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Lawrence W. Sherman (born Schenectady, NY, 25 October, 1949) is an academic criminologist. In 2006, he was elected Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, where he was appointed founding director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology in 2008. He is also the director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. Sherman’s primary research interests include crime prevention, evidence based policy, restorative justice, police practices and experimental criminology.

Research

Sherman is a prolific writer and researcher who, by 2007, had published 9 books and over 100 book chapters and journal articles on a wide variety of topics. He is best known as an experimental criminologist. His use of randomized controlled experiments to study deterrence and crime prevention has led him to examine such wide-ranging issues as domestic violence, police crackdowns and saturation patrol, gun violence and [crime] , crack houses, and reintegrative shaming. He has collaborated with over 30 police and justice agencies around the world. Sherman’s ground-breaking research on domestic violence began in the 1980s with the highly influential Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment. His early experimental research into the influence of arrest on recidivism in spouse abuse led to changes in police department policies and procedures nationwide, encouraged state legislatures to modify state statutes to allow for misdemeanor arrest, and eventually resulted in five federally-funded replications, one of which he conducted. In the late 1980s, Sherman’s experimental research into the effect of directed police patrol in high crime locations led to his development of the concept of “hot spots.” In the early 1990s, Sherman’s Kansas City Gun Experiment studied the effect of concentrated police patrol on gun crime and violence and that directed police patrol in gun crime “hot spots” led to an increase in seizures of illegally carried guns and a decrease in gun crimes.

Since 1995, Sherman has been co directing a program of prospective longitudinal experiments in restorative justice involving approximately 2,500 offenders and 2,000 crime victims. Recently, he has been working on the development of new tools for predicting murder among offenders on probation and parole in Philadelphia, as well as randomized trials of intensive services among highest risk offenders.

In addition to his experimental research, Sherman has published articles and book chapters on a wide variety of topics, including police corruption, police education, police discretion, police crackdowns, restorative justice, investigations, police use of force, and fear reduction. In 1997, Sherman led a team of University of Maryland criminologists in producing Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising, a Congressionally-mandated evaluation of over 500 state and local crime prevention programs.

His major discoveries can be summarized as follows:

• In 1980 he discovered that restricting police powers to shoot people was not followed by any increases in crime, or in violence against police officers; this evidence was later cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its decision to restrict police powers to kill across the US.
• In 1987 he discovered that over half of all reported crime and disorder occurred at just 3% of the property addresses in a major city, a finding that has since been consistently replicated in other cities. He showed that that exactly where and when crime will occur is far more predictable than anyone had previously thought, thus laying the theoretical and empirical basis for what is now called “hot spots policing,” now widely practiced from New York to Sydney.
• In 1995 he discovered that homicides, shootings and other gun crimes could be reduced by intensified but lawful use of police stop and search powers in hot spots of gun crime, a finding that has now been replicated in six out of six independent re-tests by other scholars. This research helped prompt a major change in police practice in the US that was followed by a substantial reduction in the US homicide rate.
• In 1992 he discovered that arrest has contradictory effects on different kinds of domestic violence offenders, causing less violence among employed men but doubling the frequency of violence among men without jobs. This finding has also been replicated by independent scientists, and is now the basis for some women’s advocates to recommend abandoning mandatory arrest policies for non-injurious domestic assault.
• In 1995, with his colleague David Weisburd, he demonstrated that doubling or tripling the frequency of police patrols in crime hot spots could reduce street crime by two-thirds. This discovery has been replicated by other scholars as well.
• In 2000, with his colleague Heather Strang, he discovered that restorative justice conferences between violent offenders and their victims could reduce repeat offending by half.
• In 2006, with his colleagues Strang, Barnes and Woods, he showed that restorative justice also caused a 400% increase in criminal offending among Aboriginals, and that restorative justice must seen as a powerful and potentially dangerous intervention.
• In 2008, Sherman discovered with Strang that nine ten out of ten of the restorative justice experiments they designed with victims present substantially reduced the overall two-year frequency of repeat convictions or arrests, across a wide range of offence types, offenders, and points in the criminal justice system. This included seven that were independently assessed by Professor Joanna Shapland of Sheffield University.

Research on the prestige of scholars in criminology and criminal justice has listed Sherman as one of the most highly-cited, and thus arguably one of the most influential, scholars in the field.

Evidence-Based Policing

In a 1998 Police Foundation lecture, Sherman sketched out the concept of “evidence-based policing,” modeled on the ideas of evidence-based medicine. His core idea was that police practice can be made far more effective if all of its complex but repeated elements were tested by repeated controlled field experiments. In February 2000, Sherman co-founded the Campbell Collaboration's Crime and Justice Group, which has pursued the synthesis of research evidence on the effectiveness of policing and other crime prevention practices. Since then, the FBI Academy has offered a course on evidence-based policing, and it has become the subject of wide debate and commentary in police practice and research journals.

In 2008, Sherman made evidence-based policing (EBP) the core of the Police Executive Programme at Cambridge University, a part-time course of study for senior police leaders from around the world to earn a Diploma or Master’s in applied criminology. In that year, the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) funded the first international conference on EBP, which was attended by police executives from Asia, Australia, Europe and the US.

Education

Sherman graduated magna cum laude from Denison University in 1970, with a B.A. in political science. He received an M.A. in social science from the University of Chicago in 1970 and earned a Diploma in Criminology from Cambridge University in 1973. In 1976, Sherman received his Ph.D.in sociology from Yale University.

Academia

From 1999 to 2007, Sherman was Greenfield Professor of Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Sociology. Under his leadership, Pennsylvania became the first Ivy League University to establish a Ph.D. in criminology as a separate field; Sherman was appointed the University’s first Professor of Criminology in 2003. He served as Chair of the University’s Department of Criminology from 2003 to 2007 and was the Director of the Fels Institute of Government from 1999 to 2005.

Prior to his appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge, Sherman was a member of the faculty of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1982 to 1999. He served as Chair from 1995 to 1999 and in 1998 was named a Distinguished University Professor. In 1987, he was the Seth Boyden Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Criminal Justice and from 1994 to 2005 he also served as Adjunct Professor of Law at the Australian National University’s Research School of Social Science. From 1976 to 1980 he was on the faculty of the University at Albany’s School of Criminal Justice.

Sherman has also held a number of research posts, in addition to his academic duties. Currently, he is the co-director of the Justice Research Consortium in the United Kingdom, a position he has held since 2001. From 1995 to 2000, Sherman was the Scientific Director of RISE, a research institute sponsored by the Australian Federal Police. From 1985 to 1995 he served as president of the Crime Control Institute, and from 1979 to 1985 he was the Director of Research at the Washington-D.C.-based Police Foundation.

Awards and Honors

Sherman has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards for his work in the field of criminology and criminal justice. In 1998 he became the Founding President of the Academy of Experimental Criminology and in 1999 was elected a fellow of the Academy. In 2006, the Academy presented him with the Joan McCord Award for Outstanding Contributions to Experimental Criminology.

In 1994, Sherman was elected a fellow of the American Society of Criminology. In 1999, he received the Society’s Edwin Sutherland Award for outstanding contributions to the field of Criminology. In 2001 he was elected President of the Society. He served as President of the International Society for Criminology from 2000 to 2005 and President of the American Academy of Political and Social Science from 2001 to 2005; the AAPSS also elected him as a Fellow in 2008.

In 1994, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences presented Sherman with the Bruce Smith Sr. Award, in recognition of outstanding contributions to criminal justice as an academic or professional endeavor. In 1993, Sherman received the Distinguished Scholarship Award in Crime, Law and Deviance from the American Sociological Association.

Selected Writings

Lawrence Sherman and Heather Strang. 2007. Restorative Justice: The Evidence. London: Smith Institute, 95 pp.

Lawrence W. Sherman, David P. Farrington, Brandon Welsh and Doris MacKenzie, eds., Evidence-Based Crime Prevention. London: Routledge, 2002.

Lawrence W. Sherman, et al. 1997. Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. Report to the U.S. Congress. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Justice, 655 pp.

Lawrence W. Sherman, Policing Domestic Violence: Experiments and Dilemmas. N.Y.: Free Press, 1992. (Winner of 1993-94 Distinguished Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association, Section on Crime, Law and Deviance).

Lawrence W. Sherman and Douglas A. Smith, "Crime, Punishment and Stake in Conformity: Legal and Informal Control of Domestic Violence." Am. Sociological Review, 57(5): 680-690 (1992).

Lawrence W. Sherman and Richard A. Berk, "The Specific Deterrent Effects of Arrest for Domestic Assault." Am. Sociological Review, 49(2): 261-272 (l984).

Lawrence W. Sherman, Patrick R. Gartin, and Michael E. Buerger, "Hot Spots of Predatory Crime: Routine Activities and the Criminology of Place." Criminology 27: 27-55 (1989).

Lawrence W. Sherman, Scandal and Reform: Controlling Police Corruption. Berkeley: University of California Press (l978) 304 pp.

Lawrence W. Sherman, "Execution Without Trial: Police Homicide and the Constitution." Vanderbilt Law Review 33, 1:71-100 (l980). [Cited by U. S. Supreme Court in Tennessee v. Garner, l985]

Lawrence W. Sherman, “Gun Carrying and Homicide Prevention” Journal of the American Medical Association 283: 1193-1195. March 1, 2000.