A market for empirical research

One of the services I offer at Crime De-Coder is academic writing, specifically in reference to conducting empirical research. Traditionally, professors in criminology (or the social sciences more broadly) would write papers examining policy outcomes. Much of this work was either unfunded (essentially subsidized by the universities via the professors salary), or supported via government grants.

For some insider pool with grants – you may see a grant for $300,000 and think that is quite a bit of money. Professors are not getting rich off of them though. Here is a typical breakdown of that grant:

• $150,000 for overhead (typically around 50%)
• $60,000 to hire a research assistant for a year (salaries for RAs are tiny, but you need to pay fringe)
• $20,000 course buyout (you teach one less course a semester, and the buyout so an adjunct will teach)
• $10,000 travel/open-access papers (you are expected to go to multiple conferences and publish work)
• $20,000 for summer salary (you don’t get paid over summer, but grant can give that money)

This leaves $40k left over in our hypothetical $300k grant. You cannot just say “give me $40k” though. Basically the only extra money professors make is via summer funding (which typically has a hard cap as a percent of salary).

Note that this does not include funding for the public sector agency directly. So if I am doing an experiment that is funded by NIJ with a police department, NIJ gives $0 to the police department to help the implementation. The money is entirely for the academic team. Overhead and hiring research assistants ends up being very wasteful.

What is a better model? Paying researchers directly to conduct the work. Two recent examples of this in my career are the Child Poverty Action League hiring me to evaluate the firearm crime reduction effects of LED street light conversions in Dallas. (They did not reduce firearm crimes.)

The second is the Council on Criminal Justice supporting work on estimating the prevalence of domestic violence using both police reported crime data via NIRBS and victimization surveys.

These were both supported by non-profit groups, but it makes sense for private and public sector entities to consider this as well. Are you using a new product and want to show how well it works at reducing crime? That is something it makes sense to have an outside researcher on.

Independent research is important to not only ensure the integrity of the analysis, but can be an effective advertisement for a police department or tech company. Hiring me directly to do research is cost effective (think paying $10k to $20k, not $300k like a grant).

Ultimately the work I provide as an independent contractor will be less burdensome and more timely than working with an academic research group.