Lawrence W. Sherman is Chief Executive Officer of Benchmark Cambridge, a global police reform organization, and Wolfson Professor of Criminology Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. From 2022 to 2024 he served as Chief Scientific Officer of the Metropolitan Police Service (London), where he designed the VAWG100 project for stopping the most dangerous suspects predating on women and girls. From 2007 to 2022, he educated hundreds of police leaders on evidence-based policing in the Cambridge University Police Executive Programme.
Since beginning his career as an analyst in the New York City Police Department, he has designed or led experiments in over 50 police agencies on four continents. His experiments began when he became the US Police Foundation’s Director of Research, where he met the founders of the UK’s Police Foundation. His discoveries included key facts for police strategies for preventing domestic violence, cooling geographic hot spots, convicting high-harm repeat offenders, and helping victims with restorative justice. A former President of the American Society of Criminology, he holds honorary degrees or medals from five universities. In 2010 he was elected Honorary President of the Society of Evidence-Based Policing at its founding at Cambridge. As the editor of the Cambridge Collection on Evidence-Based Policing, he has attracted over half a million readers of research for better policing.