To contact any member of the research staff, click on their email link below.

Karen L. Amendola, PhD, Chief Operating Officer. Dr. Amendola has almost twenty years of experience in law enforcement testing, training, research, evaluation, technology, and assessment. Her areas of focus include culture and climate, integrity, accountability, performance, and measuring performance. She has been with the Police Foundation since 1994.

Dr. Amendola earned both her master of arts and doctor of philosophy degrees in industrial/ organizational psychology at George Mason University. She also holds a master of arts degree in human resources management from Webster University.

Formerly she served as the vice-president of training and career development at Fields Consulting Group, Inc. where she managed public safety selection, testing, and training projects emphasizing ethical and community oriented dimensions of performance. Dr. Amendola also served as president of Professional Development Associates, Inc., a training, career, and organizational development firm serving public safety agencies and other businesses.

Her publishing credits include Psychological Fitness for Duty, Evaluation of Performance; Assessing Law Enforcement Ethics; Law Enforcement Shift Schedules, Stress and Police Work; Minimizing the Risks: Personnel Selection Strategies, as well as two co-authored publications on mentoring relationships, and one on Compstat.

David Weisburd, PhD, Senior Fellow. He is professor of criminology at the Hebrew University Law School in Jerusalem and distinguished professor and director of the Center for Evidence Based Crime Policy at George Mason University. Professor Weisburd received his PhD from Yale University. He is the coauthor of several Police Foundation reports, including The Abuse of Police Authority, Compstat and Organizational Change in the Lowell Police Department: Challenges and Opportunities, and The Growth of Compstat in American Policing. Professor Weisburd chairs the foundation’s research advisory committee.

David A. Klinger, PhD, Senior Research Scientist. An associate professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL), Dr. Klinger is on leave from the university to serve as Senior Research Scientist at the Police Foundation. An expert on police decision making and the use of deadly force, Professor Klinger is author of the book Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004). His research interests include a broad array of issues in the field of crime and justice, with an emphasis on the organization and actions of modern police. He has published scholarly manuscripts that address arrest practices, the use of force, how features of communities affect the actions of patrol officers, and terrorism. He has conducted two federally-funded research projects dealing with the use of force by police officers: one on officer-involved shootings and the other on police special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams.

Professor Klinger received a BA in history from Seattle Pacific University in 1980, a master’s in justice from American University in 1985, and a PhD in sociology from the University of Washington in 1992. Prior to joining the criminology and criminal justice faculty at UMSL, he was an assistant (1992-1998) and associate (1998-1999) professor of sociology at the University of Houston. In 1997, he was the recipient of the American Society of Criminology's inaugural Ruth Caven Young Scholar Award for outstanding early career contributions to the discipline of criminology.

Prior to pursuing his graduate degrees, Professor Klinger worked as a patrol officer for the Los Angeles (CA) and Redmond (WA) Police Departments.

Garth den Heyer, PhD, Senior Research Fellow. Dr. den Heyer has served with the New Zealand Police for 28 years.  He is a Chief Inspector and is the Manager, Security, Counter Terrorism and Emergency Planning.  His areas of research center around operational and strategic policing and include comparative policing, police resource allocation, modeling crime, police threat and risk analysis, police use of intelligence, the law enforcement response to national and international terrorism and organized and transnational crime, police tactical squads, close protection policing, police performance measurement and service delivery effectiveness.

Dr. den Heyer has served in post-conflict nations, advising on law, justice, and policing issues and was recently the strategic advisor to the executive of Regional Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) Participating Police Forces (PPF) in relation to the organization’s performance, structure, design, and the direction of the future deployment and Mission.

Edwin E. Hamilton, MA, Professional Services Director. Mr. Hamilton received his master's in criminal justice from the George Washington University and completed doctoral studies at the University of Maryland. He has served as the statistical analyst and project director for numerous foundation projects, including Private Ownership of Firearms in the United States: A National Survey, and First-Line Supervision in the Community Policing Context. He is author of Project Exile: A Guidebook to Implementing Successful Gun-Reduction Programs, and co-author of The Metro-Dade Spouse Abuse Replication Project, The Big Six: Policing America's Largest Cities, and The Abuse of Police Authority: A National Study of Police Officers’ Attitudes. Mr. Hamilton has been with the Police Foundation since 1983.

LeRoy O’Shield, Senior Technical Assistance Advisor.  LeRoy O’Shield has over thirty years’ experience in law enforcement and is a leading expert in innovative community-police relations.  He served as chief of the Chicago Housing Authority Police and as a commander of district operations in the Chicago Police Department. He has served as a consultant and trainer on a range of police operational and administrative issues for public and private entities, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Police Foundation.  He is also an adjunct professor in criminal justice at Governor’s State University.

Greg Jones, MA, Research & Crime Mapping Coordinator. Mr. Jones coordinates the development and dissemination of Crime Mapping News and the development of related crime mapping publications and projects. He has served as an instructor for crime mapping, crime analysis, and problem analysis trainings. He has also assisted with research and evaluations on various foundation projects focused on policing, homeland security, victims, and crime prevention.  He formerly served as a research assistant at the Maryland Justice Analysis Center and as a policy analyst at the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, where he published several documents on courts and corrections issues. He has a BA in Sociology from the University of Kentucky and MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Raymond Johnston, Sr., BA, Senior System Engineer. Mr. Johnston has almost 40 years of experience in software design and development, and computer engineering and programming. After 20 years with Sperry Univac, and 10 years with RCA/GE, Mr. Johnston designed and developed The RAMS™ for the Police Foundation. He has a BA in Mathematics from Lincoln University, and has done graduate work at New York University toward his master's degree in mathematics.

Meghan Slipka, MA, Research Associate. Ms. Slipka comes from a psychology background where she has researched applied memory as it relates to the accuracy of eyewitness memory. She has assisted with various projects at the foundation including, law enforcement shift practices, elder abuse, and eyewitness identification. Prior to joining the Police Foundation staff in July 2007, Ms. Slipka interned in the testing and standards department of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, examining selection and promotion methods within law enforcement. She has a masters in general psychology from The Catholic University of America, and bachelors in psychology from The College of Wooster .

Kristin Williams, MS, Research Assistant. Kristin joined the Police Foundation in 2008 with the desire to incorporate sociological and criminological theory into the field of policing.  Though her research has primarily focused on the community effects of social disorganization and mass incarceration, she has a general interest in social theory and research methods. She has bachelor of science degrees in both sociology and criminology and criminal justice from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a master of science degree from North Carolina State University.