies related societies in Australia and New Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States, which formed a global coalition in 2024.

Its charitable objects and current mission centre on the use, production and communication of research evidence in policing. Those functions are directly documented. The further claim made here — that the Society is most useful as practitioner infrastructure — is the author’s analysis of how those functions fit together. The same last-mile problem, moving evidence from journals into briefing rooms, is the specialism of Susanne Knabe-Nicol’s research-translation work.

The gap: from senior leaders to the constable with an idea

Evidence-based policing had, by 2010, plenty of academic champions. What it did not have was a mechanism to reach the officer on the ground — the inspector who suspected that the way the shift was allocated was producing worse outcomes than the data would suggest, the detective who had noticed a pattern in the crimes her team were not solving, the PCSO who wondered whether the walk route that had been used for years was actually reaching the people it was supposed to reach.

Those people did not need a journal article. They needed permission to act on the question they already had, the language to frame it, someone to point them at existing evidence and — crucially — someone to support them if they wanted to find out for themselves.

That is the gap the SEBP is most usefully understood as filling. It is not primarily a publishing house or a lobbying body. It is a community of practice built around the idea that evidence-based policing belongs to every officer, not just the ones with PhDs.

Not every idea needs a randomised controlled trial

This is the part of the SEBP’s mission that most deserves saying plainly, because the alternative reading does real damage: the belief that “evidence-based” means “you need an RCT”, which in practice means “you need a university, a budget and three years”. That reading turns evidence-based policing from a habit of mind into a credential held by a small elite.

The SEBP’s current definition does not equate evidence-based policing with running an RCT. It describes the practice as using the best available research evidence to guide and evaluate decisions, alongside professional judgement and local context, and explicitly recognises that research can be incomplete, contested or absent. Different questions require different methods: randomisation can be powerful for estimating causal effects, while descriptive force data, qualitative evidence and systematic reviews answer different questions. The discipline lies in matching the claim to what the method can establish.

The shift from “nothing to evidence” is bigger than the shift from “good study to RCT.” The SEBP’s potential is greatest, and its need is greatest, at the first step — normalising the habit of looking before doing and writing down what you found.

Mentorship, leadership and the support to test an idea

A curious officer with a hypothesis and no institutional support will usually find that the hypothesis dies. The hypothesis needs time that operational pressures do not naturally create. It needs someone who has done it before to help translate a felt sense that something works — or doesn’t — into a question precise enough to answer. It needs a supervisor who treats the investigation as legitimate professional development rather than an indulgence.

The SEBP’s conference, its CrimRxiv publishing collection and its informal networks are the infrastructure that makes this support available to practitioners who would otherwise have no access to it. The 2024 Global Societies of Evidence-Based Policing Conference at Cambridge put serving officers in rooms with researchers from several countries, talking in shared language about what works. That is a genuinely unusual resource for a detective constable who has never published anything and does not plan to, but wants to understand whether their force’s knife crime tactic has any evidence behind it.

The leadership dimension matters too. Forces that have embedded EBP most deeply have leaders who created the conditions: time, legitimacy and a clear message that testing and reporting back was part of the job, not a distraction from it. It is the same enabling role Alex Murray played in founding the Society in the first place — a senior officer using his standing to make the question legitimate. The SEBP is best understood as the vehicle that can carry that message to forces whose leaders have not yet sent it.

Write it up. Share it.

There is a failure mode in policing that evidence-based practice should in principle defeat, but in practice often perpetuates: the pilot that works, that everyone on the team knows works, that then quietly disappears when the team moves on or the sergeant who drove it is promoted. The knowledge never leaves the room it was produced in.

The obligation to write findings up and share them is not bureaucracy. It is the difference between individual learning and organisational learning — and organisational learning is what changes cultures rather than projects. The SEBP’s publishing platform, its conference programme and its connections to Police Science Dr and the wider practitioner-research community exist precisely to close this loop. A pilot that produced interesting results and then went into a drawer served the people involved; a pilot whose findings reached officers in other forces served the profession.

This is also where the SEBP’s role as a celebrant matters. Sharing negative results — tactics that did not work, approaches that did not replicate — is as professionally valuable as sharing successes, and considerably rarer. Creating cultural space in which reporting “we tried this and it did not improve outcomes” is treated as useful and creditable rather than as failure is one of the harder and more important things the Society can do.

What it is and what it offers

Practically, the SEBP’s offer is simple:

• Free membership — the Society’s current terms say membership is free to eligible individuals, and its join page says it is open beyond serving police personnel.
• A member resource hub — the current join page lists training, event recordings and practical tools.
• Conference and event access — members receive discounted annual-conference rates and advance notice of events.
• A monthly newsletter — a regular route for communicating research, case studies and evidence-based practice.

The wider network may also create informal mentorship and publishing opportunities, but those are better described as features of a professional community than as guaranteed membership services.

Where the limits are

The SEBP does not run forces or set operational policy. Its influence depends on practitioners choosing to engage and on police organisations giving them time and permission to do so. Operational pressure, access to data, research skills and the time needed for evaluation are structural constraints that a membership organisation cannot remove on its own.

The more defensible claim is therefore about opportunity rather than measured cultural effect. SEBP provides an independent practitioner-facing route into evidence, training, events and an international network. Whether that changes decisions inside a particular force is an empirical question and should be evaluated as such.

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Sources and further reading

• Society of Evidence-Based Policing, Our mission, What is EBP?, Join and Terms & Conditions.
• Charity Commission for England and Wales, current Society of Evidence Based Policing register entry and original charity governing document.
• Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, Hall of Fame: Alex Murray, George Mason University.
• ANZSEBP, Global Collaboration: Societies of Evidence Based Policing.
• What Works Centre for Crime Reduction, whatworks.college.police.uk.
• Society of Evidence Based Policing, collection on CrimRxiv.
• Police Science Dr, policesciencedr.com — practitioner-facing research summaries and digests.