Lawrence W. Sherman

Lawrence W. Sherman, born in 1949, is an American criminologist who pioneered the fields of experimental criminology and evidence-based policing. He launched the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment in 1981, the first randomized controlled trial testing the effect of arrest on repeat domestic violence offending, research that prompted twenty eight United States states to reform their domestic violence statutes. In 1998 he co-founded the Academy of Experimental Criminology with David P. Farrington, later chaired the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing, and founded the criminology department at the University of Pennsylvania.