Founding CEO

Professor Lawrence W. Sheman

The Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing was founded in 2013 by Cambridge University Criminology Professor Lawrence W. Sherman, who now serves as Chief Scientific Officer of London’s Metropolitan Police Service

Professor Sherman is widely credited as the founder of evidenced-based policing, an idea which he first proposed in his 1998 Police Foundation/National Policing Institute lecture in Washington DC.

Professor Sherman was ranked by academicinfluence.com as the most influential criminologist in the world 2010-2020.

Since 2017 he has served as Editor-in-Chief of the open-access Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing. He has also been elected President of the American Society of Criminology (2001-2), the Academy of Experimental Criminology (1998-200), as well as Honorary President of the Society of Evidence-Based Policing since 2010.

Sherman’s research discoveries have included the first demonstration that most crime is concentrated in a small fraction of any city, which he labelled ‘’hot spots.’’ With David Weisburd, he led the first ‘’hot spots policing’’ experiment showing that increased police patrols drove down crime in hot spots. With Peter Neyroud he developed the Cambridge Crime Harm Index, a simple means for weighting the relative severity of each category of crime based on sentencing guidelines.

With Heather Strang he led 12 experiments in restorative justice, which showed substantial benefits for victims and reduced severity of repeat offending by even serious offenders. With Richard Berk he led the first test of arrest for minor domestic assaults, and with Janell Schmidt and others he showed that arrest consistently backfired among unemployed suspects. In 2013 he developed the core conceptual framework of evidence-based policing as three kinds of decisions: targeting, testing and tracking.

Sherman’s work as a police educator has reached thousands of police in the UK and abroad. For fifteen years he led the Cambridge Police Executive Programme, a part-time master’s degree course enrolling over 800 senior police leaders, many of whom went on to become Chief Constables or chief officers. His training videos have reached thousands of police officers of all ranks, both in person and online. His work has been recognized by honorary doctorates or medals from five universities, and a 2016 Knighthood from the King of Sweden.

While is current work at New Scotland Yard precludes his involvement in the operation of the Cambridge Centre, his life’s work in evidence-based policing is the intellectual foundation for all of the Centre’s training, consultancy and research.