Edmund McGarrell
Professor of Criminal Justice | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Edmund McGarrell is an expert in violence prevention, evidence-based crime policy, and community- and problem-oriented policing.
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Biography
Ed McGarrell's primary research interest is in communities and crime and the development of evidence-based strategies for violence reduction. Since 2002 he has led an MSU team that has served as the national research partner for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) program. This has involved research on gun, gang, and drug-related crime and the impact of PSN as well as the provision of research-based training and technical assistance to PSN task forces coordinated by the 93 U.S. Attorney’s Offices across the country.
Additionally, McGarrell and colleagues are working with criminal justice officials and community partners in Detroit (Ceasefire, PSN, Innovations in Policing, Police-Prosecution Innovation) and Genesee County (School Climate and Safety), as well as cross-city research on firearms violence and sentinel event reviews. McGarrell is Director of the Michigan Justice Statistics Center that serves as Michigan’s Statistical Analysis Center. The Center works directly with the Michigan State Police and other state and local stakeholders. His research is currently supported by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Bureau of Justice Statistics, and National Institute of Justice.
McGarrell is a 2017 recipient of the William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award from Michigan State University. He received the Distinguished Achievement Award in Evidence-Based Crime Policy from the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, George Mason University; the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Division of Policing, American Society of Criminology; the O.W. Wilson Award, from the Police Section, Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences; and the Mentor Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
Industry Expertise (3)
Writing and Editing
Education/Learning
Research
Areas of Expertise (3)
Gun, Gang and Drug Related Crime
Violence Reduction
Community Policing
Education (3)
University of Albany, SUNY: Ph.D. 1986
University of Albany, SUNY: M.A. 1981
Mansfield University: B.A. 1978
News (2)
Well-Kept Vacant Lots Can Help Reduce Crime
Science Daily online
2018-04-18
The premise of the study was devised when the Genesee County Land Bank Authority began its Clean and Green program 13 years ago to spruce up vacant property throughout the city. They discovered that over the years, the program seemed to produce another benefit -- in neighborhoods where community groups maintained vacant lots, crime appeared to decline.
Block watch groups mean extra eyes on Yakima
Yakima Herald online
2017-08-02
“Research shows that neighborhoods with high collective efficacy experience greater public safety and reduced crime even when controlling for factors like poverty,” said Edmund McGarrell, a Michigan State University criminal justice professor who since 2002 has researched crime prevention as a partner in the Department of Justice’s Project Safe Neighborhoods program. “Thus, a sound crime prevention strategy is to build collective efficacy — connections between neighbors and a collective sense of looking out for one another. Block Watch can be a way of doing this.”...
Journal Articles (5)
A Quasi-Experimental Synthetic Control Evaluation of a Place-Based Police Directed Patrol Intervention on Violent Crime.
Journal of Experimental Criminology2018 This research evaluates the impact of an implementation of a place-based police-directed patrol intervention—originally based on the Data Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS) model—on violent crime in Flint, Michigan, USA.
Fear, Victimization, and Community Characteristics on Citizen Satisfaction with the Police
Policing: An International Journal2018 The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between fear of victimization, actual victimization, and community-level characteristics on citizen satisfaction with police. This study attempts to clarify important factors in how citizens view the police, while accounting for contextual, neighborhood-level variables.
Exploring the spatial-temporal relationships between a community greening program and neighborhood rates of crime
Applied Geography2017-06-01
Advances in built-environment focused community development strategies afford new multi-disciplinary opportunities to address crime with criminologists, criminal justice practitioners and community partners.
Gun crime incident reviews as a strategy for enhancing problem solving and information sharing
Journal of Crime and Justice2016-03-09
Over the last several decades, police departments and other criminal justice agencies have seen a shift toward a proactive problem-solving response to crime problems. This problem-solving orientation has often included an emphasis on expanded partnerships across criminal justice agencies as well as with a variety of community stakeholders, including researchers. This manuscript uses the issue of gun violence as a lens through which to examine the organizational and inter-organizational changes necessary to apply a data-driven, proactive, and strategic policing-led response to gun homicides and non-fatal shootings in four Midwestern sites. Each site adapted a unique data collection process and incident review. The data collection, incident reviews, and the varying models developed across the four cities, provide a reflection on corresponding organizational and inter-organizational changes that illuminate the movement toward this proactive, data-driven, problem-solving model of criminal justice. Fulfilling the promise of the incident reviews, however, requires internal organizational and cross-agency inter-organizational collaboration to align people, systems, and resources with this proactive, problem-solving model. Additionally, effectively implementing these organizational and inter-organizational changes appears dependent on commitment and leadership, collaboration and partnerships, data quality and availability, and training and communication within and across organizational boundaries.
Adult and Youth Involvement in Gun-Related Crime: Implications for Gun Violence Prevention Interventions
Criminal Justice Policy Review2016 The purpose of this study is to assess whether distinct targeted violence prevention programs are needed to address gun violence based on offender age. Police incident reports were used to analyze the temporal, situational, and spatial patterns of offending between a group of adult and youthful offenders in the city of Detroit, Michigan. Chi-square and logistic regression multivariate techniques were used to test the differences and similarities between these groups. The findings suggest that youth and adult offenders of gun crimes in Detroit are not significantly different in the time or place in which they offend. Only modest differences were observed in terms of situational characteristics. The most significant differences between youth and adult offenders involved the age of their victim and the presence of co-offenders. Policy implications are discussed.
