How do we know what we know?
The acquisition of knowledge is a curious idea -- we all have accumulated a great amount of it in our lifetime on a slew of topics. But very few people take the time to consider where their knowledge came from. There are the obvious answers of course: experience, parents, teachers, senior co-workers, etc., but aside from the source, we don't normally think about the soundness of our acquired knowledge. Just because someone tells us something, is it good information? How did they come by it? Should one file it into their own knowledge database? The answers to these questions are not simple, but we must begin by taking a critical look at our own knowledge bases, and how we acquired this knowledge. As we'll see when taking a closer look at native human inquiry, frequently the key to collecting sound information is to change how we observe the social world around us.
Scientific Method in Criminal Justice
One of the goals of this course is to detail one technique of acquiring knowledge in the areas of criminal justice/criminology: the scientific method. Our young field has a kind of uneasy history with utilizing scientific information. For years things were done, for example, in policing because they seemed to make common sense. Policing is one area where science refuted conventional wisdom and led to changes in practice.
Take the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment as an example. Prior to this study, urban police departments almost exclusively used random patrol as their primary crime prevention strategy. It had been the primary strategy for years (tradition) and certainly made sense to those working in law enforcement (authority). But when tested empirically, random motorized patrol was no more effective than a police presence initiated by citizen calls for service.
Every field of study has of course been revolutionized to some degree by science (new methods, discoveries, technological advances), but our field is unique in that these changes are taking place before our eyes in a relatively short period of time. We are less encumbered by history in criminal justice, making the field more wide-open for scientific advancement. Not to say that science hasn't met resistance (science, after all, tends to bring change with it), but the potential for obtaining more valid information through science in criminal justice has just begun to be realized. On that note let's now look at the ways knowledge comes to us.