Police create Evidence-Based Policing team to fight crime with data and research

Friday, 26 April 2019

A Wellington-based team of people are fighting crime – but not in the traditional way you might think.

Instead of hitting the streets looking for guns and gangs, scientists and academics are pouring over research and data.

'You could call it fighting crime with academia,' head of the group Superintendent Bruce O'Brien said.

The Evidence-Based Policing (EBP) team – the first of its kind in the world – was created at the end of last year.

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The EBP is the brainchild of Police Commissioner Mike Bush, and it aims to use statistical analysis of crime data to inform police practice better.

'EBP is fundamentally about targeting problems, testing solutions in live environments and tracking results to ensure the best outcomes for our communities,' O'Brien said.

EBP was a term first coined by American criminologist Lawrence Sherman in the late 1990s and has been a developing field of research ever since.

New Zealand police are the first to create a centre solely dedicated to EBP research projects, and distributing those findings to the wider police force, O'Brien said.

'It is a completely unique model; there is nothing like it anywhere in the world at the moment.'

'A lot of police forces have done research into crime, with the new centre we have the ability to operationalise that research.'

The type of research the team will conduct will be varied but could include looking at homicide trends, how to better police domestic violence or how long police should remain at a crime scene.

It will mean scientists will be working on the streets with police to collect data.

'It allows us to be extremely agile and conduct short, medium and long term research and experiments, depending on the issue that we are dealing with.

'This gives us confidence that solutions to problems can be found quickly, but also allows for longer-term research to be conducted.'

O'Brien, who has worked for the police for almost twenty years, was inspired to research crime reduction after seeing the impact of burglaries in Manukau, Auckland.

He won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge, where he completed a masters degree in 2018.

He now leads the team, which includes researchers, data scientists, design experts and works collaboratively with academic advisors from the University of Waikato.

The centre is also partnered with the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) and Vodafone to conduct the work. 

O'Brien hopes the centre will be able to produce world-class research within the next year. 

'I want to see New Zealand police recognised for contributing to the body of science and criminology research, nationally and internationally.

'Our objective is to have numerous field experiments up and running across New Zealand over the next twelve months.' 

Ultimately, O'Brien hopes the centre will lead the way for better policing in communities across the country. 

'We are sending people out into our communities every day. We need confidence the work they are doing actually works.'