Bruce Taylor is a Principal Research Scientist with NORC at the University of Chicago in the Substance Abuse, Mental Health, and Criminal Justice Studies (SAMHCJ) department. He manages research projects, analyzes data, writes reports and papers for publication, presents results at conferences, and leads business development in the areas of criminal justice for NORC.
Taylor has 20 years of professional experience in applied research, field experiments, statistical analysis, measurement, survey design, and program evaluation in criminal justice. He has conducted studies on violence prevention, violent offenders, victimization, policing, and the dynamics of drug markets. His current research examines the effectiveness of a dating violence prevention program in schools, dynamics of illegal drug markets, license plate recognition devices in reducing auto theft, the integration of crime analysis into police patrol work, community policing self-assessment tools, and police officer safety. He has conducted research funded by a number of federal sources, such as the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. His research has also been supported by a number of state and municipal sources, along with several foundations and other private sources. Taylor has published his work widely in leading peer-reviewed academic journals such as Criminology, Criminology and Public Policy, Journal of Experimental Criminology and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Prior to joining NORC in 2010, Taylor was the research director for the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), based in Washington, D.C., from 2005-2010, where he managed a group of about 10 researchers, oversaw all research projects at PERF, provided research recommendations to the PERF executive director, led strategic and business development for PERF, and developed annual department-level budgets. From 2002-2005, he was a senior research associate/managing associate at Caliber/ICF International, where he led projects on juvenile justice, children exposed to violence, youth violence prevention, and community policing. From 1998- 2002, he was a researcher and deputy director of the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program, a program within the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice that involved surveys and specimen collection on drugs and crime issues from detained arrestees in more than three dozen cities across the U.S. Prior to his work at DOJ, he was a senior research associate at the Victim Services Agency in New York City, where he conducted experimental research on the effectiveness of victim service programs and batterer treatment, as well as examined the psychological effects of victimization and the role of significant others in the recovery process for rape victims.