Lawrence Sherman

Professor Lawrence W. Sherman is Chair of the Cambridge Police Executive Programme at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, which has over 1,000 alumni serving in police leadership positions around the world. After beginning his career as an analyst in the New York City Police Department, he earned his PhD from Yale University, and holds honorary doctorates from Stockholm and Denison Universities. While leading experiments in over 40 police agencies in 10 countries, he founded the new movement for “evidence-based” policing, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing.

Sherman has conducted field experiments on finding more effective ways to reduce homicide, gun violence, domestic violence, robbery, burglary, and other crime problems, in collaboration with such agencies as the Metropolitan, Northumbria and Thames Valley Police, London’s Crown Courts, HM Prisons, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Youth Justice Board of England and Wales, and the National Probation Service, as well as 30 US police agencies and the Australian Federal Police. Since 2005, he has been developing new “Big Data” tools for predicting risk of serious harm by arrested offenders, as well as randomised trials on how to prevent that harm. The former President of the American Society of Criminology, he holds medals awarded by the King of Sweden, Yale University, and the (UK) Royal Society of Arts.