From the Acting Director: National Institute of Justice Seeks to Make America Safer

My career pathway to law enforcement research has been circuitous. After getting my doctorate in statistics from the University of Washington in 1999, I began work at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to informing policy with research. I eventually became Director of RAND’s Center of Quality Policing, and later, Director of RAND’s Safety and Justice Program. In this role, I worked with numerous police departments and governments around the world to develop solutions to the crime and justice problems they were facing. For example, I worked with the city of Los Angeles on police recruiting strategies, the city of New York on analysis of officer-involved shootings and stop-and-frisk practices, and the Abu Dhabi Police on setting up a research division within their organization. Perhaps my best-known research focused on race and policing in which I developed an approach for characterizing the time, place, and context in which an officer works; matched that officer’s activities with other officer’s working in the same time, place, and context; and constructed benchmarks that could detect whether the officer’s performance deviated substantially from similarly-situated peers. That system was deployed in Cincinnati as part of the 2002 Settlement Agreement and in New York to assess whether certain officers were stopping a surprising number of minority pedestrians.