About

Background

I am Dr. Wade Deisman, a criminologist with more than thirty years of experience studying crime, policing, security, and the institutions that respond to them. This site is a staging ground for the work of public criminology.

I currently serve as Associate Dean of Social Sciences and Associate Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, and as President of the Vancouver chapter of the Canadian Association of Security and Intelligence Studies. I hold a Ph.D. in Sociology from Carleton University.

Over three decades I have worked as a researcher, teacher, and academic leader. I founded PATORI, the Police Accountability, Transparency and Oversight Research Initiative, and earlier directed the National Security Working Group at the University of Ottawa. I began my career as a research officer at the Law Commission of Canada, working on the legal and regulatory frameworks governing policing in Canada. My research has spanned police oversight and accountability, national security and civil liberties, surveillance, organized crime, extortion, and public criminology.

I have spent years explaining crime and justice to the public, as a commentator across Canadian television, radio, and print, and as co-host of a weekly program on crime and social justice. The gap between what criminology knows and what the public is told is wide. It is not the public's fault. The stories we are told about crime are built to be simple, emotional, and memorable. The truth is usually complicated and harder to sell. But the truth matters, because bad beliefs about crime produce bad policy, and bad policy harms real people.

This work sits in a tradition. Mike Larsen and I have written about public criminology as a practice grounded in participatory democracy, one that critiques received approaches to crime, demystifies politically loaded ideas, and puts debates about crime control back in their social and historical context. I write more about what that means and where it comes from in Public Criminology as an Approach, below.

I started this site because good research too often disappears into journals while bad information fills public debate. Public criminology is not a luxury. It is a responsibility.

What I do

My current work spans several areas:

• Research and analysis: on organized crime, violence, and the effectiveness of criminal justice interventions
• Teaching at the university level, focusing on critical thinking about crime and justice
• Public writing: essays, media commentary, and this site
• Policy engagement: advising on evidence-based approaches to crime reduction and victim support

Public Criminology as an Approach

This site is a work of public criminology. That phrase has a history, and I want to be clear about where it comes from and what I take it to mean.

The call for public sociology

In his 2004 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, published the following year as "For Public Sociology," Michael Burawoy called on sociologists to take knowledge back to the publics it came from, to make public issues out of private troubles, and in doing so to renew the discipline's moral purpose.¹ Quoting C. Wright Mills, he argued against a sociology that is insular, self-referential, and shut inside the academy. He set against it a sociology that is critical, connected to public debate, and committed to the defense of civil society.

Burawoy mapped the discipline into four kinds of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. They depend on one another. Public knowledge is not a lesser form. It is the part that returns the work to the people it concerns.

From public sociology to public criminology

Criminology has always been tied to the administration of justice and the making of public policy. Burawoy's address did not begin a new conversation in our field so much as reopen an old one. Gregg Barak had already argued for what he called newsmaking criminology: "the conscious efforts and activities of criminologists to interpret, influence or shape the representation of 'newsworthy' items about crime and justice."² The news is saturated with crime, usually told badly. Newsmaking criminology sets out to contest and demystify those portrayals.

Public criminology reaches further than policy relevance and further than the news. As Todd Clear put it, it means working "in a way that engages the crime / justice consumer publics (both those who make crime policy and those who are affected by it) in the meaning of the work": "talking to, talking with, and talking about those publics in the production of criminological scholarship."³

What I take it to mean

Mike Larsen and I have argued that public criminology, at its best, is a movement and a set of practices grounded in a commitment to informed and participatory democracy.⁴ It engages many audiences through many means. It critiques the received approaches to crime and justice. It demystifies concepts weighed down with political and ideological baggage. It places debates about crime control in their social and historical context. And it opens room to imagine and examine other ways of thinking and acting on crime and justice.

That is the work this site tries to do.

A note on method

Public criminology demands a wider range of venues than the academy normally uses. The scholarly book, the peer-reviewed article, the conference paper. These matter, but they rarely reach past the academy. Doing this work means experimenting with other forms which will extend reach, audience, engagement: social media, memes, substack, broadcasting, radio, podcasting, teaching in the open, workshops, information pop-ups, building tools and resources the public can actually use. That is why this site takes the shape it does. It is both a clearing house and a signal flare.