Malcolm K Sparrow, Handcuffed: What holds policing back, and the keys to reform
| Author | David Connery |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0004865816663048 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
2017, Vol. 50(2) 307–314
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865816663048
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Book Reviews
Malcolm K Sparrow, Handcuffed: What holds policing back, and the keys to reform. Brookings Institution
Press, Washington DC , 2016; 262 pp. ISBN 978-0-8157-2781-1, $25.00 USD (hbk)
Reviewed by: David Connery, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Australia
Handcuffed continues Malcolm K Sparrow’s research focus on harm, problem solving
and performance measurement in law enforcement, and supports his ongoing quest to
provide police forces with practical advice (Sparrow, 2000, 2008, 2015). In Handcuffed,
Sparrow asks very hard questions about the ‘crisis in policing’ in the United States, and
takes direct aim at the ‘Evidence Based Policing movement’. This book will, of course, be
of interest to a broader audience than police and social scientists, for his ideas go to the
challenge of managing a modern public enterprise.
Having set the scene with vignettes of where policing is currently failing, Sparrow’s
second chapter turns to addressing the way police forces define success. Most of the
problems he cites are well known, and he explains how statistically driven measures like
crime reduction pervert behaviour. The strength of his analysis lies in the way he mar-
shals the views of Goldstein (1977), Moore and Braga (2003) and Moore, Thatcher,
Dodge, and Moore (2002) to argue that the judgments about police performance must be
based on more than five or so statistical measures. These statistics need to be reported,
he writes, but they should be ‘dethroned’ (p. 90). In their place, Sparrow says police need
to be assessed on their total mission, and include qualitative evidence such as accounts of
success in specific areas. He likens the task of measuring police performance to flying a
complicated aircraft, which requires 50 or so gauges in the cockpit, rather than just a few
indicators.
One of the key themes in this book is Sparrow’s advocacy of a problem-based
approach to police research. He argues that a problem-orientation is compatible with
a community policing approach because problem solving requires active support from
the community. He is also an advocate for data analysis, but not in the way the evidence-
based policing (EBP) movement, as he describes it, advocates it. This aspect of the book
will be particularly interesting to research criminologists and police practitioners.
Sparrow uses Chapters four and five of this work to reject the underlying assumptions
he assigns to EBP – that police should allow social scientists to make determinations
about the effectiveness of policing interventions, and police should limit themselves to
using only scientifically-tested interventions – arguing that the problem based approach
is superior (see p. 131). Readers interested in this debate should turn straight to
Chapter four.
Rather than waiting for the gold social science standard of the randomized control
trial (RCT), he says in this chapter, police and researchers should use the more
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