Here Be Dragons: burdens of knowledge and innovation in evidence-based policing

Evidence-based policing has reached a critical inflection point. While decades of evaluation studies have clarified which strategies reduce crime, this progress has created a ‘burden of knowledge’ that makes further innovation harder and exposes large areas of policing practice that remain weakly understood. The next stage of evidence-based policing must move beyond cataloging what works toward explaining how and under what conditions policing strategies generate intended and unintended outcomes. Such a model of scholarship would push the field toward a second-generation model of evidence-based policing that integrates implementation science, richer tracking of officer activity through technologies such as body-worn cameras and automated vehicle locators, and more diverse research methodologies. Taken together, these arguments outline a future in which evidence-based policing is sustained not only by experiments and rigorous quasi-experiments but by a wider knowledge infrastructure capable of guiding innovation in complex, resource-constrained environments.