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

The most important thing the Society of Evidence-Based Policing does is not what appears in its mission statement — it is making ordinary officers feel entitled to ask whether what they are doing actually works. That might sound like a modest ambition. In the culture of British policing for most of its history, it was genuinely radical. Fifteen years on, the SEBP has not solved the problem. But it has built the infrastructure that makes solving it possible — and the infrastructure is more interesting than it first appears.

What it is

The SEBP was founded in 2010 by Alex Murray — a Detective Superintendent, not an academic — alongside a group of like-minded practitioners frustrated that the research existed but the culture to use it did not. Lawrence Sherman, whose Cambridge programme had built the intellectual case, became honorary president. It is now a registered charity, run by serving and former officers alongside academics, and it operates the first and most-copied model of its kind: sister societies now run in Australia and New Zealand, Canada, the US and the Netherlands, most of them modelled directly on the UK original.

Its stated aims are use, produce and communicate evidence — a three-word supply chain for knowledge. Those three verbs are fine as far as they go. What they don’t quite capture is the specific gap the SEBP was built for.

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 evidence-based policing movement’s own framework does not require that. RCTs occupy the top of the evidence hierarchy because they are the most reliable tool for establishing whether something causes an outcome. But a systematic review of existing literature that finds your force’s approach is at odds with the best current evidence is also evidence-based policing. A force reviewing its own custody data to see whether a recent procedural change made any difference is being more evidence-based than it was before. A team that reads the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction summaries before trialling a new tactic and then records what happened is doing something genuinely valuable — even if the only output is a two-page note at the next team meeting.

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 honest 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, open to anyone — officers, researchers, policymakers, civilians with an interest. No membership fee, no seniority requirement.
• The annual conference and global events — the field’s main practitioner gathering, where a constable and a Cambridge professor can present on the same afternoon.
• A publishing route via CrimRxiv that is open-access, practitioner-legible and does not require affiliation with a university to submit.
• Informal mentorship through the network — people who have navigated the question of how to run a study inside a force, who have written up results, who know where to find existing evidence, and who are generally willing to help.

Where the honest limits are

The SEBP is a small charity and its influence is entirely soft. It does not run forces, set policy or compel any officer to read anything. Its reach depends on whether force culture permits or encourages engagement — and many forces still do not. The 24-month wait between a good practitioner idea and any kind of tested finding, inside the demands of operational policing, is a structural problem the Society cannot solve alone.

What it can do is keep the door open and put the right people on either side of it. That has, over fifteen years, turned out to be more than nothing. It has contributed to a generation of British police officers for whom the question “what does the evidence say?” is at least a recognisable one — and for the most engaged, a professional habit. The goal now should be driving that habit deeper, spreading it wider, and making sure the layer of officers doing the asking includes the frontline as well as the leadership tier.

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Sources and further reading

• Society of Evidence-Based Policing, About us, Our mission and Join the SEBP.
• Charity Commission for England and Wales, Society of Evidence Based Policing — register entry.
• Wikipedia, Evidence-based policing — founding and early membership figures.
• 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.