Professor Lawrence Sherman

Lawrence W. Sherman is Chair of the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing Ltd. and Wolfson Professor of Criminology Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. After 15 years of leading the Police Executive Programme (M.St. course) at Cambridge University, he served from 2022 to 2024 as Chief Scientific Officer of the Metropolitan Police in London, and from 2024 to 2026 as CEO of Benchmark Cambridge Ltd., a global police reform company.

He has designed or led experiments in over 50 police agencies on four continents, and trained over 5,000 police officers and analysts in evidence-based policing. A former President of the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Experimental Criminology, and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, he holds honorary degrees or medals from five universities and five learned societies. His research has focused on finding useful theories and effective policies for dealing with domestic violence, police corruption, gun crime, burglary, crime hot spots and harm spots, crime harm severity, police legitimacy, fatal shootings by police, crime victims, racial disparities in justice outcomes and other issues. His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in two cases. His 1998 Lecture on “Evidence-based policing” led to the foundation of societies of evidence-based policing in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the US and Canada.