EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Moving beyond “Best Practiceâ€: Experiences in Police Reform and a Call for Evidence to Reduce Officer-Involved Shootings

Robin S. Engel, Hannah D. McManus and Gabrielle T. Isaza

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2020, vol. 687, issue 1, 146-165

Abstract: In post-Ferguson America, police departments are being challenged to implement evidence-based changes in policies and training to reduce fatal police-citizen encounters. Of the litany of recommendations believed to reduce police shootings, five have garnered widespread support: body-worn cameras, de-escalation training, implicit bias training, early intervention systems, and civilian oversight. These highly endorsed interventions, however, are not supported by a strong body of empirical evidence that demonstrates their effectiveness. Guided by the available research on evidence-based policing and informed by the firsthand experience of one of the authors in implementing departmental reforms that followed the fatal shooting of a civilian by an officer, this article highlights promising reform strategies and opportunities to build the evidence base for effective use-of-force reforms. We call upon police executives to engage in evidence-based policing by scientifically testing interventions, and we call on academics to engage in rapid research responses for critical issues in policing.

Keywords: evidence-based policing; police shootings; use of force; police reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716219889328 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:687:y:2020:i:1:p:146-165

DOI: 10.1177/0002716219889328

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:687:y:2020:i:1:p:146-165