For researchers to influence policy, their work must ultimately reach people making or implementing policy, and yet a gap often exists between the two communities. Rebecca Neusteter witnessed this gap when she was the director of research, policy, and planning at the New York Police Department (NYPD). Peer-reviewed journals often published articles about policing—and even policing in New York City—but her office did not have subscriptions to those journals and lacked easy, affordable access to the articles. What was available—typically abstracts written for fellow researchers—too often wasn’t useful to people in the department. It seemed to Neusteter like a missed opportunity for relevant research to inform practitioners. Ultimately, that led her to publish a brief, nontechnical digest of recent police-related research that conveyed important takeaways to readers who were hungry for information to help them do their jobs better, but who lacked the time to find and read the full articles.

After Neusteter launched the research digest at the NYPD, she brought the idea with her to the Vera Institute of Justice, a think tank based in New York City, when she became the director of its policing program. Since January 2018, the Institute has published quarterly volumes of the Emerging Issues in American Policing Digest, which covers the latest research on a range of pressing topics in criminal justice, including the effects of body-worn cameras and the relationship between crime clearance rates and the revenue collected by municipal police departments through fees, fines, and forfeitures.

On this week’s episode of On the Evidence, I discuss with Neusteter what she has learned so far about translating, packaging and sharing the latest research on policing.

We also have a condensed Q&A version of the conversation available here: https://www.mathematica-mpr.com/commentary/it-shouldnt-read-like-a-crime-novel-lessons-from-a-project-to-summarize-useful-research-for-police

The digest itself is available here: https://www.vera.org/publications/emerging-issues-in-american-policing-digest