Research
Lawrence Sherman is a prolific writer and researcher who has 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, crack houses, and reintegrative shaming. He has collaborated with over 30 police and justice agencies around the world. Sherman’s research on domestic violence began in the 1980s with the 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 (to whom he was married in 2010), 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 scholars in the field.
Read more about this topic: Lawrence W. Sherman
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