Anthony Braga


Anthony Allan Braga is an American criminologist and the director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.

Education

Braga received his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 1991, his M.A. and Ph.D. from Rutgers in 1993 and 1997, respectively. He later received his M.P.A. from Harvard University in 2002.

Career

Braga worked as a research associate at Rutgers University's Center for Crime Prevention Studies from 1993 to 1995. He then began working at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government as a research associate, where he has been a senior research fellow since July 2010. Also in July 2010, he joined Rutgers again as a professor of criminal justice, and became the Don M. Gottfredson Professor of Evidence-Based Criminology there in September 2012. On July 1, 2016, he left Rutgers and Harvard to become the director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.

Research

Braga's research focuses on multiple topics in the field of criminology, including reducing criminals' access to guns, reducing gang-relatead violence, and crime control hot spots. He has also designed a study on the effectiveness of police body-worn cameras. He has recommended that, to conduct this study, the New York Police Department put such cameras on some of its officers in 20 precincts and compare these officers to their counterparts in precincts where officers are not wearing cameras. His research has also found that hot-spot policing is effective at reducing the crime rate. In the 1990s, while a research associate at Harvard, he and his colleagues designed and implemented the anti-gang violence program Operation Ceasefire in Boston. He has since published research showing that this program was associated with reductions in violence, but that this relationship may not be causal.

Honors and awards

Braga's work with the Boston Police Department on its Safe Street Teams program led to him receiving the International Association of Chiefs of Police's Community Policing Award and Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award, both in 2011. He later received the Joan McCord Award from the American Society of Criminology's Division of Experimental Criminology in 2014.