Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety (2008-2011)

  1. One Week in Heron City: A Case Study (Part A) and (Part B) 
    Teaching Notes available: click here to request
    by Malcolm K. Sparrow (9/09)
  2. The Changing Environment for Policing, 1985-2008 
    by David H. Bayley & Christine Nixon (9/10)
  3. Making Policing More Affordable; Managing Costs and Measuring Value in Policing 
    by George Gascón and Todd Foglesong (12/10) 
  4. Governing Science 
    by Malcolm K. Sparrow (1/11)
  5. Policing Science: Toward a New Paradigm 
    by David Weisburd and Peter Neyroud (1/11)
  6. The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism
    by David Alan Sklansky (3/11)
  7. Toward a New Professionalism in Policing
    by Christopher Stone and Jeremy Travis (3/11)
  8. Moving the Work of Criminal Investigators Towards Crime Control 
    by Anthony A. Braga, Edward A. Flynn, George L. Kelling, and Christine M. Cole (3/11)
  9. Police Discipline: A Case for Change
    by Darrel W. Stephens (6/11)

Papers from the PAST Executive Session (1985-1991)

Overview

The current Executive Session with equally high ambitions. The new Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety brings together today's established police executives with those rising to take their place. Joining these leaders in policing are local, state, and federal officials concerned with public safety as well as prominent academics and select leavenors. Together, the members of the Executive Session will elaborate the strategies and frameworks needed for policing in this new century.

The Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety is funded by the National Institute of Justice, as part of the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) at the US Department of Justice.

Attendance at the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety is by invitation only.

Members

  • Chief Anthony Batts, Oakland Police Department
  • Professor David Bayley, Distinguished Professor, School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany
  • Dr. Anthony Braga, Senior Research Fellow, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, Harvard Kennedy School; Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University
  • Chief William J. Bratton, Los Angeles Police Department (retired)
  • Chief Ella Bully-Cummings, Detroit Police Department (retired)
  • Ms. Christine Cole (Facilitator), Executive Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, Harvard Kennedy School
  • Commissioner Edward Davis, Boston Police Department
  • Chief Ronald Davis, East Palo Alto Police Department
  • Chief Edward Flynn, Milwaukee Police Department
  • Colonel Rick Fuentes, Superintendent, New Jersey State Police
  • Chief George Gascón, San Francisco Police Department
  • Mr. Gil Kerlikowske, Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy
  • Chief Cathy Lanier, Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department
  • Ms. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Visiting Scholar, New York University
  • Professor Tracey Meares, Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law, Yale Law School
  • Chief Constable Peter Neyroud, Chief Executive, National Policing Improvement Agency (UK)
  • Christine Nixon, Chair, Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction & Recovery Authority (Australia)
  • Chief Richard Pennington, Atlanta Police Department (retired)
  • Mayor Jerry Sanders, City of San Diego
  • Professor David Sklansky, Professor of Law, Faculty Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
  • Mr. Sean Smoot, Director & Chief Legal Counsel, Police Benevolent & Protective Association of Illinois
  • Professor Malcolm Sparrow, Professor of Practice of Public Management, Harvard Kennedy School
  • Chief Darrel Stephens, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (retired)
  • Professor Christopher Stone, Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice, Harvard Kennedy School
  • Mr. Jeremy Travis, President, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
  • Mr. Rick VanHouten, President, Fort Worth Police Association
  • Professor David Weisburd, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, Director, Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University and Distinguished Professor, Department of Administration of Justice, George Mason University
  • Dr. Chuck Wexler, Executive Director, Police Executive Research Forum

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Overview of Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety

Police agencies across the United States face a frightening array of new challenges, yet those agencies are equipped with organizational and strategic frameworks from an earlier era. What's more, they face these challenges at a time of high expectations established over a decade or more of declines in crime, and tight budgets at every level of government. The challenges themselves are many: Some flow from new threats of international terrorism, others involve new forms of crime made possible by the internet and other technologies, and still others are as intangible yet galvanizing as rising fear of crime and feelings of insecurity. 

A generation ago, policing faced a similar set of challenges. The answers in that era were found through the Executive Session on Policing, jointly sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the Harvard Kennedy School starting in 1983. The participants in that Executive Session became the police leaders of choice for the next two decades.

The papers published as a series called Perspectives on Policing during the course of the last Executive Session became essential reading in thousands of departments and executive offices across the country. The overarching strategy crystallized in that Executive Session - community policing - has become the dominant paradigm for policing across the nation and around the world.

Our current Session has similarly high ambitions.  The Session meetings provoked scholars and practitioners to collaborate on a new series of papers that hope to influence the field in the way the earlier series did.  The series of papers from the 21st century Executive Session is called New Perspectives in Policing

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What is an Executive Session?

An Executive Session is a convening of individuals of independent standing who are prepared to take joint responsibility for rethinking and improving society's responses to an issue over two, three, or four years. It is more than just a series of conferences. The people invited to be members of an Executive Session might be thought of as the Board of Directors, if there were one, for the issue. 

Read more about our Executive Sessions

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