Replicating & reproducing policing research

In science, replication and reproduction are critical for understanding the reliability of findings from scholarship that came before. When an independent group of researchers collects new data with the intention to replicate an earlier study and end up drawing similar conclusions, our certainty in knowing or understanding the phenomenon under scientific scrutiny grows; if, on the other hand, a replication fails to draw similar conclusions, what we know or understand about the phenomenon under scientific scrutiny is rightfully called into question (Lamal, 1990; Popper, 2005; Simons, 2014). As such, replication and reproduction in science is not only critical for knowledge creation, but for verifying what we know as well. Despite serving as critical pillars in the creation and verification of scientific knowledge, however, some fields do not engage in replication or reproduction efforts regularly. Psychology, for example, has been experiencing a so-called ‘replication crisis’ for the better part of the last two decades after researchers not only realized that few studies in the field have been replicated or reproduced, but when replications or reproductions were attempted, they were either not possible to conduct or failed to draw conclusions that were similar to their original investigations (Makel et al., 2012; Maxwell et al., 2015). The picture of replication and reproduction in criminology, and indeed the sub-field of policing, are no different. An investigation by McNeeley and Warner (2015), for example, found that between 2006 and 2010, just over 2% of published criminological studies were replications. And in policing, with exception to a small list of police practices that have received considerable empirical attention – such as hot spots policing (e.g., Braga et al., 2019) – policing scholarship has largely not faced the scrutiny of subsequent replication or reproduction efforts either. As such, whether replications or reproductions of existing policing scholarship can yield conclusions similar to their original investigations, let alone whether replications or reproductions of existing policing scholarship are even possible to begin with, remains to be seen. While an Editorial Introduction is not the appropriate venue to unpack the many reasons for why a replication crisis, too, exists in the field of policing, we would like to briefly touch upon one of these reasons: a bias toward publishing scholarship that is new, original, and innovative (Huey & Bennell, 2017). This bias is likely influenced by the fact that policing as an academic field is still ‘new’, so there is still a considerable amount of the profession that has been untapped for empirical investigation. Indeed, Discussion sections published in across policing journals – including this one – often contain a laundry list of related areas in need of future research because there is much more left to explore. Additionally, with the police possessing a broad net of roles and responsibilities that are not firmly defined (see e.g., Langton et al., 2022; Lum et al., 2022), the police as an institution and policing as a practice are constantly developing and evolving to meet the demand for their services with new opportunities for empirical investigation arising in tandem. To be clear: new, original, and innovative scholarship that broadens and expands our current understanding of policing is needed and should continue to be encouraged. However, policing scholars should not be putting all their eggs into the baskets of ‘originality’ and ‘innovation’, so-tospeak. As Lowenkamp et al. (2003, p. 353) explains, continuing to do so can be detrimental: