Warping Time and Space: What It Really Takes to Do Action Research in Crime Control

Abstract

Nearly 10 years ago, I moved to New York. At that time, I’d been studying policing for some 20 years and been actively and operationally engaged in actual crime control work—in action research—for a decade. My entry into that world had been heavily contingent and essentially backward: low-level field research for the high-level Harvard Executive Session on Policing had gotten me into some of the worst areas of some of the most dangerous cities in the United States at the height of the crack epidemic. The violence, fear, and disorder I saw there had spurred an obsessive focus on the worst public safety issues in the country’s most troubled neighborhoods: homicide, gangs, guns, drug markets, domestic violence, and the like. That, in turn, had led to a long focus on policing: what it was, how it worked, and especially how it didn’t work and might be made to work better.