Our Funding

The Crime Lab provides our services to non-profit and government agencies at no cost to them. We receive our funding from philanthropy and state and federal sources who have no vested interest in the outcome of our evaluations.

Photo by Jason Smith.

Community Safety Leadership Academies (CSLA)

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Operating Model

We are not a “fee-for-service” organization that charges our government or NGO partners; instead, we receive funding from philanthropy. We also receive funding from the federal government sources, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the Institute for Education Sciences, and the National Institutes of Health, in the form of peer-reviewed grants. Our role is to apply the science and let the data tell its own story.

Our Theory of Change

We design, test, and scale data-driven innovations to improve the public sector’s response to the dual challenges of America’s gun violence crisis and a criminal justice system that needs reform. We partner with philanthropic partners to provide seed funding to test these ideas. Once we have found proven approaches, we work to disseminate our results and direct public dollars toward innovations that work.

Visit our donation page to support our work.

To learn more about our funding needs, contact our Founding Executive Director, Roseanna Ander.

Our funders make our independent research possible.

We are thankful to our funders, without whom this work would not be possible.

About the PLA

The PLA is a violence reduction initiative that aims to prevent violent crime, support officers, and improve fairness and effectiveness in policing. We do this by developing better police management practices nationwide and in select cities globally, with a focus on many of America’s highest-violence geographies.

The academy, which is being rigorously evaluated to measure its effectiveness, addresses a persistent training gap by providing a five-month, robust management and leadership education to police at the commander level and at no cost to the department.

Focus on Police Commanders

Investing in law enforcement management education can transform public safety in an entire city simply by training a few handfuls of key people.

Currently, there are no national standards, curriculum, or best practices for training and supporting police commanders/captains/majors – the rank that oversee police precincts and station houses. Police commanders don’t directly supervise patrol officers – they supervise the supervisors and can exert much greater influence over local patrol behavior than department leadership. The PLA is the only police management and leadership education program in the country solely focused on this critical rank of police leader.

The PLA builds on prior research from the Crime Lab showing that changes in police department management can drive reductions in both violent crime rates and police use of force. The five-month curriculum provides hands-on training in datadriven management, violence reduction, and community trust.

Years Active

2022 – present

Topics

Project Leads

Roseanna Ander

Founding Executive Director

Kenneth E. Corey

Director of Outreach and Engagement, Policing Leadership Academy

Erin Kuller

Program Director, Policing Leadership Academy

Sandy Jo MacArthur

Director of Curriculum Design, Policing Leadership Academy

Luann Pannell

Director of Instructional Design and Academic Innovation, Policing Leadership Academy

Meredith Stricker

Executive Director, Policing Leadership Academy

Research Principal Investigators

Anthony Braga

Jerry Lee Professor of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania

Aaron Chalfin

Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania

Dylan Fitzpatrick

Research Director

Max Kapustin

Assistant Professor at Cornell University

Kailey White

Portfolio Director of Qualitative Research

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