Sponsored by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the IACP Research Advisory Committee (RAC) has established an annual research award in which three law enforcement agencies are recognized for exceptional research performed either with a research partner or exclusively by the agency. The purpose of the award is to recognize law enforcement agencies that demonstrate excellence in initiation, implementation, and research to improve police operations and public safety and to promote the establishment of effective research partnerships among law enforcement agencies and criminal justice researchers.

Past winners of the award include:

• Houston, Texas, Police Department, Robbery Division, used a randomized experiment to test four methods of presenting photo spreads to robbery witnesses. Overall, there were few meaningful differences between the methods in terms of filler selection rates (i.e., known selection errors) and suspect selection rates.
• Kent Police, United Kingdom, for KIRAT, which is a risk assessment tool and that strives to identify, from the available intelligence, those individuals most at risk of committing contact sexual offenses.
• California Commission on Police Officer Standards and Trainings (CalPOST) for their SAFE (Situation-Appropriate, Focused, and Educated) Driving Campaign aimed at saving lives and limiting costs by reducing the overall number of law enforcement traffic collisions.
• Boston, Massachusetts, Police Department for the Safe Street Teams Hot Spots Policing Research Initiative. This program involved teams of BPD officers assigned to violent crime hot spots and required to use community problem-solving techniques to address the underlying conditions and dynamics that cause violence to cluster in these small places.

Applications are now being accepted for the 2015 IACP Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award.

The deadline for submission is July 31, 2015. For detailed award application information, please visit the IACP/Laura and John Arnold Foundation Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award webpage, or contact us at [email protected].

To learn more about this award, and to see how other law enforcement agencies are addressing critical policing issues through research, we encourage you to visit IACP Research Advisory Committee page.