Cross-posted on my Crime De-Coder blog.

I will be giving a talk at the upcoming American Society of Evidence Based Policing (ASEBP) conference (registration link here, May 20th-22nd in DC). My talk is How long to conduct your experiment? Check it out Thursday morning – I specifically asked for one of the short talks; 15 minutes is plenty to get the gist.

I will be sharing a web-app to go with the talk soon (you can see my WDD tool and this blog post for background), but wanted to write a more general post about why researchers (as well as police officers who are interested in professionalization of the field) should join ASEBP.

To start, I have been involved in various ways with ASEBP for several years now, but I do not have any financial ties to ASEBP. I currently volunteer on the committee that reviews conference talks.

ASEBP is clearly the best organization for policing scholars currently in the country. The other main criminological societies (the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences) are operating much as they did 30 years ago. Mostly they only exist to run journals and have a yearly conference where anyone can give a talk. They are incredibly insular, and have basically zero input from practitioners.

You can go and just look at the talks for ASC and ACJS – they are basically irrelevant to the vast majority of criminal justice operations (not only in policing, but in the CJ field as a whole). You can go look at the talks for the ASEBP conference and see they have a much clearer focus on realistic topics police departments are interested in, but presented by legitimate researchers and practitioners.

For scholars, I have developed working relationships with departments through multiple police practitioners I have met through ASEBP – and I hope to make more!

ASEBP was started by Renee Mitchell with a clear goal in mind – Renee is really the modern-day version of August Vollmer. ASEBP is intended to be a rigorous (unlike ASC, which allows almost anyone to present) conference and organization (ASEBP has training opportunities as well) to advance the use of evidence in policing operations.

If you think “I am not a policing researcher”, but have anything to do at all with criminal justice, feel free to get in touch. (Crime analysts should definitely join.) I have ideas to expand the organization – nothing equivalent currently exists in other parts of the criminal justice system as well. Being evidence-based is really the core of what Renee and everyone else is building.

If you are going to the conference and want to meet up, feel free to send me an email, andrew.wheeler@crimede-coder.com, and I will find a time to get a coffee while we are in DC.