We are “criminologists”. Frustrated ones. We have doctorates in criminology, criminal justice, and related fields, like sociology or psychology. We do research and we analyze data; we evaluate, we teach, and we read–a lot. After a while, we start getting a sense of “the big picture”. However, there are few outlets for us to discuss the big picture, apart from books. This is frustrating.

We watch the news and hear sound bites that sound like the sound bites we were hearing 20 or 30 or even 40 years ago. The breaking point that inspired this website came after the video of the George Floyd killing was released to the public and protests erupted all over the country. Pundits and cable news hosts and politicians were discussing police violence, calls to “defund” the police, and the supposed “war on cops”. Where were the criminologists discussing serious ideas about police reform? Where were the criminologists when the media later turned their attention to “rising violence”? The only solution anyone seemed to talk about was “hiring more police officers”. Ugh.

We want to help students and journalists and interested others discern “information” that is consistent with research on crime and criminal justice policy, from the gazillions of opinions, re-posts and web-scraping search returns that one gets doing simple Internet searches. We want to disabuse you of misunderstandings. We want to point you in the direction of information that you can be proud to cite.

That’s it. See you again.