The foundation hosts a semi-annual guest lecture series, Ideas in American Policing, in which leading criminologists are invited to present commentary and insight to an audience of scholars, practitioners, and policy makers. The lectures are delivered in the Police Foundation conference room, 1201 Connecticut Avenue, Suite 200, Washington, DC, and are published in the Police Foundation's Ideas in American Policing monograph series, which are available for downloading by clicking on the preceding link, or on individual titles below.

The inaugural lecture in the series, Policing in America: Assessment and Prospects, was delivered by David H. Bayley, then dean of the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York at Albany.

Lawrence W. Sherman, then professor and chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland at College Park, presented the second lecture, entitled Evidence-Based Policing.

Stephen D. Mastrofski, then professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, gave the third lecture in the series, Policing for People.

The fourth lecture in the series, On Democratic Policing, was delivered by Jerome H. Skolnick, emeritus professor of Law and former chair of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California at Berkeley, and co-director, Center for Research in Crime and Justice, NYU Law School.

Professor Mark Moore, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, presented the fifth lecture in the Ideas in American Policing lecture series. Professor Moore's topic was Recognizing and Realizing Public Value in Policing: The Challenge of Measuring Police Performance.

Donald Foster, Professor of English at Vassar College, delivered the sixth lecture, Author Unknown: Questioned Documents in Police Investigations. An attributional expert, Professor Foster works with law enforcement agencies and the media to determine authorship of anonymous or disputed documents, including forgeries, threats, ransom notes, and anonymous tips. Foster has assisted the prosecution in the Unabomber case, the FBI in the investigation of the Atlanta Olympic bombings, and local police departments in murder cases involving questioned documents. In his new book, Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous, Foster tells some of his favorite stories of literary detection. Dr. Foster’s monograph, Policing Anonymity, was published in December 2001.

Edward R. Maguire, Associate Professor in the Administration of Justice Program at George Mason University, presented the seventh lecture, Police Departments as Learning Laboratories. In his monograph, Professor Maguire discusses how police agencies are often unable to state with any degree of precision how their performance has changed over time or how it compares with their peers, and proposes how police agencies can make greater use of information and measurement to enhance their capacity for organizational learning and assessment.

David Klinger is Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a former Los Angeles and Redmond (WA) police officer. His lecture and monograph, Social Theory and the Street Cop: The Case of Deadly Force, explores the dynamics of police-citizen encounters, and examines how social scientific theory can influence police officers’ use of deadly force as well as the public’s understanding of the social reality of deadly force in our society.

The entire Ideas in American Policing series is available on this Web site and is accessible from this page as well as from Publications/Electronic Library. Single printed copies are available at no charge from the Police Foundation. See Publications/List and Order Form for ordering instructions.