William Spelman

William Spelman (1957-2025) was an American criminologist and politician who served as a professor of public affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in urban and criminal justice policy. He earned an A.B. in political science from UCLA in 1977, an M.P.P. from the Kennedy School at Harvard in 1984, and a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard in 1988. Between 1984 and 1988, working at the Police Executive Research Forum, he was one of the principal architects of problem-oriented policing alongside Herman Goldstein and John E. Eck, and his research found that fast police response mattered in only about 10 percent of reported crimes. He later directed the Texas Institute for Public Problem-Solving and served on the Austin City Council from 1997 to 2000 and 2009 to 2015; his estimate that up to 25 percent of the 1990s crime drop could be attributed to prison expansion generated scholarly debate with researcher Bruce Western. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/