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Jim Bueermann

Senior Fellow and Advisory Board Member

Chief Jim Bueermann (Ret.) has spent more than 40 years in policing. From 1978 to 2011 he was a member of the Redlands (CA) Police Department, where he served in every unit within the department. In his last 13 years with the department he was the Chief of Police and Director of Housing, Recreation and Senior Services. He directed the implementation and strategic development of community policing in Redlands which included directing the consolidation of Housing, Recreation and Senior Services into the police department as a risk and preventative factor strategy for reducing crime and adolescent problem behavior. In 2000, this effort was recognized by the Innovations in American Government Award program (Harvard’s Kennedy School) as one of the 25 most innovative governmental programs in America.
After his retirement in 2011 he worked for a year for the USDOJ, National Institute of Justice as an Executive Fellow. In 2012 he was appointed the president of the National Police Foundation (NPF) - America's oldest non-partisan, non-profit police research organization. He retired from the Foundation in late 2018.

He was one of the first police chiefs to be inducted as an honorary fellow into the Academy of Experimental Criminology and the School of Behavioral Science at California State University, San Bernardino (CA). He was awarded the 2018 Distinguished Achievement Award in Evidence-Based Crime Policy by George Mason University’s Center for Evidence Based Crime Policy.

Chief Bueermann sits on advisory boards at Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology and George Mason University, is a member of the Artificial Intelligence and Police Technology Ethics Board at Axon, the leading manufacturer of police body-worn cameras and is a member of the Police Advisory Board at Lexipol, America’s leading public safety risk management company. Until his retirement from the NPF he sat on the FBI Academy National Academy Advisory Board and served as the research advisor to the California Police Chiefs Association. Appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder, he served on the US Department of Justice’s Science Advisory Board from 2015 until the Board was dissolved at the end of 2018. In addition, he was appointed to the National Academies of Sciences Working Group on Crime Trends and its Panel on Proactive Policing.

Chief Bueermann has worked extensively on advanced technology projects in policing that include mobile devices, crime mapping, community analysis, social networks, surveillance cameras, drones, sentiment analysis, data mining, geospatial tracking, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. He has also worked extensively in the field of evidence-based policing and prisoner reentry. He is a charter member of the Police Futurists International and a founding member of the American Society of Evidence Based Policing.

He has done extensive lecturing on a wide breadth of policing issues across the U.S. and internationally. He has worked extensively with local and national community and advocacy groups, bureaucrats and politicians on police reform issues. In addition, he has conducted national and international interviews with a wide breadth of media sources such as USA Today, the New York Times, the LA Times, CNN, NBC, CBS, Fox News, KNX News Radio, the BBC and numerous other international publications.

He holds a bachelor’s degree from California State University at San Bernardino and a master’s degree from the University of Redlands. In addition, he is a graduate of the FBI’s National Academy in Quantico, Virginia and the California Command College. In January 2019, Chief Bueermann founded Future Policing Strategies, a California- based consultancy that helps practitioners, policymakers and community members envision and advance policing for the future.

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