5

Conclusions and Recommendations

The challenges facing policing and police reform internationally are serious and significant. The quality of policing is a core test of the quality of good governance in ensuring the promotion of rule of law (ROL) and human rights to protect the public. Research on policing outcomes has grown in recent years (Neyroud, 2017, 2021). A great deal of this research comes from the Global North, and less from countries in the Global South. However, even in the Global North, police agencies have yet to develop ways of institutionalizing the application of such knowledge to their everyday policies and practices. Further, the great diversity of policing structures, policies, and practices across the countries with which the U.S. Department of State partners adds extra layers of complexity and challenge to international discussions of policing reform. All this raises more questions than answers about how existing knowledge can be transferred to contexts in the Global South.

Throughout this report, the committee has examined the state of the research on organizational policies, structures, and practices for policing. In doing so, it sought to consider whether certain policies, structures, and practices promote the ROL and protect the public better than others. It has shown the limits of applying existing evidence across a highly variable landscape of international policing.

Yet what this report has also shown is the success of research itself. Even as recently as a decade ago, there was no research available on several important police policies or practices. Now the body of research is growing from a wide variety of countries, with preliminary findings on a range of topics, including both descriptive analyses of police processes and

functions and some evaluative work on the effects of various police practices, policies, and tactics on some sets of outcomes. What continues to be missing are evaluations of policing across different contexts and countries; standard measures of inputs, outputs, and effectiveness; a systematic account of underlying assumptions of such measures; and reliable counting of those measures.

This chapter outlines the committee’s key findings from the existing body of evidence. It then presents a research agenda to expand knowledge and leverage an evidence-based approach to policing in order to institutionalize knowledge and build it into the basis of police practices in the years and decades to come.

TRANSLATING THE EVIDENCE: KEY IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

As noted in Chapter 1, to promote ROL and protect the population, an evidence-based policing approach requires: (1) a reliable body of knowledge about police practices; (2) the ongoing practice of evidence-based and systematic targeting, testing, and tracking in policing; and (3) the institutionalization and implementation of knowledge in police practices (Lum and Koper, 2017; Sherman, 2013). Incorporating and implementing practices grounded in research into police organizations requires translation, receptivity, and institutionalization. As noted in Chapter 1, even when research is translated, an evidence-based policing approach requires that foreign assistance donors and partner law enforcement agencies build receptivity to this knowledge, such that police officers and local leadership are amenable to it. Institutionalizing research and embedding it in practice then likely requires making fundamental adjustments to any police organization’s systems and infrastructure of incentives, accountability, deployment, supervision, management, leadership, technology, and professional development to sustain an evidence-based approach over time.

In the endeavor to translate research into practice, the committee cautions that context is critical. Given the wide range of countries with whom INL works and to which findings from research might be applied, there can be a major challenge of contextual “fit.” Programs that work in some countries may not work in others. The same tactics, strategies, and interventions that could be successfully used in one country may backfire in another (or even be used to oppress people or violate human rights). Even strong evidence that programs work in some countries may not be enough to predict what will work in others.

That perspective necessitates understanding and mapping out the barriers to change in each context. Planning the pathways to success before an innovation starts can also be aided by what Kahneman (2011) describes

as a “pre-mortem” examination of a plan, asking “If this innovation dies in the attempt to implement it, what would be the most likely causes of death?” (pp. 264–265). Once barriers are identified, such knowledge may illuminate the choice for proceeding or not, or for proceeding with a plan for evading or overcoming those obstacles. The result would be a more selective targeting of different kinds of police reforms in different countries, based on feasibility as much as on need.

With these caveats in mind, the committee outlines the following key implications for donor practice, highlighting findings from the evidence detailed in previous chapters that can inform capacity-building efforts.

• Findings from available research regarding the role a militarized police plays in protecting the population are mixed and raise concerns about the consequences for the ROL. Militarization in the Mexican police has been associated with greater homicidal violence and human rights violations, but further study is needed to see if these findings hold outside the Mexican context. Studies in the United States have focused on crime reduction as an outcome, whether through transfer of military-grade weapons or SWAT-style teams, and their findings have been inconsistent. While one randomized controlled trial in Cali, Colombia, finds that crime decreased in the areas patrolled by the military, and researchers in Colombia and Mexico find that militarization appears to enjoy considerable public support, variations in local context may still lead the militarization of the police (or constabularization of the military) to cause more harm than it would prevent (see Chapter 2).
• The qualitative evidence on systems of police governance suggests that their effectiveness may strongly depend on whether they include dimensions of police operational independence and structures of checks and balances. There is no clear evidence about the effects of placing decision-making authority for police operations at higher or lower levels of government under national control, local control, or a combination of both. However, it is recognized that these choices may have inherent tradeoffs as it relates to policing practices (see Chapter 2).
• In places where the investigation of police misconduct is important for reform, a fair and anonymous system for submitting complaints is critical, since without a formal complaint a formal investigation is unlikely. Effective independent investigative agencies will likely foster public trust and increase government legitimacy by improving citizens’ access to justice for crimes committed by state agents while ensuring due process for the accused (see Chapter 2).

• Accountability systems for tracking overall police performance and individual misconduct are critical to the ability of a police service to promote the ROL and thus protect the public from abuse by police. Thorough implementation of these systems, with checks and balances, seems very important. Studies also show that such efforts may require attention to cultural factors to be effective and avoid being thwarted directly by resistant parties or indirectly by cultural norms (see Chapter 3).
• Research has illuminated the promise of recruitment policies that promote a policing workforce representative of the community it serves and reflecting the diversity of its population. The consequences of such policies may improve police legitimacy and community confidence in the police by reducing hostility between police officers and citizens and elevating values of equal protection and respect both within and outside the police service. Recruitment policies can actively encourage the recruitment of underrepresented groups or remove structural obstacles to such recruitment. Retention policies are also needed, especially for retention of historically underrepresented identity groups, as such groups often have negative experiences within police agencies (see Chapter 3).
• Research suggests that several technologies may have the potential to increase police accountability to the ROL and their public safety mandates. However, achieving these outcomes depends on (1) whether police services have access to essential technologies that can fulfill such mandates, (2) how each technology is actually used (or not), (3) the strength and supervision of implementation policies concerning those technologies, and (4) whether citizens and the police share similar expectations about those technologies (see Chapter 3). For example, body-worn cameras may be an effective technology for accountability. However, this effectiveness relies on agencies having well-enforced policies that require police to turn on and use the cameras, as well as policies that dictate how the agency will process and actively use body-worn camera footage for internal and criminal investigations of suspect police actions (see Chapter 3).
• Internal police culture is likely to have significant consequences for external police engagement. Findings from recent correlational research are consistent: having policies aimed at creating a culture of accountability, fairness, and justice within a police department translates to positive effects on police interaction with the community (see Chapter 3).
• Research evidence shows that problem-oriented policing can be an effective practice to reduce crime and disorder, one component of

• the ROL. Agencies often need critical infrastructure elements—such as information technologies and analytic resources—to implement and institutionalize a problem-solving approach in a consistent and meaningful way. However, even in low-resource communities, it would be possible to apply basic problem-solving skills and principles to collect and analyze available data and open communication channels to address chronic problems. An accountability infrastructure to record, document, and help assess problem-solving efforts would need to be developed and built into the police agency’s rewards, incentives, and disciplinary subsystems. Problem-solving tactics and activities would also need to be monitored to ensure that they are not inadvertently harming the community, such as causing greater disparities or inequities in the justice system, or leading to greater police violence or uses of force (see Chapter 4).
• Several reviews of the evaluation research on community-oriented policing programs have been mixed in terms of their effectiveness at reducing crime. While community-oriented policing does not often have consistent crime prevention or deterrence benefits, some programs can improve citizen satisfaction with police services (although the impacts on perceptions of police legitimacy may be weaker, see Chapter 4).

These findings from the policing literature merit consideration for adoption in capacity-building programs to promote ROL and protection of the public. While there is much uncertainty on whether existing evidence can directly inform policing programs, existing evidence can be leveraged in capacity-building efforts to generate new knowledge if applied with intention and evaluated. There are also opportunities for assistance in amplifying lessons learned from research in international policing, including programs at the U.S. Departments of State, Justice, Treasury, and Homeland Security. To this end, “evidence partnerships” across various U.S. federal agencies, and between the United States and other countries undertaking similar activities, may be fruitful. In the committee’s view, only the growth of INL’s recent work in building new knowledge and reviewing existing lessons can provide sufficient clarity to fully answering the questions in our mandate and realizing the goal of translating evidence into practice.

A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR EVIDENCE-BASED POLICING

To facilitate greater adoption of evidence-based policing practices worldwide, a registry of global policing impact studies is also needed. While no such registry currently exists, such a registry could serve as a foundation for the development of both measurement methods and substantive

conclusions that will advance qualitative and quantitative evidence and further inform practice.

RECOMMENDATION 1: In pursuit of better knowledge management, foreign assistance donors, including the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State, should support the establishment of an open online registry of all available research worldwide on police organizational policies, structures, and practices with outcomes measuring the rule of law and public protection and analysis of contextual factors contributing to these outcomes.

The registry should be designed to manage documents in multiple languages and extend the knowledge accumulated to researchers across countries. Further, the registry should promote the growth of research in the countries within the Global South.

This registry could build on the work led by Mazerolle and colleagues (2017) for the University of Queensland’s Global Policing Database, with a view to creating free public online access to the original research reports. Some features of the registry could support daily scanning of scientific journals and other sources for new research reports that can help to compile the “raw” knowledge from individual studies and scientific peer reviews of each study in order to provide a quality control check on all studies included. As part of the registry program, systematic reviews of all research registered in specific areas could be conducted periodically (e.g., a review of the effects of procedural justice training on police conduct with citizens). Effort will need to be made to group studies by country similarities (cultural or other relevant characteristics), as this can serve to aid moderator analyses in systematic reviews.

Existing training programs that discuss police organizational structures, policies, and practices need to reflect the available evidence related to organizational structures, policies, and practices and continue to adapt curricula as additional evidence emerges. Foreign assistance donors, such as the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, should examine their training in light of material and resources provided in this report and be prepared to continue to adapt curricula as new knowledge emerges.

RECOMMENDATION 2: Foreign assistance donors, including the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State (INL), should conduct an evidence-based assessment of their training modules to determine how aligned the curricula are with available evidence on the outcomes of organizational structures,

policies, and practices that promote the rule of law and protection of the public and on the contexts in which such structures, policies, and practices work.

While the committee recognizes the wide range of curricula taught across the many countries with which INL works, given the knowledge already amassed in policing, INL needs to conduct an assessment of the curricula it funds in the Global South, including curricula taught in the International Law Enforcement Academies and other settings, to see if the content is aligned with current research knowledge. Part of that review would include an assessment of any curriculum’s focus on evidence-based policing itself, to show how agencies might use existing evidence and learn how to institutionalize research into their everyday practices.

The committee recognizes that there are no simple answers to guide decisions around organizational policies, structures, and practices that promote rule of law and protect the population. Much organizational effectiveness depends on cultural, political, and social conditions, and such conditions can vary between and within countries. With better contextualization, many lessons from research in other countries can be tested for applicability in new settings. It would benefit donor efforts to have a better understanding of the conditions that affect the success of organizational-level interventions.

RECOMMENDATION 3: Foreign assistance donors should encourage, and possibly commission, research that examines the cultural, political, and social conditions in which police operate—and assesses which of the contextual variables are likely to lead to successful outcomes from different kinds of police assistance efforts.

As noted above, key gaps in the literature are evaluations of policing across different contexts and countries as well as standard measures of inputs, outputs, and effectiveness. These gaps are caused in part by the absence of a set of standards for the definition of effectiveness and reliable counting of those measures. Such standards are needed to interpret the meaning of research results (Sherman, 2012), as uncertainty over the reliability of measurement is a major impediment to translating science into practice. Foreign assistance donors are in a position to help facilitate the development of a research framework to assess policing interventions in multiple contexts as well as police-researcher partnerships to expand available policing research and advance evidence-based policing. Local research capacity exists in many countries, even in areas of high violence and civil

unrest, but may lack the funding and incentives to form police-researcher partnerships. Donors can encourage police-research partnerships and facilitate police partnering with either extra-national research institutions or local researchers and provide the necessary technical assistance to conduct research and evaluations of interventions.

RECOMMENDATION 4: To gather data and expand available policing research, foreign assistance donors, including the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State, should incentivize partner countries to monitor, track, and evaluate the implementation of promising approaches and other initiatives by linking resources to establish police-research partnerships in assistance agreements.

The challenge of deciding how much aid each country receives is based on a variety of factors, many of which are political in nature and thus outside the scope of our task. However, to advance the long-term, overall strategy of global police reform, it is essential to create a vanguard of cooperating countries that implement evidence-based policing more comprehensively and substantially than most police agencies in the Global North have done to date. Investing in local partners who are willing to do the evidence and data gathering work is essential. The State Department is uniquely positioned to incentivize and facilitate such reform.

A reliable infrastructure for evidence-based policing is one based on international standards and metrics. This report has repeatedly noted the need for reliable records management for all kinds of police operations, and not just for reported deaths. It has also noted major gaps in that reliability in the Global North as well as the Global South.

RECOMMENDATION 5: To advance a policing research framework suitable for multiple countries, foreign assistance donors should raise awareness in host countries of the value of recording and reporting crime and harm metrics. In addition, they should encourage the research community to establish a model crime reporting system for violent crimes and the identification of geographic concentrations of harm from crime and disorder to strengthen understanding of both crime and how officers are responding to crime across countries.

The goal of a model crime reporting system would be to identify specific pieces of information that must be collected so that police agencies can more successfully carry out the protection of the public. Such a system could be based on the World Health Organization’s Violence Prevention

Alliance,¹ which includes standards for recording crime reports, for independent (nonpolice) auditing of compliance with those standards, and for regular reports to the public on the results of those audits. This system would need to be translated into the language(s) of each state the U.S. government is assisting and installed in a software package that can be operated as locally, regionally, or nationally as different countries may require.

Similarly, a model recording and reporting system for identifying patterns and concentrations of harm may use a globally constant crime severity or harm index. This system, in order to support both preventive operations and reliable research, could include unique identifiers for places, victims, suspects, and systematic evidence of social network links in crime records across individuals. The aim of such crime analysis would be to understand where, when, and who commits crimes as a way to better understand safety concerns, with the ultimate purpose of better targeting of effective practices. These records could be used to support a wide range of initiatives in evidence-based policing, problem-oriented policing, and community-oriented policing. At the same time, because concentrating crime prevention efforts on specific places or people may disproportionately concentrate police attention on certain populations, such efforts must be combined with a comparable concentration of officer training, incentivizing, and monitoring to protect against human rights violations.

In order to create the capacity for reliable assessments of change over time and differences across countries in the level of crime harm, this system could adopt a system already used in Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and parts of Australia that provides a standard weight for each of the major crime types. Despite differences in sentencing practices across countries, it is not unreasonable to select a standard weighting system for analytic purposes only (and not to promote a standard sentencing system). This standard would be applied only to the most serious offenses, such as murder, rape, grievous bodily harm, robbery, and aggravated assault. One option is to use the midpoint between average sentences and sentencing guidelines (which leave out prior offender records as a sentencing criterion). These two official sources reflect different methodological perspectives, both of which can be combined by selecting a midpoint; the use of guidelines is known as the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (Sherman, Neyroud, and Neyroud, 2016). Alternatively, agencies could use monetary-based harm estimates based on meta-analyses of public surveys, jury awards, and variation in home values, such as the RAND Cost of Crime Calculator (Heaton, 2010). Once harm weightings are applied across countries, the comparisons of public protection will become more reliable, even while

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¹ See https://www.who.int/violenceprevention/approach/definition/en.

remaining far from perfect. It would be a first step in a long journey to global transparency about crime and justice.

The creation of transparent facts about crime and policing can be highly disruptive in any political context. Establishing equal protection by improving police recording practices is a major issue for the rule of law. It is also a major operational and diplomatic challenge, as suppression of crime reports is an inconvenient truth. Understanding the successes and failures of reporting systems will comprise a major step forward in the global understanding of how to achieve a safer and more lawful world.