Evidence-Based Policing
Affiliated Scholars
Cynthia Lum, PhD.
Program Co-Director
Dr. Cynthia Lum is the Director and Associate Professor of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. She researches primarily in the area of policing. Her works in this area have included evaluations of policing interventions for crime prevention effectiveness, examining place-based determinates of street-level police decision-making, understanding the relationship between technology and policing, and assessing airport security efforts by the TSA. With Dr. Christopher Koper and Cody Telep (both of George Mason University) she has developed the Evidence-Based Policing Matrix, a translation tool designed for police practitioners to better institutionalize and utilize research on “what works” in policing into their strategic and tactical portfolio. (Curriculum Vitae)
Christopher Koper, Ph.D.
Program Co-Director
Dr. Christopher Koper is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. He was formerly the Director of Research for the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a policing membership and research organization based in Washington, D.C. He holds a Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland and has over 20 years of experiencing conducting criminological research at PERF, the University of Pennsylvania, the Urban Institute, the RAND Corporation, the Police Foundation, and other organizations, where he has written and published extensively on issues related to firearms, policing, federal crime prevention efforts, research methods, juvenile delinquency, and other topics. Dr. Koper has served as a lead or senior-level investigator for numerous projects funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, including Congressionally-mandated assessments of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban and the federal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. He is also the co-creator of the Evidence-Based Policing Matrix, a tool used by organizations including the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance and the National Policing Improvement Agency of the United Kingdom for visualizing research results on police effectiveness and translating those results for practitioners and policymakers. Dr. Koper is aresearch associate of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University and a former scholar-in-residence of the Firearm and Injury Center at Penn (a center of the University of Pennsylvania Health System). (Curriculum Vitae)
Jim Bueermann
Senior Fellow
Jim Bueermann is former Chief of Police in the Redlands, CA Police Department. He worked for the Redlands Police Department from 1978 until his retirement in June 2011, serving in every unit within the department. He was appointed Police Chief and Director of Housing, Recreation and Senior Services in May 1998. He holds a bachelor’s degree from California State University at San Bernardino and a master’s degree from the University of Redlands. In early 2007, he was named Honorary Fellow to the Academy of Experimental Criminology. (Curriculum Vitae)
Julie Grieco, MA
Program Co-Coordinator
Julie Grieco is a doctoral student in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. She received an MA in Forensic Psychology from Marymount University in 2009. Her research interests include evidence-based police practices, crime and place, research methods and systematic reviews. Julie is currently a Graduate Research Assistant in the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. (Curriculum Vitae)
Joshua Hinkle, Ph.D. (Georgia State University)
Dr. Joshua Hinkle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Georgia State University. He received his doctoral degree in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland in the summer of 2009 after completing his Master’s degree in the department in May 2005. His research interests include policing and criminological theory. Since August of 2007 he has worked under Dr. David Weisburd as the project director on an NIJ funded randomized experimental evaluation of broken windows policing in three cities in California. (Curriculum Vitae)
Brian Lawton, Ph.D.
Dr. Brian Lawton is an assistant professor in the Administration of Justice Department at George Mason University. He received his B.A. from Rhode Island College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Temple University. Dr. Lawton’s research interests include crime and place as well as police discretion and accountability. His current research projects have included evaluations of targeted policing efforts in Dallas and Houston, as well as an examination of citizens’ perceptions of police efforts and fear of crime in Houston, TX. (Curriculum Vitae)
Stephen Mastrofski, PhD.
Stephen Mastrofsk is University Professor in the Department of Administration of Justice, and Director of the Center for Justice Leadership and Management at George Mason University. His research interests include police discretion, police organizations and their reform, and systematic field observation methods in criminology. Professor Mastrofski currently leads a team of researchers that supports the transformation of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service. He is also engaged in research projects on measuring the quality of street-level policing, measuring the lifecourse of police organizations, and assessing the impact of legitimacy-based policing. Professor Mastrofski has been a Visiting Fellow at the National Institute of Justice and the Office of Community Oriented Policing, and he has consulted for a variety of public and private organizations. In 2000 he received the O.W. Wilson Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences for education, research, and service on policing. He served on the National Academy of Sciences panel on Police Services and Practices that published a book entitled Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence. In 2008 he and his coauthors received the Law and Society Association’s article prize for their article on Compstat.
Linda Merola, Ph.D., JD
Dr. Linda M. Merola is an Assistant Professor of Administration of Justice at George Mason University. Professor Merola’s academic interests relate to civil liberties, constitutional law, the judiciary, public opinion and legal psychology. She has published articles concerning terrorism, civil liberties, the judiciary, and various topics related to the public’s interaction with and knowledge of the criminal justice system. Professor Merola received a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, where she was awarded the Harold N. Glassman Dissertation Award for the most accomplished dissertation in the social science disciplines. In addition, Professor Merola holds a J.D. from the George Washington University Law School, where she served on The George Washington Law Review and was admitted to the Virginia State Bar Association. Professor Merola has also received advanced training in research methodology, statistics and survey/experimental methods through the National Science Foundation and Duke University, as well at the University of Michigan as a recipient of the Miller Scholarship.
Cody Telep, ABD
Program Co-Coordinator
Cody Telep is a doctoral student in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. He was a Presidential Fellow at George Mason from 2008-2011 He received an MA from the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland in 2008. His research interests include innovations in policing, police education, and evidence-based policy. His recent work includes a Campbell Collaboration systematic review on the effectiveness of problem-oriented policing, the Evidence-Based Policing Matrix, and a study of the impact of police officer education on abuse of authority attitudes (Curriculum Vitae)
Travis Taniguchi, Ph.D. (Police Foundation)
Travis Taniguchi is a Senior Research Associate at the Police Foundation. He received his B.S. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Chaminade University of Honolulu and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Temple University. His research interests include program and policy evaluation, crime and place, street gang dynamics, and the spatial distribution of drug markets. He is dedicated to expanding and evaluating the partnerships between researchers and practitioners. His publications can be found in Justice Quarterly and the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. (Curriculum Vitae)
Nigel Waters, Ph.D.
Nigel Waters obtained a First Class, Honours BA from Cambridge University in 1972 and his MA and PhD from the University of Western Ontario in 1973 and 1977, respectively. He joined the Geography Department at the University of Calgary in 1975 and was promoted to Full Professor in 1990. He was nominated twice for the Master and Superior Teaching Awards, and has conducted numerous studies in GIS, modelling, spatial analysis and transportation geography. He is a former President of the Western Canadian Association of Geographers, and an associate editor of GeoWorld where he is also a regular contributor of the Edge Nodes column. At the University of Calgary he was the Founding Director of the Masters in GIS Program and of the Transportation Theme School and Transportation Studies Major. Prior to leaving the University of Calgary (where he is now Professor Emeritus of Geography) he was participating in two GEOIDE research projects, leading a SSHRC Project and was working with the Nobel Peace Prize winning Carter Center in Atlanta as the Technical Director of the Mapping the Media in the Americas Project (www.mediamap.info). In June 2007 he was appointed Professor of Geography and Director of the Center of Excellence for Geographic Information Science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
David Weisburd, Ph.D.
Dr. David Weisburd holds a joint appointment as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University and also as the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at the Hebrew University Law School in Jerusalem. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Police Foundation in Washington, DC, and Chair of their Research Advisory Committee. He is the 2010 recipient of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. In addition to his experimental and evaluation work on criminal justice interventions, Dr. Weisburd’s key research interests include the criminology of places, policing, statistical methodology, and white collar crime. He is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and of the Academy of Experimental Criminology. Professor Weisburd is a member of the National Research Council Committee on Crime Law and Justice, the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group, the Science Advisory Board (OJP) and of the National Institute of Justice/Harvard University Executive Session in Policing. Professor Weisburd is author or editor of more than twenty books and more than one hundred scientific articles. He is editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology and serves on a number of journal editorial boards including Evaluation Review, the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. (Curriculum Vitae)
James Willis, Ph.D.
James Willis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. He earned his B.A. in Administration of Justice from The Pennsylvania State University (summa cum laude and with honors) and Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University. At Yale he was a Jacob K. Javits fellow and the recipient of a Henry Hart Rice Fellowship. His dissertation examining the transportation of British convicts to America and Australia was awarded the Sociology Department’s Marvin B. Sussman prize for the best dissertation submitted in the past two years. Willis has published on COMPSTAT, community policing, and punishment and has received research grants from the Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services (COPS), National Science Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2008 he and his coauthors, Stephen Mastrofski and David Weisburd, received the Law and Society Association’s article prize for a paper they published on COMPSTAT. He is currently the principal investigator on a project examining the relationship between COMPSTAT and community policing. (Curriculum Vitae)