During August 2012, two major policing events took place at the University of New Haven.
Center for Advanced Policing Created
First, a research center was created which is called the Center for Advanced Policing. The center’s mission is to improve the police profession by working with police practitioners to produce and disseminate quality research on innovative police interventions and police management issues. The Center for Advanced Policing will partner with police practitioners from across the globe to conduct rigorous research on police practices.
The partnership between practice and researchers is especially important because, if both groups are working together, research findings have the potential of immediately impacting the policies and practices of the partner police departments. Publications produced by the Center will be found in both academic and trade outlets, to ensure their influence in the study and practice of police. The Center’s training and educational modules will provide a forum for debating and disseminating relevant police innovations; nurture new and on-going research relationships with practitioners; and teaching current and emergent police managers and administrators how to retrieve, digest, and apply cutting-edge, evidence-based innovations that serve their communities’ needs.
Innovations in Police Management Course
Last summer the University also saw the first annual Innovations in Police Management Course take place in the beautiful Lee Institute building. As a way to further the mission of the UNH Center for Advanced Policing, Drs. DeCarlo, Jenkins and Sedelmaier, along with a magnificently dedicated team of staff and students, put together what will be the first IPMC course for police administrators.
A little less than fifty police chiefs and upper level police administrators from across the United States attended this intensive sixty-hour course that took place over one week. The students in the course had the benefit of being taught by some of the leading minds in policing in the United States. David Kennedy lectured on his focused deterrence intervention, which has just been adopted as project Longevity by the State of Connecticut. The intervention has enjoyed great success nationally in its other incarnations known variously as Boston Cease-fire and High Point Drug Market Intervention. Daryl Stephens, former director of the Police Executive Research Forum and Chief (Ret.) of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department, lectured on the use of research to inform policing practice. Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute spoke to an enthralled audience of students on the NYPD’s role in the cultural and economic re-emergence of New York City. Retired NYPD Chief of Department, Louis Anemone, gave an insider’s view of the Compstat process and how this research based intervention made substantial contributions to an unprecedented drop in crime. In all, there were twenty-one lecturers that took part in the course and presented on varied topics in policing threaded together by the common theme of using research partnerships and data driven, evidence based methods to inform practice and increase the value of police to the communities that they serve.
The Future
The University of New Haven, Center for Advanced Policing has been awarded two significant federal grants. The first, a $350,000 award, will fund the expansion of the Innovations in Police Management course and the development of an evidence based curriculum that will be used as a national model of police management training. In addition, the center has been awarded a second grant to study the use of community mediators in assisting police to solve problems that have been resistant to traditional policing methods.
Under the aegis of Dean Mario T. Gaboury, The Center For Advanced Policing hopes to make continuing strides in policing research and partnerships. Center for Advanced Policing researchers will host a police innovations roundtable and present original research at two complete panels as well as make individual presentations at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Annual Conference in Dallas this year. Additionally, six University of New Haven students will team up with CAP researchers to present original collaborative research at next summer’s NEACJS.
