ABSTRACT
The United Kingdom has made significant investments in promoting and facilitating evidence-based policy and practice. In this chapter our focus is on the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction (WWCCR) and in particular EMMIE. EMMIE is a framework denoting five categories of evidence that are important to inform policy and practice decision-making: Effect, Mechanism, Moderator, Implementation, and Economics. As part of the WWCCR, EMMIE was used to populate a toolkit for police and others with crime prevention responsibilities to draw on, in deciding what to do to address crime problems (the “Crime Reduction Toolkit”). Across the range of interventions for which systematic reviews had been undertaken, the toolkit summarizes the quality of both the available evidence and findings in relation to the five domains comprising EMMIE. An appraisal of systematic reviews using EMMIE revealed substantial gaps in the crime reduction evidence base, whose repair will require primary studies and reviews that draw on a wide range of studies using diverse methods.
