Lawrence W. Sherman is Director of the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing UK, and Wolfson Professor of Criminology Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, where he currently serves as Director of the Cambridge Police Executive Programme. Since beginning his career as a conscientious objector (to the war in Vietnam) serving as an analyst in the New York City Police Department, he has designed or led experiments in over 50 police agencies on four continents, and trained over 2,000 police officers and analysts in evidence-based policing.
A former President of the American Society of Criminology and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, he holds honorary degrees or medals from five universities and five learned societies. His research has focused on finding useful theories and effective policies for dealing with domestic violence, police corruption, gun crime, burglary, crime hot spots and harm spots, crime harm severity, police legitimacy, fatal shootings by police, crime victims, racial disparities in justice outcomes and other issues. His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in two cases. His 1998 Lecture on “Evidence-based policing” has attracted thousands of police in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada to form a Society of Evidence-Based Policing in their countries to promote the production and application of research for improving policing. He spent most of his career at the University of Maryland, founded the PhD program and then Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999-2010, and served as Director of Research at the National Police Foundation in 1979-85.