Evidence based policing has become a key perspective for practitioners and researchers concerned with the future of policing. This book provides both a review of where we stand today with evidence based policing, and consideration of emerging trends and ideas likely to be important in the future of evidence based policing. It includes comparative and international contributions, as well as researcher and practitioner perspectives. While emphasizing traditional evidence based methods and approaches, the book also identifies barriers to the advancement of evidence based policing. It also expands the vision of evidence based policing by critically examining ethical and moral concerns and questions. The book’s main focus is not on what has to happen in police agencies to advance EBP, but rather on an issue that has received far less attention - the science that is necessary to produce for EBP to be successfully integrated into policing.

Evidence-based policing (EBP) is perhaps the most significant police reform movement of the last 30 years. Most notable for identifying what does or does not work, and for trying to integrate science into policing, much of EBP’s focus remains on program evaluation methods and investigating crime prevention strategies. This vision for policing often characterizes the craft of police work as an obstacle rather than a useful contributor to science. This is changing, as proponents of EBP begin to embrace a wider variety of methods to assess a broader range of outcomes, and to treat both science and experience as necessary elements of successful police reform. In this chapter, we recommend that EBP focus more attention on assessing the choices that patrol officers make in their everyday encounters with the public. Drawing on a case study of a neighbor dispute, we show how EBP could benefit from listening to practioners and learning what their rich experiences have taught them about how best to respond. We also suggest ways that research might help generate knowledge on the essential normative or moral questions that characterize street-level discretion, and thus combine knowledge about what works with knowledge about doing the right thing.

In our 2011 paper on Police Science (Weisburd & Neyroud, 2011) we set our belief that a radical reformation of the role of science in policing will be necessary if policing is to become an arena of evidence-based policies. In this revised and updated version of our paper, we reinforce our argument that the advancement of science in policing is essential if police are to retain public support and legitimacy, cope with recessionary budget reductions, and deal with the myriad of problems that encompass modern police responsibilities. We outline a proposal for a new paradigm that changes the relationship between science and policing. This paradigm demands that the police adopt and advance evidence-based policy and that universities become active participants in the everyday world of police practice. But it also calls for a shift in ownership of police science from the universities to police agencies. Such ownership would facilitate the implementation of evidence-based practices and policies in policing and would change the fundamental relationship between research and practice. We add in this paper a new emphasis to our model that focuses attention to moral and ethical elements of research and practice that are an essential part of science in universities and must become a key element of EBP.

Writing the paper is one of the most challenging aspects of a project, and learning to write the report well is one of the most important skills to master for the success of the project and for sustaining a scholarly career. This chapter discusses challenges in writing and ways to overcome these challenges in the process of writing papers in the social and behavioral sciences. Two main principles emphasized are that writing is (a) a skill and (b) a form of communication. Skills are developed through instruction, modeling, and practice. In terms of communication, the research report can be conceived as a narrative that tells a story. Sections of the chapter focus on identifying common barriers to writing and ways to overcome them, developing a coherent and appropriate storyline, understanding the essential elements of a research paper, and valuing and incorporating feedback.

This chapter is concerned with the ethics of keeping animals in zoos. It examines the ethical problems of keeping animals in captivity with particular reference to the ethics of keeping elephants in zoos. Public attitudes towards various aspects of zoos are examined, including attitudes towards dissection, live feeding, euthanasia and the culling of healthy animals. Animal sentience is also discussed, particularly in relation to the inclusion of some invertebrates in this concept.

This chapter addresses the general character of the ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology and the variety of intellectual styles, reflected in the chapters in this volume, which it has come to include. That variety is such that only two propositions may be said to be generally shared: that the ethical dimension of human social life is non-trivial, and that the understanding of ‘morality’ that is dominant in contemporary Western societies is inadequate for describing and understanding it. In upholding the first of these positions, the anthropology of ethics has departed from those trends in recent anthropology characterized by Sherry Ortner as ‘dark anthropology’. In pursuit of the second, it has attempted to free itself from the imaginative straitjacket of what the philosopher Bernard Williams called the ‘Morality System’, so that it may reckon with the full range of forms of ethical thought, feeling, and practice in the ethnographic record. The chapter also gives a brief overview of the thematic parts of the volume, and the chapters.

Engaging two intertwined and yet competing literatures detailing moral aspects of suffering through the lenses of sympathy and empathy, this chapter examines the extent to which suffering (and responses to it) may be viewed as a condition of possibility for ethical/moral experience. While arguably distinctive responses to suffering that have unique ethical entailments, sympathy and empathy still share, however, a more primordial manifestation in pathos. Drawing upon insights from the phenomenological tradition, the chapter argues that pathic attunement is the generative, responsive ground from which sympathy and empathy arise. Moving beyond the either/or framework that often emerges in anthropological discussions of empathy and sympathy, a focus on pathos leads to a different way of envisioning suffering as a condition of possibility for moral experience. Without collapsing the ethical and political, pathos is thus a phenomenon through which recursive relationships between ethical, political, and ontological orientations to others becomes discernible and therefore analysable.

This chapter examines the extensive influence of the thought of Michel Foucault on the development of the anthropology of ethics. In doing so it treats a classic question that has preoccupied biographers of Foucault and chroniclers of his philosophy, as well as both advocates and critics of the anthropology of ethics, namely the nature of the relationship between power and freedom. Siding with those who have seen more continuity than rupture in the shifts of emphasis within Foucault’s oeuvre, it argues that we should as far as possible seek to understand the different stages of Foucault’s work as complementary, rather than contradictory: as providing us with different viewpoints from which to view a context or question, rather than mutually exclusive descriptions.

Since its appearance on the Western landscape three centuries ago, modern capitalism has given rise to a mythology that, unlike previous socio-economic orders, is so powerful that it can function without an ethical embedding – or simply create one in its own image. This essay argues that this end-of-ethics talk is premature, and only obscures the fact that capitalism is plural in its political and ethical forms, and equally varied in its social organizations and relation to the state. Rather than capitalism everywhere creating a homogeneous ethical landscape by bulldozing intermediary institutions and extra-market value spheres, capitalist societies have given rise to an agonistic plurality of political and moral embeddings and contentions. The essay explores this diversity through a comparison of modern capitalisms in Western, East Asian, and Islamic world areas.

This chapter argues that anthropological studies of human relationships with animals can draw our attention towards – rather than away from – the importance of representation within human ethical lives. The chapter posits that the anthropological ethical turn and the animal turn are each orientated in different ways to the concept of ‘representation’. This means the two traditions speak at cross-purposes to one another, visible particularly in their distinctive innovations in relation to ‘personhood’. From the perspective of the ethical turn, the personhood (or agency) attributed to animals by multispecies ethnographers appears ethically thin. From the perspective of the animal turn, the ethicists’ focus on varied human-held forms of reflection risks repeating dualistic distinctions and portraying animals only as they appear within human accounts. Yet the chapter shows that these two emerging traditions can benefit from one another, in attending to ‘more-than-representational’ (not non-representational) aspects of ethics. These include (1) the material/embodied form of ethical representations, (2) the fact that ethical life often seems inherently hard to represent, and (3) varied ethical attitudes towards representation (such as the ‘honesty’ sometimes associated with lack of speech) that can be seen as and when people interact with their animals.

In the sixth and final chapter, we continue to trace how Lucretius rehabilitates Roman men and their performed gender. Although I resume exploring the sexual language and figures by which Lucretius depreciates male presumptions of anatomical and sociological advantage, in “Vir Recreandus” I also tease out from the poem a positive argument about masculinity. Following the poet’s cues, I construct what an Epicurean man is, what he can do, what he is for, and how he can flourish in Lucretius’ reordering of the world. This Epicurean homo turns out to be manly in behaviors that, in part, map onto traditional scripts for a vir even while acting and self-regarding in ways that Romans would deem strange indeed. Much to Cicero’s vexation, Epicurean men become Rome’s true patriots.

Anthropologists and cognitive scientists interested in ethics and morality have much to gain from a two-way dialogue that does not shy away from constructive criticism. This chapter seeks to initiate such a conversation through an overview of three lines of recent research in cognitive science: the evolution of human morality from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology; theories that look to social institutions rather than only evolved psychological dispositions for insight into the variability of human moral dispositions; and studies of how responsibility and intentionality are ascribed in cases of wrongdoing. The final section offers some personal reflections on the methodological challenges of inter-disciplinary engagement, drawing on some of the authors’ recent research on morality and change in western Amazonia. It concludes that anthropologists can use experimental methods creatively, as a way of generating new ethnographic insights; although if genuine conversation on an equal footing is to take place, then ethnography must not only inform experimental design but also be employed to redefine concepts and generate theory.

Anthropologists of ethics have often drawn inspiration from ancient virtue ethics and ordinary language philosophy. What might be gained for the study of ethics by drawing on a theory of values? This chapter shows that value theory, in allowing us to distinguish between moral and non-moral values, offers two ways of conceptualizing ethics. Narrowly conceived, ethics is about people’s efforts to realize moral values, hence to relate to other people in the right way. Broadly conceived, ethics is also about people’s efforts to relate in appropriate ways to the variety of values they recognize, including aesthetic and epistemic ones. Employed on their own or in combination, the narrow and the broad conceptions are uniquely suited for a systematic comparison of ethical life across a diverse range of societies. A comparative discussion of cases from Africa and Euro-America shows that while the content and relative weight given to moral values vary significantly, valuing things appropriately is always an ethical matter.

Ethical self-formation and epistemic virtues have been a focus of attention in the history of science for over three decades, and yet, despite some important early contributions, anthropologists of science have only recently started to pay more sustained and explicit attention to the ethical. This chapter argues that anthropologists of science could benefit from taking a closer and more systematic look at recent developments in the anthropology of ethics. Conversely it suggests that anthropologists of ethics might gain from a closer consideration of some of the specificities of Euro-American science as an (internally and externally contested, multiple, and perhaps in part fictitious) ethical tradition. The first half of the chapter explores the rather fitful genealogy of an interest in the ethical in the history, sociology, and anthropology of science, and points to some of the elements from which the anthropology of science as an anthropology of ethics might be (re)built. The second half of the chapter gives one extended, ethnographically grounded example of what such a (re)building might produce, and suggests some of the ways in which anthropology’s exploration of both science and ethics might benefit.

This chapter explores the insights that ethnography offers into understanding the interface between commerce and ethics. The first section argues that the anthropology of exchange, in which commerce is seen as a distinctive sphere of transaction, risks truncating our understanding of the relationship between commerce and ethics. The second section explores the relationships between trade, violence, and state power, noting that merchants often articulate ethical ideals as they negotiate these relationships. The third section discusses scholarship on long-distance trading networks and trust, and suggests that the category of ethics is most helpful when it is used to describe not the basis of trust but the ways in which merchants manage and confront mistrust: for example, how they conceive of tensions between sentiment and self-interest. The final section identifies four areas stimulated by attention to the ethical dimensions of commerce: the diverse notions of reputation and personhood that animate the conduct of trade; the ways in which merchants conceive of the relationship between commerce and systems of morality and negotiate moral dilemmas; the way that commerce is informed by vernacular notions of value, abundance, and prosperity; and the forms of self-making that traders pursue through commerce.

This chapter explores the ethical tension between kinship and love in the realm of self-chosen marriages or ‘love-marriages’ in India. Central to the discussion are notions of personal autonomy as revealed in the deliberations of young people who must contend with normative ideas about acquiescing to marital ‘arrangement’ (by parents, elders, or kin) and who appear to eschew them by seeking to base their self-made kinship on love. In contrast, societal delineations of selfishness and selflessness play an unusually large part in narratives about love-marriages in North India and impose a measure of authenticity of self and of ethical distinctiveness between persons. This chapter seeks to explore the meanings of the ‘selfishness’ of love-marriages ethnographically by identifying bekhudiyat (literally, ‘losing the self’) as a form of self-forgetting that is poignantly linked to experiences of love and marriage in Delhi.

Rules are a ubiquitous normative form across the human experience. The recent anthropology of ethics and morality has, however, tended to focus elsewhere, in part to redress a perceived earlier over-emphasis on rules within anthropology. Bourdieu’s scepticism as to the value of structuralist talk of rules, and favouring instead of ‘practice’, has been more widely influential. This chapter makes the case for a renewed and more sophisticated attention to rules within the anthropology of ethics. While the roots of anthropological rule scepticism lie in debates – often inspired by Wittgenstein – over whether the implicit norms of ‘ordinary’ social life should be thought of as ‘rules’, the prominence of explicit rules in many of the world’s great ethical traditions seems hard to ignore. And yet, the conceptual tools available to anthropologists for their nuanced ethnographic appreciation remain under-developed. Some potential resources from analytic and legal philosophy and moral theology are brought to bear on examples from the author’s research on the use of religious rules, specifically those of the Islamic sharia. Having demonstrated the diversity, complexity, and ethnographic interest of the practice of moral rules, the chapter ends by considering why some social contexts appear more ‘ruly’, or legalistic, than others.

Computational work on morality has emerged from two major sources – empirical moral science and philosophical ethics. Moral science has revealed a diversity of moral phenomena: moral behavior (including moral decision making), moral judgments, moral emotions, moral sanctions, moral communication. Philosophical ethics has long focused on moral decision making, and this is where most of the computational work has emerged. Much of it uses rule-based systems rooted in formal logic but is complemented by connectionist, case-based, and other approaches, and more recently by reinforcement learning models. Computational work on moral judgments is sparser, in part because moral judgments build on numerous complex mental capacities, such as causal and counterfactual reasoning and theory of mind. Nonetheless, some models of blame judgments have emerged that draw on information processing approaches from empirical moral science. Even less work has tackled moral emotions, sanctions, and communication – phenomena that present vast challenges and opportunities for future work.