LPRC - CrimeScience Episode 59 – Policing, Victimization, Evidence-Based Practice, and CrimComm ft. Dr. Laura Huey (Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing)

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

In this episode of LPRC CrimeScience, Dr. Laura Huey, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario and the Director of the Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing (CAN-SEBP), joins Dr. Read Hayes to discuss her background, victimization of marginalized groups, data analysis, implicit and explicit bias, the importance of evidence-based practice, the Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing, CrimComm, and much more. The post CrimeScience Episode 59 – Policing, Victimization, Evidence-Based Practice, and CrimComm ft. Dr. Laura Huey (Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing) appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Be a leader in loss prevention by implementing integrated solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations, and customer service. operations, and customer service. Bosch Integrated Security and Communications Solutions spans zones one through four in the LPRC's zones of influence, while enriching the customer experience and delivering valuable data to help increase retail profitability. Learn more by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science Podcast. Today we're joined by Dr. Laura Huey, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, or UWO it looks like all the time. So I want to welcome Laura today, and what we're going to do

is spend a little bit of time talking about two main things, I think in my mind anyway. One is the idea of actually using logic models, but even better, informing not only the models, but the actual practice that come out of them with evidence. And, you know, using evidence from different sources, different types of evidence, but as rigorous as possible. But then the second part is making what we're learning available, not only to colleagues or peers in the research industry in academia through peer-reviewed journals, which is the primary source, but also conferences, but that probably have a very small readership, making all this available to the practitioners. And most importantly, though, making it available in a way that they can actually go to work with it. So, Laura, I want to welcome you to Crime Science.

So, Laura, let's go over to you and let's talk a little bit about criminology in 2020. Is it sociology or is it something else? Tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into the field, if you will, and how you've ended up where you are. But how all this is shaped the way you look at what we need as a society and what practitioners need as individuals and as groups to better safeguard vulnerable people? Wow, what a fantastic question. And you know, I have to tell you, in almost 20 years, nobody's ever asked that question, which is really surprising when you think about it, because our backgrounds and our influences completely and utterly shape our careers. So I'm a little bit different from your typical criminologist.

And by the way, that's how I self-identify. I, my family, there's no nice way to put this. They were more on the criminal side than they were on the law abiding side. So I grew up as being the white sheep in the black sheep family and in so many respects. I grew up as being the white sheep in the black sheep family and in so many respects. And as a consequence of growing up that way and growing up poor, I had a completely different mentality to a lot of things than say, a lot of the people that I went to school with in, in university,

certainly a lot of the kids, you know, I went back, I went to university when I was 27. So I was already old and out of kids, you know, I went back, I went to university when I was 27. So I was already old and out of it, you know, compared to these kids. And many of them came from, you know, pretty decent middle class backgrounds. And they were all excited. This was before CSI, but they were going to do this and they were going to do that. And I was like, screw it. I want to be a lawyer.

Show me the cash. And the true story is I could not pass the LSAT. Like many good criminologists, I failed the LSAT. So I ended up going in and staying in criminology. And I took a course with a guy who passed away a number of years ago. He was a social activist in Vancouver's downtown East side. His name was Jim green. And he was a gruff kind of mean kind of,

you know, guy I was going to swear, but I, I hemmed it in. And he thought we were a bunch of spoiled little kids that. Wanted to just go down and stare at you know the the drug addicts and and the alcoholics and the this and the that down in skid row so he was challenging us to go down there and to do some meaningful piece of research and I got addicted. I got addicted to doing field-based research. I loved it. I still love it, except I'm way too old to do it now, but I think it's kind of a young person's game.

And I started following, this is my first gig as a researcher, following private security guards around Gastown as they harassed homeless people and tried to push them out so that the tourists wouldn't know that there were homeless people in Vancouver. That's how I got started. And that mentality that I carried of being, I'm sorry, but, you know, we talk a lot about race and gender and ethnicity and sexual orientation in terms of identity, we often don't talk about class and how it affects the choices that we make, or the ways that we view the world. And my research morphed into two streams, policing and victimization, and particular victimization of super marginalized groups.

So, you know, when we get, if you ask me, if you ask me about that hashtag defund stuff, I'm going to have a lot to say because there is a real lack of security within marginalized communities. And it's not clear to me that that movement represents a lot of those people that don't have that security so you might have to this is i i recognize i'm already going controversial three minutes in but that that's kind of where my perspective comes from and how i got started well i think that um

and that's a great start um and the idea that it's somehow viewed as controversial to base some perceptions on what you've experienced, what some literature shows, the literature might show, and even your personal research, of course, is an interesting, it does create for a very interesting time. I don't know how much it's been different over the years, but it seems probably more challenging now than ever to do what you're talking about, to say, look, let's come in and we may not be neutral. We can't. We're all going to have inherent bias of some sort for a lot of reasons, probably mostly for survival instinct. We're not just going to trust any and everybody or in everything

to propagate our gene code. But I do think that it's probably not controversial, in my opinion, to say, look, I want to challenge things. I want to, from my perspective, and spending a lot of quality time, personal quality time, and now probably a lot, like you said, vicarious quality time. There may not even be such thing as a community, right? But, but the individuals out there, probably there's a lot of heterogeneity and how they look at the world, but they mostly would like to be left alone. But not just by the police, but by people that are trying to victimize them. Absolutely. 100%. I wrote a piece years ago, and it came out in the British Journal of Sociology, which was kind of a weird place to publish it, and I didn't think they'd accept it. by critical criminologists was that marginalized groups are disproportionately targeted by security cameras, that it's stigmatizing, so on and so forth.

What I discovered in my research was that actually a lot of homeless citizens, in particular women, actively seek out spaces to overnight, um sleep rough is the term they use in the uk because those cameras are there and are watching and so that if somebody comes and tries to victimize them it'll be on the camera and perhaps help can come and that that at the time i published i was like oh i'm i'm dreading the response I'm going to get from this. Because, again, it sort of challenges the dogma around security. And there's a lot of it. And a lot of it is centered, I'm just going to say this, what the hell.

A lot of it is middle and upper middle class people that do research that do not do research in these communities that they claim to protect or speak for. And they represent a view that is based on not actually going, like I said, not actually asking people, what do you think? What do you want? And there was a fantastic piece that was just published. And I wish I can remember the scholar's name, but it just came out within the past day or two. It was an op-ed piece that talked about how the discussions around security are very one-sided, and actually what people want is a lot more complex.

They want to be left alone, but at the same time, they also want the security available to them when they need it. And that's part of the conversation I think that's been missing a lot. And I went way off bloody topic, but I've been pretty passionate about this stuff. And kind of a little bit sad because a lot of the public discourse around policing and security right now paints it as though they were two totally bad things when the reality is for people that don't have the ability to have alarms, bars on their home windows, dogs like mine that are barking out in the yard right now in their backyard. Unfortunately, they have very few other methods of creating security and to a certain extent have to rely on the public police. And in there, we could say that the police could do a much better job and we'd all be in agreement, including a lot of police officers who recognize that.

But that's not the discourse today. Well, it's maybe not the discourse by those that have the microphone, but I think that we hear a lot about implicit bias, and the construct probably holds, if it holds true, and presumably it does, but it applies to everybody, including researchers. And so, right, the questions they ask, how they ask them, while we're supposed to be neutral instruments, we're hoping our thermometers are not, have a lot of implicit bias, for instance. And so, I can imagine, and I would be interested to know, I need to look this up, and I don't know if you're aware, what percent of criminology or sociology or sociological research is based on secondary data analysis. I actually just got off a really, about an hour ago, a really good dissertation defense, which is easy to do now, right? You just zoom in. But it was all secondary data analysis. And they may not express it, but I was thinking as an experimental criminologist and the work that we're able to do,

we're so fortunate in that we can, we may not get the constructs right, but we can try our best through the literature and trial and error and continue to improve the constructs and how we measure them. But also, you know, as experimental criminologists, we're out there again looking for a signal, but we can test options. And hopefully the options we're testing are coming from, again, others as well as our research. The secondary data analysts, which seem to be the majority when we go to conferences and read the journals, they don't really have a whole lot to say about what somebody's measuring and how well they're measuring it or anything. And then you see, and so I can't, I would be very, very frustrated if that's all we did. It's almost none of our research is in that area. So I guess the next question would be around that and that, you know, we even have seen a couple of data points, if you will, I think that sort of support a little bit that you're talking about here. And one is in Baltimore, where they had the aircraft that's been used in Afghanistan and

other places, and then was used in Mexico to locate some cartel members that murdered a female police officer to locate them. And then now in Baltimore, and then they just continued. And now my understanding is that many, many African-American leaders, Black leaders in that area are calling for the plane to come back. And yeah, and the same thing at NYPD where they disbanded the street crime squads and all the precincts

that were doing a pretty incredible job of taking a lot of dangerous firearms and other facilitators off the street day in and day out. But that creates friction. And we know that when you're doing something, you're going to create friction. Now, some of the community leaders are calling for immediate reestablishment of those squads. Any thoughts around that, that

maybe you're not as controversial as some might think? Well, I think you're absolutely right that public opinion and it will start to shift and it's already starting to shift the comment about secondary data. I have a funny story about that, that I think illustrates in a nutshell, the problem that we're seeing. And I said this recently, it's always a minority of very loud voices that take up a lot of space and make it seem like there's a lot more people supporting a position than really there is. There's very little. Pew just did a study on the defund movement to see what the level of support was.

And that's the first study, by the way, that I've actually seen on it. But the story is this. I used to do terrorism research. I don't know what the hell I got in, why I got into this, but I, you know, I was bored and I thought, oh, hey, why not? And ISIS was big at the time. So I was actually like a fool following Islamic State affiliated women online. And some really, really crazy, serious, I mean, crazily serious jihadi type people were following me back and trying to communicate with me because that's what they do. And so here I am out there collecting all this data to analyze and, you know, at a little bit of risk to myself, I go to a terrorism conference and I'm sitting next to this guy who I know from the six o'clock news.

He's one of those talking head people that you see all the time. So I said to him, oh, I'm really, you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm doing this. What are you doing? He tells me, I said, oh, where do you get your data from? He says, I do secondary analysis. And I looked at him. I said, you mean you read the newspaper? And's like yeah and he said well why don't you collect primary data it's available on social media I don't want to end up on a no-fly list I thought you've got to be freaking kidding me and first of all the so-called expert didn't even know that's not how you get on the list. But second of all, I mean, seriously, you are representing yourself as this big expert. You actually have no freaking clue what you're talking about.

And we see this over and over again in a whole bunch of different contexts. Who gets cited as an expert on a topic? Oftentimes, isn't somebody that's actually really an expert on the topic so yeah i went way off on a tangent but the secondary data analysis thing is a big is a big one well i think it should be i think it should be discussed and studied like everything else the same thing implicit bias within all of us myself included, those of us that do the research, regardless. Absolutely. But the thing of it is, is there's, I mean, in some of the research, it's explicit bias.

And there's not much you can do about that. We've seen tons of, I can point to several examples within policing research where the primary data collection technique was using freedom of information requests. And then you published an entire study, but you don't actually understand the context. So you misinterpret everything to fit your own ideological view. You know, and we're seeing this over and over again. And this is why I got into evidence-based policing in the first place. Because I got tired of seeing junk research. So this is a great segue into that next step. And that is evidence-based practice. And the reason I actually got into or interested in it, my grandfather and my father being primary care physicians, docs,

and so I would read their journals or parts of them, at least the little sidebar that was even less than an abstract for the busy practitioner. But, you know, that's where you started to see, I think, evidence-based practice start to take hold, I guess, particularly in the 30s, 40s, 50s. So that's really what I knew was that, hey, somebody would propose this. There was all this research around it. They were tying together all types of studies. My dad, if somebody presents with different high blood pressure symptoms, he's going to, his diagnostic process is by and large going to be logical, but most importantly, evidence-based. And then his differential diagnosis is the same from that. And then he's going to now, he's got, but now he's got dosing options, right? He can now say, well, people will differentially respond to these things, these treatments.

I've got these options. Now I'm going to see what work's been done, depending on your age or your obesity level or weight level and all these other. I can't even imagine having anything close to that in law enforcement or in our area that we mostly deal with. We do deal with law enforcement a lot, asset protection or loss prevention. So let's go to evidence-based practice. What's your background? How did you start getting interested? And you kind of alluded to that just a minute ago, but how did you start heading down that pathway? I got asked to sit on a expert panel. And when I first got the invitation,

I was like, was this sent to me by mistake? And they assured me that, no, we really want you to do it because you study policing of marginalized communities and we need your input. And that panel was the Canadian, the Council of Canadian Academies expert panel on the future of policing,

which really was a little bit like trying to figure out how many angels dance on the head of a pin. What is the future of policing? Part of the problem is it's not a super answerable question, but more importantly, we didn't, we couldn't even begin to answer basic level questions about the present situation of policing in Canada. What had happened was the federal and provincial governments had systematically defunded their Yo! hashtag defund research. And so a lot of the money that used to be available to the people in the States take for granted through groups like the NIJ, we cut all that. And we basically told researchers, if you want to do this work, you have to go find other funding avenues.

And police didn't pick up the slack in terms of funding that research. So we couldn't answer. Here was the question I'll never forget. Does it, in terms of inclusivity and diversity, does it make sense to have officers of colour go into communities of colour? Now, common sense would say, well, okay, I think so. But that's actually a much more complex question. And we had zero, zero research that had actually been done on diversity and inclusion and policing in Canada.

So we do what we typically do. We import it from the U S or we import it from the UK. I got fed up. I also got fed up with the Neely Mouthway in which the federal government wanted to declare a crisis in policing that research was supposed to solve, but actually put zero money into research. So here's the thing you need to know about me. I'm motivated by two things, anger and greed. There were no handbags that were going to be attached to this. So greed, we have to rule out. I was angry. And so I do what I do when I get angry and I created a research network.

Which seems like a really stupid thing now that I think about it. But I thought, you know what? If the government is not going to step in and help, then I need to try to shift things so that we get research generated in a different way. And the focus became getting police officers to want to work with

researchers to create the research that would fill the gap that the government had left for us. And by the way, if anybody from the Canadian federal government is listening, you owe me a damn handbag. Perfect. We know people will ask. We deal with 65 retailers. I know a few that have handbags, but that's perfect.

So, all right. So there you go. We have a dearth of evidence, but a huge, huge ask. You know, one thing I wondered about, and I've seen this in other disciplines, our families in agriculture and so on. And, you know, there's, Florida is actually the oldest cattle state

in the United States. Spaniards came here first. And, but, you know, where if a research, how much is a practitioner, let's say in this case, a farmer, grower, rancher, use evidence or university-based? Well, in the state of Florida, turns out a lot do because of IFAS, which was this, it's sort of this translational center from, you know, science, as you know, translating that to practice. And then now all 67 Florida counties are now, I mean,

since the late 1800s, have an IFAS office, you know, right, the county agent. But that's where they translate things into practice. And there's nonstop research going on all around the state in cattle and citrus and row crops and everything else. And so there's a lot of that happening. But I've seen with family and friends or other groups, a lot of it has to do with the researcher though. And they're not just their bedside manner, but I mean their approach. And the point here is that I've heard this brought up by some practitioners that, you know, I'd like to listen to some of this. One, it's very difficult to understand what people are

talking about. We don't have the grounded background. But also, some of these are the same people that are on Twitter and other platforms are yelling at us. They are telling, you know, they're not really endearing themselves to the practitioner, you know, by their statements. And I hear that. They say, well, criminologists seem like everybody else. They make these sort of drive-by comments that's not influencing us in the right way. That's not encouraging us. Hey, wow, I want to hear more about what that person has to say

about their objective research. So any thoughts on that? Other things even there that we could do as research scientists to not degrade our own credibility? not degrade our own credibility. I think this is awesome. So I might be the wrong person to ask. And I'm laughing because I have a very well-known reputation in criminology, but also in policing circles in Canada for being one of the rudest, most blunt, curse-filled, just lay it out, curse filled uh just lay it out tell you what i think kind of person and um i have been told that well i can tell you for a fact in chief circles that doesn't go over very well but i i'm not interested in chiefs i've never been interested in chiefs because chiefs typically only have a tenure of what three two to maybe five to seven years max i'm interested in chiefs because chiefs typically only have a tenure of what three two to maybe five to seven years max I'm interested in the frontline officers and growing their interest

in research and what I found over time is that well first of all you can't change who you are and but what I've done is I've just my personality and my style, I just tell it like it is. And if people are open and they like to hear unfiltered non BS comments about research, they'll be there. little tiny knickers in a twist they won't be but guess what they would have found another excuse to be turned off anyway and maybe perhaps they might go to somebody else where they like the message better i don't have an issue with um with i i understand when police officers or anybody in say the private sector or any other practitioner group says, we don't like you guys because you're kind of arrogant. You use $35 words when a $1 word will do quite nicely. You don't have much of a sense of humor or personality, and I can't read your freaking slides. And also when we talk we talk at people and it's that who wants to listen to that and it's funny because i know behind the scenes because i go out for coffee and lunch and drinks

with you guys meaning other criminologists you watch the real housewives of beverly hills you are fascinated by junk television magazines magazines, and books, and you secretly like vampire fiction. I don't know what the hell that's about. But anyway, you like all sorts of really goofy things. So you're not like that in your real life. And I'm not like that. And so I just put it out there. And what I find is that people respond so much better to that, unless they have tiny egos and then I go away. But they do. I'm trying to encourage criminologists to let down their guard a little bit and stop trying to be the freaking expert in the room all the time. I remember sitting next to a police

inspector here in Ontario who leaned over to me in the midst of an academic police research meeting and said, you guys scare me. And I leaned over and said, you have the gun. And we cracked up. And, you know, but I get it. We're kind of obnoxious. Let's be honest. We can be a little obnoxious. There you go.

I said it. No, that's good. And I think, too, to maintain perspective, I think going back to, say, the farmer-rancher analogy, I think that that actually is the case. They appreciate, I'm dealing with another human. They've spent a lot more time trying to understand this one thing. And I spend a lot of time trying to understand

other things or a lot of things. And I don't mind sarcasm or any of that. I think it's just broad brush. Like they walk into a room of farmer and say, all right, you know, farmers are a bunch of rednecks. Okay. So from now on, nobody's listening. Right. And I think that's sort of some of the drive-by comments that law enforcement and law school practitioners are concerned about that. You know, it's not individual sarcasm or personality quirks or any of that as much as, you know, this broad brush condemnation. Well, I get that, but here's the thing. Sorry, I'm getting old. If I don't jump in and wait until the thought actually hits my brain, it will be gone in like literally 0.02 seconds. You know how it is.

But I remember trying to broker a research deal here in Canada that would have been a huge research deal. And I happened to be pals with somebody who is the leading expert in Canada and probably one of the leading experts in the world on this particular topic. And this police leader basically refused to go to this expert for help and went to some fly-by-night academic who basically robbed him blind on this project. When I asked him why he actually said he didn't like him. Since when do you have to like people to work with them? Huge point. Huge point. It's yeah. Let's what's the outcome we're trying to go for here.

So now let's segue in. So evidence-based, how would you sum it up for the listening audience? Evidence-based practice, in this case, evidence-based policing. We're trying to safeguard vulnerable people. Turns out we need some bedside manner maybe. I mean, that's probably some of the take home from some of the, you know, the blowback that we get. But what's your take on evidence based practice what does that mean and how could listeners uh think about that i as as i am you know as i used to say drive by comments i am a i'm a rage tweeter i'm just gonna own it right i'm a rage tweeter not a drunken tweeter just a rage tweeter and so every

once in a while i will just get really enraged by something and just tweet out and you probably saw me go off yesterday about about oh you did you saw me go off on something yesterday uh my see here's the thing when we started promoting evidence-based policing five six five and a half almost six years ago people especially in, but in other walks of life as well, did the hard eye roll. Because they have been through, in my career lifetime, so in the past 20 years, we've had, remember community policing? Remember when everybody was doing that? It was a big thing. We had problem-oriented policing. Do you remember when everybody was doing that? It was a big thing. And we had problem-oriented policing. Then we had, oh God, what's that thing that Jerry was doing?

ILP. Yeah, intelligence-led policing. Intelligence-led policing. See that? I kind of blipped on that one. That went past my radar really fast. then we had you know probably a few other ones um and then we got and then we get evidence-based policing and so people did this hard eye roll because they're like oh great another cure to help save policing fantastic we'll just change all our programs and everything so we can do this and then in five years we'll do it we'll do something different and i understand that my point with my rage tweet yesterday was to say all those cures that you've been exposed to some of which have been very well tested and some of which haven't been tested at all evidence-based policing is not a cure it is the antidote to all the fake cures that you've been sold,

all the snake oil. What do I mean by that? Evidence based policing isn't like a plug it in, plug and play option. It is a way of, it's sort of like a holistic way of thinking about how you make decisions. And strangely enough, I actually practice this in my real life. Meaning that when I have to make a decision, for example, about a medicine I should be taking or vitamin supplement or whatever, I actually go and look at the research before I make a decision. And that's all it is. It's just, it is looking at the research to see what it says. And if you don't have the research, generating it. So that when you have a quote-unquote solution, you know that the bloody thing works.

It's that simple. No, I like it. One thing that we spend some time with them, helping them understand that there needs to be some logic that we're going to, you know, why are we testing this thing or why are we deploying it, dosing it, whatever this way, or should we look at a few options? And then why would we look at those options? What are the mechanisms here of the problem and the action mechanisms of whatever the solution or solution options are? And now we're going to start to collect different types of evidence around that as well as see what are other people finding, assuming, hopefully, somebody else is testing this. But I don't know that we want to come up with acronyms that say, well, it should be evidence-based. It should be logic and evidence-based or whatever.

But no, I think that's fair. And we can use that personally. And I think, I believe that I do the same in my personal life with myself, family, and friends is not trying to overwhelm them and send them every article I find on anything. But rather, yeah, what's sort of the consensus seem to be the evidence-based consensus on this. So now here we are, you tell me about the, the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing, and then the more importantly, the Canadian equivalent, or probably it's even better, but that you, how did you guys come up, get involved? How did that evolve? And so forth. We got involved in different ways, but at the same time, which was kind of funny, Renee Mitchell was a PhD student under Larry Sherman at Cambridge. And so that's how

she got interested in evidence-based policing. And she started the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing in the same year. And it might be the same month or one month before or after we did. So in 2015, we were pretty close. And hers was very much focused on, in some respects, she had a bit hard, she's a bit harder of a task than i do because you guys have like it feels like eight million freaking police services in the u.s correct yeah yeah 18 000 anyway well i was close exactly plus or minus plus or minus so in canada we have just over 200 which makes life a little bit easier for us. But so that's how she got started. The Canadian society started slightly differently. So remember I mentioned I sat on that Canadian council of the expert pound,

blah, blah, blah. Well, they invited this English guy. And on the first day, within the first five minutes, we got into a verbal spat. So we were arguing over, I think it was Egon Bittner's work from 1967 or so. I forget. But anyway, I was like, oh, who does this guy think he is? And then, of course, as is always the case for me anyway, we ended up being good friends.

And that was Peter Nehru to Cambridge. And so I was complaining to Peter privately in an email about the SADSAC State of Canadian Policing Research. And he sent me an email and said, I'm in Australia. We're starting the Australian Society of Evidence-Based Policing. Why don't you start the Canadian one? And then literally, I want to say like 15 minutes later, I got another email and it said, I've talked to the Australians. They like the idea. You should do it. Because everybody knows once the Australians are in, you're good, right? That's right. Exactly.

So I, that's so in April, 2015, I started the Canadian society and then, um, Cambridge hosts an event or, you know, not that, not this year due to COVID, but every year they do an evidence-based policing conference and both Renee and I were going to this. And of course, for whatever reason, we jet lagged at totally different times and didn't meet, but eventually we did. And in the early days of our organizations, it was fantastic because we had two two groups that were in the same boat um we were trying desperately to get the word out

there and after five years i would say that um both groups have been fairly successful and we've taken very different approaches so they've done they do a fantastic conference and this year it is virtual. And I believe everything is free and wide open. So anybody listening, just, you know, academics don't typically give stuff away for free. So y'all ought to hop on there. And we do tons of stuff on our website, materials that, you know, again, it's all free. So why not use it? website, materials that, you know, again, it's all free. So why not use it? There's my little plug. No, excellent. So that's good. So we are,

we're getting involved more. I was supposed to present at the American version and literally both of my Delta flights, you know, nothing, nothing is direct from Gainesville. It seems like you're going through Atlanta, but anyway, both flights were canceled, so I didn't make it. But so I plan to get more involved. And Renee did come in and speak to our group. We had about 400 executives come in, some law enforcement, mostly, of course, from the big retail chains, just to talk about the similarities and differences, but the evidence-based concept. And we like that to have somebody reinforcing what we've been trying to talk about. Really, this is about our 15th year talking about evidence-based practice and what that might mean. And then, but most importantly, I guess, conducting over 300

projects to help show them what in the world that means. So let's now phase into Crimcom. And what was the genesis of the idea? How are you all pulling it together? What's your goal, your objective, and how are you pulling it together? Oh, wow. I guess that's three or four questions. You'll probably have to remind me. Remember that I'm old and I'm forgetful.

remember that i'm old and i'm forgetful um so you uh when i first started can sab in the first couple years there was this one guy i'll never forget i think i had to block him on social media at one point he was so obnoxious um but here's the thing he was persistent he was obnoxious because he was persistent and his persistent message was this. If you want to increase uptake of research, academics have to change the way they speak. And I know that. But here's the thing. Let's think about this. So basically what you're telling me is it's not enough that I try to reform one change resistant or institution policing. But now you want me to also take on academia fantastic so i can get it from both sides um i was i wasn't prepared at that point to try to deal with the fact that academics often don't speak to, but they talk over other groups, including practitioners. And it took me a couple of years.

And what sort of got me going on this was we started creating products for CanSav to bridge the gap. And I found that it was actually a lot of fun creating educational products and programs to communicate you know I'm going to sound really like like nuts here but the joy and wonder of science I love this stuff and I'm you can't see it but I'm waving my hands like a maniac here I think research is cool I love finding out about new techniques and different ways that you can do things. To me, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson likes the cosmos, right? To me, research methods is like the cosmos. There's always something new to learn.

And so I got really into this and excited about trying to get other people excited about it. And I realized, you know what? to get other people excited about it. And I realized, you know what, I actually enjoy this a hell of a lot more than I enjoy sitting in a meeting trying to convince a bunch of chiefs to do something. Or doing my 15th millionth presentation on this is the fundamentals of evidence-based policing. It just wasn't doing it for me anymore. And we have this huge need to get other academics to start thinking about how they can take their research and increase the uptake. Because here's the thing.

I'm really hard on my own people, by the way. I admit that. And let's be honest. I would be a hypocrite if I didn't point out that I had been part of the problem here for 15 of the 20 years of my career. I didn't create products that could take my research and make them useful. I wrote books that three people read. I wrote journal articles that maybe one person read and the rest just cited because we have to cite stuff, but we don't actually read anything that we cite.

I wasn't helping. And so when I'm critical of other criminologists, it's also directed harshly at myself as well. I think that if we really want to stop whining about how, for example, retailers don't use our research on loss prevention, then we need to make our stuff accessible. And guess what? It can be fun. It can be witty. It can be interesting.

It can be visually appealing. It can be, you know, put a damn unicorn on it. I don't care. Just make it so that people want to access it. Huge points all. Yes, it's got to, somebody else has got to be, I like your term, uptaking, you know, ingesting information. But we take even more pleasure when they actually implement it or their version. Sometimes it'll happen.

Would you mind if, no, no, you please use whatever you think is valuable and please critique and change that that you don't think is and give us the feedback if you would. That's our ask. So I like that. So how does the, so we get to the objective. How did you all start to put it together? Where are you in the process and, and and where are you headed what do you want to see when the smoke clears well first of all i want to give you a big shout out um for doing this podcast because this podcast is an example the type of work that we want to see more criminologists doing so for those of you that are listening i've already warned reed that i'm going to be putting a link to this podcast on our Crimcom website, which is launching at the end of the month, as an example of how to do it right. So there you go. So a little shout out there.

How, literally, this is, you know, again, motivated by greed and rage. So I was mad about something. I don't even remember what set me off this time, but I thought, okay, this is it. We're going to, we're going to do something. And I had been following a lot of the scientists in science and technology, engineering and mathematics, the STEM people, they were doing cyclone and it looked cool and I thought why do social scientists suck so bad we don't do any of this cool stuff so I sent an email or actually messaged um Eileen Malm through Twitter and said and Eileen and I have known each other since undergraduate days like

we go that's how far back we go uh didn't fell out of you know fell out of touch because she went to the states and i stayed in canada but when i decided that i wanted to create a social science version of psycom i thought you know what when it whenever you're going to start something you have to recognize where your strengths are and where your weaknesses are and Ailey compliments me very well because Ailey's actually I am a hater I hate going to conferences I hate talking to people I hate schmoozing I hate a lot of stuff and she is the opposite of all those things warm charming and friendly everyone. So it was a no-brainer to send Eileen an email and say, we should do this together. And it also doesn't hurt that she's got fantastic ideas about how to do CrimCon. And literally, that's all we did. We sent each other messages

back. And then I launched a Twitter. We got a website we started. And we're just generating interest. Eileen just announced today, I don't know if you saw this, that she's going to be doing, and you better be warned because she might hit you up for this. She's going to be filming interviews with people who are criminologists that have tons of experience with doing media. And just coming up with different ways to get criminologists out of their shell. I know to the listeners, you probably can't tell from read,

but criminologists, social scientists are generally really introverted, weirdo, nutty people. We're kind of nerdy. And so the idea of getting them out there and putting their research out in fun, creative ways is scary. So we're trying to, and I'm actually modeling some of the behavior. So I started a video series on how to film yourself, in which I make every mistake, usually completely unintentionally, and then have to film another video to explain about how I fixed the mistake that I made in the previous video. I have filmed with my pajamas on. I have filmed with dogs howling in the background. All the things that

happen in real life to sort of say, guess what? You don't have to do this perfectly. You just have to do it. I don't even know. Did I answer your question? Yeah, you did. You did. And I love, no, I love the whole thing. So we got, no, we did there. We were able to tease out. No, we found the, what we were talking about that here's what you're trying to do. You're trying to make things accessible. You're trying to, you really are actually doing what you weren't excited about before, it sounds like initially, and that is, hey, we're not only here to help inform and influence law enforcement practitioners, but the same for the academics, you know, the researchers. And I like the dynamic duo, you know, the Canadian PhDs that have taken over North America, you and I, Lee, and how your joint forces and, you know, complimentary personalities and strengths and weaknesses.

Perfect. Perfect. So I do think you nailed it on that. So I, yeah, so this is good. This is fantastic. Kevin Tran, our crime science podcast producer's on. He has to listen to these things, but that's really one of his strengths as he's taken this LPRC website and then he's creating learning modules. And now with Diego,

a colleague doing that, and then these crime science podcasts, I think it's, I don't even know, we're probably at about 70 or more episodes. But he's got this multi, we would say mixed or multi-method, but different platforms are going out there, omni channels, as they say in retail, to get the word out to the practitioners, to help them understand, to engage and see, look, you don't have to wing it. And you know, this, you know, and I know listeners have heard of some of the genesis of this LPRC thing. It was not my idea. It was 21 years ago. We're all getting old, but, and the vice president at Target came to me and said, what research could you do that would help me get better? So boom, you know, I interviewed, ended up interviewing a hundred, over a hundred active criminal offenders that were attacking Target and similar chains,

had some really nice quality time, spent quality time with them in the field. Most were snowballed sampled, right? We got the first initial, it's not that professional, dumb and unlucky that were caught, but we were able to get out into the wild, talk to those that were not, learned an incredible amount. He and I spoke at the National we're caught, but we were able to get out into the wild, talk to those that were not learned an incredible amount. He and I spoke at the national retail Federation, a trade group. That's, you know, thousands of LP practitioners put it out. He made the call out nine other vice presidents joined him, Walmart, the Home Depot and so on and started this.

And they were basically very upfront. You know what? Everybody's benchmarking on everybody else. And we know that everybody's benchmarking on target and King Rogers, the VP at the time said, you know what? I'm not convinced. I know what the hell I'm doing. Sometimes, uh, we need some science here, guys, people are getting hurt and killed. We're losing billions of dollars in stuff every year. I think we can get better. So just these things are very similar stories.

Very similar. You fall into them. That's right. Right. That's it. Yes. Right place, right time. So anything else? And you and I have been interviewed by the media multiple times and they always ask, is there anything, any question that I did not ask you that I should have? Well, I actually appreciate that question better than I read Vanity Fair. And then when one of the questions they always ask is something about when you die. And I'm like, please, I would much rather answer your question. Yeah. My, my, the only other comment that i would make is this anybody that's

listening we're up on twitter at um calm crim because somebody took crim calm and then got their twitter suspended thank you very much for that what i would say is this if you are on twitter and you have ideas and suggestions for things that we're not doing that we could be doing, please contact us because guess what? We're not just talking to cops. This is criminology in general. So we want all kinds of practitioners. We want all kinds of different communities to say, hey, you know what? This is something that we could really use. Can you try this or can you look at that so that we can come up with solutions because we want to get research to you and we can't think up everything. So, you know, give us your bright thoughts.

That's excellent. That's excellent. So I want to thank you, Laura, for all your insights and your candidness, but it's, it's really helpful to see that there's a lot of like-minded thinking and the thinking out there is, hey, way too many people are being victimized. And there are things that we can do at all different levels and different ways

to reduce that victimization and to truly safeguard people and their places and their stuff. And, but most importantly, even if we do research on that, that research has got to be understandable. It's got to be usable and it's got to be accessible. And so, you know, kudos to you and ILE for generating that platform. That is, it's incredible. Took 2020. Maybe this was virus inspired,

That is, it's incredible. Took 2020. Maybe this was virus inspired, but whatever it takes, right? So thanks so much, Laura, for helping us out on crime science. Great. Thank you so much for having me.

All right. And to everybody else out there, thank you again for listening. And we do want your feedback, your insights. What can we do to get better, to get you the information you need and the way you need it from the LPRC or from the University of Florida. So signing off from Gainesville, this is Crime Science and Reed Hayes and Kevin Tran, our producer.

Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more Crime Science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science podcast are those of the authors

and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.