As John MacDonald observed 90 police executives from the United Kingdom exchange ideas and collaborate on evidence-based methods to reform policing, he noticed an unmistakable energy. That was 2019. MacDonald, a professor of criminology and sociology in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, a college at the University of Cambridge. This culture, rooted in experimentation, had no analog at an American university.
“Just being around these mid-career police officials who were all speaking a common language about research and evidence, I’d never seen that before,” MacDonald says. “It was kind of eye-opening.”
It planted a seed for MacDonald: Could Penn create a degree program that applied research-backed strategies to cultivate fair and equitable policing, with an aim of strengthening relationships between law enforcement and communities?
Beginning next fall, the idea will come to fruition. The Department of Criminology, in conjunction with the College of Liberal & Professional Studies, will offer a new Master of Applied Criminology and Police Leadership (MCPL) degree. It is the first program of its kind in the United States.
This differs from a traditional criminology graduate degree. Its hybrid design will allow the targeted students—many who are senior police leaders—to continue to work full-time while taking classes, which will run on Fridays and Saturdays, plus a summer session. The first cohort will be 15 students, with an initial focus on senior officials from the Philadelphia region. Future classes could grow to 30 students from police departments along the East Coast, with two sequential cohorts totaling 60 part-time students by Academic Year 2027-28.
It is the right time for Penn to introduce something like this, says Nora Lewis, vice dean of Professional & Liberal Education. “We educate doctors. We educate lawyers. We educate businesspeople. Just like those other types of professionals, police should have access to a top-tier graduate education, one that can advance the culture of policing.”
MacDonald says that police officials in leadership positions, a decade or so into their careers, will likely fit the program best; they already have experience to build on, and after they earn the degree, have years to put into practice what they’ve learned. This is why rather than a thesis, the Penn program will require a capstone project based on “a problem in either their agency or some other agency that they have a connection to,” MacDonald says, “seeing if they can do some research around that problem and how to address it.”
This story is by Matt Gelb. Read more at Omnia.
