Lawrence Sherman

Lawrence W. Sherman is a founder of the fields of experimental criminology and evidence-based policing. Currently the Chair of the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing, his 1981 launch of the first randomized controlled trial of the effects of arrest on repeat offending, the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment, prompted 28 US states to change their domestic violence laws. It also led to hundreds more experiments in policing world-wide. In 1998 he founded the Academy of Experimental Criminology, and was elected its first president. He also published his first paper on evidence-based policing, which became the basis for the graduate course for police leaders that he taught at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology from 2007 through 2022. His teaching led his graduate students to create professional societies of evidence-based policing attracting members in the UK, Australia-New Zealand, the USA, Canada and the Netherlands. Most of those countries have also applied Sherman’s principles for the design of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index as a single metric for summarizing crime statistics.