Can experience be evidence?: craft knowledge and evidence-based policing

Abstract

This article explores the use of evidence and other varieties of knowledge in police decision-making. It surveys official government policy, demonstrating that evidence-based policy-making is the dominant policy-making paradigm in the United Kingdom. It discusses the limits to social science knowledge in policy-making. The article explores four ideas associated with the notion of ‘experience’: occupational culture; institutional memory; local knowledge, and craft, drawing on data from four UK police forces. We discuss the limits to experiential knowledge and conclude that experience is crucial to evidence-based policing and decision-making because it is the key to weaving the varieties of knowledge together.