The Reducing Crime podcast
With over 250,000 downloads and plays, this monthly podcast features conversations with influential thinkers in the police service and leading crime and policing researchers working to advance public safety. Often amusing, often enlightening, always informative. Host Professor Jerry Ratcliffe chats to a range of international guests covering policing, crime prevention, practical criminology, and public safety policy.
The podcast is available directly from SoundCloud or Apple podcasts, where you can also subscribe to get access to new podcasts when they become available. You can also find the podcast in most dedicated podcast outlets, such as Stitcher, and Spotify. Follow @_reducingcrime on twitter for updates on the latest episodes and news.
Also, if you are an instructor or lecturer then send a DM on twitter to @_reducingcrime with your work/university email address for a free spreadsheet with multiple choice questions for every podcast episode. Each episode also has transcripts (see below). Quick links and a concise list of episodes are available.
More episodes: 1-20 | 21-40 | 41-60 | 61-current
#77: Jason Potts
Jason Potts is the chief of the Las Vegas Department of Public Safety, and the president of the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing. Potts discusses the challenges of implementing evidence-based policing practices as a police leader, including getting buy-in from frontline officers, middle managers, and elected officials. In this chat, he emphasizes the importance of developing a culture that embraces ambiguity, risk, and failure as part of the process of implementing evidence-based reforms.
Jason Potts was sworn in July 11, 2022, as the sixth chief for the city of Las Vegas Department of Public Safety, providing the public with law enforcement and detention services. Potts has more than 26 years of law enforcement experience. He began his policing career with the Vallejo Police Department in Northern California, where he moved up the ranks to captain, leading the Operations Bureau, Investigations Bureau and Emergency Services Unit. Potts earned a master’s degree in Criminology, Law, and Society from the University of California, Irvine. Potts serves on the Executive Board for the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing, is a member of the Council on Criminal Justice (violent crime working group), as well as a Futures Policing Institute, and National Policing Institute fellow.
#76: Thaddeus Johnson
A former police officer from Memphis Tennessee, Dr Thaddeus Lateef Johnson is now an assistant professor of Criminal Justice & Criminology at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice. We discuss his career to date, and his recent study where he and his colleagues examined the effects of unionization and collective bargaining on police use of force. The paper discussed is available here.
Thaddeus Johnson is an expert in the area of policing, crime control, and governance equity. A former officer from Memphis, Tennessee, he is now an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice & Criminology at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice. His research has addressed police lethality and coercion, street violence, recidivism, and predictive bias. Among his many published works he also co authored the 2019 book Deviance among physicians: Fraud, violence, and the power to prescribe. Johnson received his PhD in Criminal Justice & Criminology from Georgia State University and his Masters in Criminal Justice from the University of Tennessee–Chattanooga.
#75: Ian Adams
In this highly colorful (language-wise) episode of the podcast, Dr Ian Adams, talks about his former policing career, his move to academia, and his recent policy related paper "Fuck: The Police". In this work, he explores the range of ways that police officers use the word, and it's many variations, and how or even if, police departments should regulate the use of profanity in officers' behavior.
The language throughout is highly colorful, and you probably shouldn't listen with kids in the car.
Ian Adams started his career in corrections and then as a police officer in Utah for a decade before becoming Executive Director for the state’s Fraternal Order of Police, while simultaneously studying for his PhD at the University of Utah. In 2022, he graduated and joined the University of South Carolina where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
He is an NIJ LEADS academic, has been a guest lecturer at the FBI National Academy, and has published prolifically, with over 40 peer-reviewed articles in such respected journals as Criminology & Public Policy, Police Quarterly, and the Journal of Experimental Criminology.
#74: Grant Edwards
Grant Edwards, a retired commander from the Australian Federal Police, shares his experiences and struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in this episode. He discusses the cumulative effect of trauma in policing and the importance of mental health management. Grant emphasizes the need for a mentally safe workplace and a culture that supports vulnerability and open communication. He suggests that organizations should prioritize mental health literacy and provide resources for self-care, such as movement and exercise.
If you need support for any of the topics discussed in this episode, see our support page.
In 2019 Grant retired from the AFP after 34 years’ service, having worked in everything from international drug trafficking, intelligence, and major organized crime to human trafficking and child exploitation. He worked overseas in Timor-Leste and Afghanistan, overseeing the AFP’s contribution to rebuilding the Afghan Police. Grant also spent seven years in the US, culminating as the AFP’s liaison officer in Washington DC covering law enforcement engagement across North, Central and South America.
Grant represented Australia in Athletics, Bobsleigh and the Scottish Highland Games, and competed in the 1999 World’s Strongest Man competition in Malta. He holds a Guinness World Record for single-handedly pulling a 201-ton steam locomotive.
#73: Cynthia Lum
A former police officer and detective, Dr. Cynthia Lum is Distinguished University Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University, and directs their Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. She is an appointed member of the National Academies of Sciences Committee on Law and Justice, an appointed trustee to the Council on Criminal Justice, and a board director for the National Policing Institute. We talk about evidence-based policing, implementing innovation, and how to overcome some of the barriers to progress.
Cynthia is a leading authority on evidence-based policing, an approach that advocates that research, evaluation, and scientific processes should have “a seat at the table” in law enforcement policymaking and practice. Lum has studied and written extensively about patrol operations and police crime prevention activities, police technology, investigations and detective work, and evidence-based crime policy. Additionally, she has developed numerous tools and strategies to translate and institutionalize research into everyday law enforcement operations. She is the Editor in Chief of Criminology & Public Policy, the American Society of Criminology’s flagship policy journal, and the founding Editor in Chief of Translational Criminology Magazine.
#72: John Mina
John Mina, the Sheriff of Orange County, Florida, discusses his background in policing, including his time as Chief in Orlando, and his decision to run for Sheriff. He talks about the benefits and challenges of being an elected law enforcement official and the unique role of the Sheriff. Mina also shares his views on recruitment and retention, the relationship between policing and the media, and the issues facing sheriffs and police chiefs alike, such as recruitment, violent crime, homelessness, mental health, and officer wellness.
John has lived in the county for more than 30 years, starting with the Orlando Police Department, where he rose through the ranks and was appointed Chief of Police in 2014. Prior to that, he was a Military Police Officer with the 82nd Airborne Division.
Sheriff Mina is a member of the Major County Sheriff’s, Florida Sheriff’s, Central Florida Criminal Justice, and the Florida SWAT Associations.
His is also a member of the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force, has testified before the United States Congress, and spoken at the White House on law enforcement matters.
John serves on the Board of Directors for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and is also on the boards of the local Boys and Girls Club, YMCA, United Way, and the Camaraderie Foundation.
#71: Peter Neyroud
After an illustrious career in British policing, Dr Peter Neyroud is now a professor at Cambridge University and director of their Police Executive Program. Peter is the Co-Chair of the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Coordinating Group, was awarded the Queens Police Medal in 2004, and in 2011 was made CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. We talk about the leadership challenges around police firearm use, being called on by the prime minister to review police leadership and training, and leaky feeders.
Peter Neyroud rose through the ranks of Hampshire and West Mercia police to become the Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police. He then set up and became the CEO of the National Policing Improvement Agency – NPIA - at what you will hear was a tumultuous time in British Policing. In 2010, at the behest of then British Prime Minister David Cameron, he carried out a "Review of Police Leadership and Training" which led to the establishment of what is now the College of Policing. A professor with extensive experience and leadership in evidence-based policing, he took over from Larry Sherman as the Director of the M.St. Police Executive Programme, one of the leading police leadership programs in the world.
#70: Keith Humphreys
Keith Humphreys, OBE is the Esther Ting Memorial Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Research Career Scientist at the Veteran’s Administration Health Services Research Center in Palo Alto and an Honorary Professor of Psychiatry at King's College, London.
We discuss the dangers of synthetic opioids, the role of academics in advising government, and the differences between drug policies in San Francisco and Portugal.
Keith Humphreys has been extensively involved in the formation of public policy, having served on a White House Commission during the Bush Administration and as Senior Policy Advisor in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Obama. He created the Stanford Network on Addiction Policy and also leads the Stanford-Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis. With co-authors, his book "Drug Policy and the Public Good" won the 2010 British Medical Association's Award for Public Health Book of the Year. His service to addiction-related services and scholarship was recognized by Queen Elizabeth when she made him an Honorary Officer in the Order of the British Empire in 2022.
#69: Alex Piquero
Alex Piquero, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Miami, discusses his career in criminology, including his time as the director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. He talks about the importance of mentors, the role of universities in challenging and provoking ideas, and the need for academics to engage in public intellectualism. Piquero also discusses challenges he faced in government and the risks around evidence-based advocacy. He concludes with excellent advice for new scholars.
Alex Piquero is an internationally recognized quantitative criminologist with a prolific publishing rate. He has authored more than 500 articles and several books, examining criminal careers, criminal justice policy, crime prevention, and the intersection of race/ethnicity and crime. He is a Fellow of both the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
In 2020, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology of the American Society of Criminology.
You can learn more about Alex's scholarship through his Google Scholar page.
#68: Jim Rose
Jerry chats with his mate Jim Rose, the real-life white cop from the movie BlacKkKlansman. Jim is a former narcotics officer and current senior advisor to the US State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. He discusses his experience infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan as a young narc officer and his subsequent work in Central America. He also talks about why proactive leadership and institutionalizing best practices can help implement intelligence-led policing and community-oriented strategies in countries like El Salvador.
While Jim Rose’s law enforcement journey started in Colorado, in the Colorado Springs police department, the majority of his career was spent with the DEA – the Drug Enforcement Administration – in Central and South America. He now serves as a Senior Advisor to INL, which is the US State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). He is the Regional Gang Advisor for Central America, based at the US Embassy in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador.
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#67: Beatriz Magaloni
Beatriz Magaloni is a professor of international relations and political science at Stanford University. She discusses her work on community policing with a specific ‘pacifying police unit’ in Brazil's most dangerous favelas, focusing on the different types of control exerted by criminal organizations in these areas. She also explains the challenges faced by police in these environments and the importance of understanding the relationships between criminal groups, the community, and collusion with the state … and the police.
Professor Magaloni is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman-Spowgli Institute for International Studies at Standford University. Her work focuses on state repression, police, human rights, and violence. She also founded the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab within Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Beatriz has spent years studying poverty, government, policing and community relations in central and South America, and in particular Mexico and Brazil. She has a PhD from the Department of Political Science at Duke University.
The paper referred to in the podcast episode, is available here, and published in the American Political Science Review, volume 114, issue 2.
#66: David Weisburd
David Weisburd is a Distinguished Professor at George Mason University and the Executive Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. He is also the Walter E. Meyer Professor Emeritus of Law and Criminal Justice at the Hebrew University Faculty of Law in Jerusalem. He is also the Chief Science Adviser to the National Policing Institute. We discuss the evolution of his career, hotspots policing, procedural justice, and his advice for new scholars.
David Weisburd is one of the most famous criminologists in the world, and an expert in the geography of crime, police innovation, and experimental criminology. He is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, he was the Chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Proactive Policing, and he was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2010. He has also won the Jerry Lee Award for Lifetime Achievement in Experimental Criminology, the Sutherland Award from the American Society of Criminology for "outstanding contributions to the discipline of criminology", and in 2015 was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize.
#65: Martin Bouchard
Martin Bouchard is a professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University. His work focuses on the social organization of illicit markets, as well as the role of social networks in a variety of criminal enterprises. In this episode, he talks about the application of social network analysis to understanding gangs and organized crime groups, concepts of social network analysis, including dyads and brokers, and discusses how police can use this understanding to strategically target and disrupt criminal activity.
At Simon Fraser University, Martin leads the Crime and Illicit Networks Lab. He has published extensively in the area of social organization of illicit markets, as well as the role of social networks in a variety of criminal enterprises. This includes understanding gang violence, and the effect of gang affiliation on individuals getting into, and out of, criminal lifestyles. He received his PhD in 2006 from the Université de Montréal, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Maryland. He has worked with numerous governmental and law enforcement agencies in Canada and on Canadian organized crime groups, and in 2019 he received the Western Society of Criminology Fellows Award for individuals who have made important contributions to the field of criminology.
#64: Dave Cowan
Detective Superintendent Dave Cowan of Australia's Victoria Police talks about his journey into evidence-based policing (EBP) and his experiments, such as a focused deterrence trial and a trial using behavioral science during COVID. He also discusses the importance of better communication and application of research in policing, and the challenges and progress in implementing EBP within policing. He emphasizes the importance of leadership, curiosity, and innovation in driving change.
Detective Superintendent Dave Cowan is the commanding officer of the Organized Crime Division for Australia’s Victoria Police.
He has a Masters in Applied Criminology from Cambridge University, has completed the Senior Executives Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of government, and has been the President of the Australia and New Zealand Society of Evidence-Based Policing since 2019. Dave is also this year’s recipient of the Australian Institute of Criminology’s Gold award for Crime and Violence Prevention.
In the episode, Dave discusses Operation Capesso. Here is a link to further information on that innovative approach to focused deterrence.
#63: Seth Williams
Seth Williams was a groundbreaking Philadelphia District Attorney and the first Black District Attorney in the State of Pennsylvania. He attended West Point, transferred to, and graduated from Penn State University, and Georgetown Law School, was a major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the US Army, and in November 2009 with more than 75% of the vote, was elected District Attorney in Philadelphia. He was on track for a third term, when in 2017 he was convicted in federal court on a charge related to the receipt of undisclosed gifts. We talk about his incarceration, and the role of the District Attorney.
Seth attended West Point, transferred to, and graduated from Penn State University, and Georgetown Law School, was a major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the US Army, and in November 2009 was elected District Attorney in Philadelphia, becoming the first black District Attorney in the state of Pennsylvania.
He initiated a number of high-profile prosecutions but in 2017 the FBI announced a 23-count indictment charging him with bribery, extortion, and wire fraud in connection with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of concealed bribes and undisclosed gifts while as district attorney. In a plea deal, he subsequently pleaded guilty to one charge. He was sentenced to 5 years, ultimately serving 34 months in federal prison.
Link: Implementation guide to the Philadelphia pilot geographic prosecution model.
#62: Ron Clarke
Ron Clarke is a criminological legend, the originator of the situational approach to preventing crime, and he co-developed the rational choice perspective with Derek Cornish. He led the UK Home Office Research and Planning Unit before going on to spend a long and storied academic career at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Ron is the founding editor of Crime Prevention Studies and authored or co-authored more than 300 books, monographs and papers. A critic of mainstream criminology, he nonetheless was awarded the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2015.
Before moving to the US in 1984, Ron spent a decade and a half in British government’s criminological research department, the Home Office Research and Planning Unit, rising to position of Director in 1982. Clarke is best known for his development of the theory and application of situational crime prevention, although he also played a major part in the establishment of the British Crime Survey. He was among the first to realize that the secret to crime prevention wasn’t often-unrealistic broad societal changes but the careful and detailed analysis of the micro-environments associated with crime, followed with targeted interventions.
Note: Here is a link to the Jerry Lee lecture I mention in the introduction.
#61: Terry Cherry
Terry Cherry is a recruiting officer with the Charleston (South Carolina) police department, NIJ LEADS scholar, and has been recognized as an IACP 40 under 40 up-and-coming leader in policing. In her 11 years with the Charleston department she has also worked patrol, investigations, and started a problem-solving unit. Working with academic colleagues she has taken a more evidence-based approach to her recruitment work and we discuss solutions to the current crisis facing police recruitment and retention.
Terry has 11 years with the Charleston, South Carolina police department and has served in patrol, investigations and problem solving. She now works in their recruiting team. Terry has been published in the academic journal Police Practice and Research, Police Chief magazine, and she featured in a recent article in The Atlantic.
She is a National Institute of Justice LEADS scholar, was a 2020 IACP 40 Under 40 up-and-coming leader, and was awarded the 2021 Ina Mae “Tiny” Miller Award from NAWLEE, the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives. she has worked with scholars such as Geoff Alpert, Kyle MacLean, and Jeremy Wilson.
The Jerry Lee lecture I mention at the beginning can be seen at this link.
More episodes: 1-20 | 21-40 | 41-60 | 61-current