New article provides orientation to using implementation science in policing

Since the 2020 murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd brought nationwide calls for change amid concerns that prevailing practices were not grounded in evidence and created harm, policing has been in turmoil. Implementation science (IS) involves integrating effective and evidence-based innovations into routine practice in fields like health care.

Yet despite its potential, IS—and specifically, evidence-based policing (EBP)—remain vastly understudied and unused in police settings. In a new article, researchers provide an orientation to these issues to help practitioners and researchers involved with policing integrate IS into EBP.

The article was written by researchers at Temple University, Brown University, the University of Massachusetts, RTI International, Rhode Island Hospital, and George Mason University. It is published in Police Quarterly.

“Policing is ripe for new methods to examine how to change organizations and how to assess the adoption, implementation, and sustainability of evidence-driven reforms in police settings,” says Brandon del Pozo, assistant professor of medicine and of health services, policy and practice at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, as well as a research scientist at Rhode Island Hospital, who led the study.

In this article, researchers offer agendas for integrating IS into EBP as police seek to adopt evidence-informed practices that deliver public safety, respect rights, and boost community satisfaction and trust. IS promotes the use of metrics to assess how different police practices influence various outcomes, which provides police leadership with valuable data about their organization.

In the article, researchers describe the historical roots of EBP in an evidence-based approach to health care, demonstrate the commonalities that make IS as natural to policing as to medicine, and survey research on IS in policing. In addition, they adapt a conceptual model of IS to policing, present two IS frameworks available to researchers and practitioners of EBP, and introduce three types of hybrid implementation/effectiveness trials suitable for use in dynamic police settings, as well as case studies.

The article also highlights the importance of the effective de-implementation of substandard or problematic practices as a key aspect of IS and discusses how police practice that fully embraces evidence will be guided by contestable values and norms, with IS providing a way to reconcile this concern. The authors conclude with a research and practice agenda for integrating IS into EBP as police contend with calls to adopt evidence-informed practices, and they address counterinfluences in policing that hamper IS’s effectiveness.

“Evidence-based policing, which aims to identify and adopt police practices supported by scientific evidence, is frequently discussed in policing but has been slow to catch on in the United States,” explains Steven Belenko, professor of criminal justice at Temple University, who coauthored the study.

“De-escalation, procedural justice, hot spot policing, focused deterrence, and virtually any other body of evidence-based practices lend themselves to studying the constructs that ensure they can be implemented with enough fidelity to be effective and sustainable.”