International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP)

NIJ recently celebrated a milestone birthday — 50 years of scientific efforts to advance the field of criminal justice. Now is a great time for us to look back at all that we’ve accomplished. You can read about some of our most groundbreaking research and accomplishments in the 50th Anniversary Issue of the NIJ Journal.

Given all we know, and still don’t know, about what works in criminal justice, the next 50 years are sure to shine more light on so many challenges we’re facing. So, it’s also time to envision our future.

Convening Police Leaders and Researchers to Learn Promising Practices and to Inform Research Agenda

Director Muhlhausen's prepared remarks at the NIJ-hosted Opioid Research Summit.

NIJ Director Muhlhausen

Next week, law enforcement leadership from around the world will attend the annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), in Philadelphia. On Saturday, October 21, NIJ will host our 4th annual Saturday Session around the theme “What Works and What Matters in Policing.”

The session will include three panels bringing together law enforcement and academic experts to discuss officer safety, technology, training, research, and other key issues.

“Most of what we do has never been tested,” pointed out Dr. Angela Hawken, before going on to explain how her organization, BetaGov, is working to change that through hundreds of rapid-implementation randomized controlled trials (RCTs). BetaGov is an innovation hub out of New York University that supports public sector practitioners conducting evaluations of their programs. Dr. Hawken has a deep research background and is a longtime advocate of a grassroots model of practitioner-led research.

Thank you, and good morning. My name is Howard Spivak and I am the Principal Deputy Director of the National Institute of Justice, NIJ.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, NIJ is the research, development, and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. We use science to inform and advance criminal justice policies and practices across the country. To do this, we provide objective and independent knowledge and tools to inform the criminal justice community, particularly at the state and local levels.

Recent events across the country have made calls for criminal justice reform commonplace, and law enforcement in particular has been called upon to increase standards of performance and advance the field as a profession. At the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), we are committed to supporting law enforcement in their efforts to advance policing, and we strongly believe that science can play a pivotal role in improving the administration of justice and ensuring that policies and practices are grounded in evidence.

In order to strengthen justice in the United States, we need to apply the expertise of all scientific disciplines to better respond to the challenges that criminal justice practitioners face every day. One of those challenges is finding the most effective and efficient analytics tools to map and forecast crimes.