Weisburd is a prolific researcher, who by 2023 had received more than $23 million in competitive grant funding and published over 35 books, 175 journal articles and 100 book chapters. Weisburd is best known for his work in place-based criminology, experimental criminology, and white-collar crime. Weisburd's research on place-based criminology has demonstrated the importance of focusing on the role geographic micro-places, such as street segments, play in explaining crime. For instance, in a 1995 study in
Jersey City, New Jersey Weisburd found that between 15% and 20% of all crime was generated by 56 drug market hot spots. In a recent longitudinal study of
crime concentrations in
Seattle,
Washington: Weisburd and his colleagues found that between 5% and 6% of street segments in the city generated over 50% of the crime incidents each year. Importantly, this research also showed that these crime concentrations remained stable across time and place over the 16-year study period. Weisburd has also replicated these findings in
Tel Aviv,
Israel, where almost the same levels of concentration were found as in his Seattle Study. In Weisburd's Sutherland Address to the
American Society of Criminology in 2015 he argued that the consistency of crime concentrations across cities and across time was so great that it suggested a
Law of Crime Concentration at Places. Weisburd's research has also repeatedly demonstrated the importance of these findings for crime prevention policy, particularly in the area of policing. With the focus on explaining crime through place-based factors, police and other crime prevention agencies have stable targets on which to focus their efforts. Beginning with a ground-breaking experimental study with
Lawrence Sherman in 1995, Weisburd's research has repeatedly shown the efficacy of focusing police crime prevention resources on small hot spots of crime. Specifically, this body of research shows that crime and disorder is significantly reduced in targeted hot spots and that crime does not simply displace to nearby areas. In fact, Weisburd's research suggests that it is more likely that crime in nearby areas which received no extra police attention will also likely be reduced—a phenomenon that has been termed diffusion of crime control benefits. Weisburd's recent work has examined the impact of different types of police tactics in crime hot spots on people frequenting these targeted areas. One recent study examined the impact of police crackdowns on disorder on residents, while another focused on the
New York City Police Department's usage of stop and frisks of suspicious persons. Weisburd and colleagues have shown, in a three city randomized trial, that when crime prevention teams focused on crime hot spots are trained in procedural justice approaches, they will treat people in the field with greater respect, make fewer arrests, and reduce crime to a greater degree than non-trained officers. That study also found that citizens will be less likely to see the procedural justice-trained officers as using too much force, or harassing people on the street. Related to this work, Weisburd has also advanced the importance of
randomized controlled trials in evaluating crime and justice policies and programs. Randomized, experimental designs produce the most valid and reliable evidence on the impact of policies or interventions, and thus Weisburd argues the field has a moral imperative to use experimental designs whenever feasible. His work in this area has also shown that there is a paradox in experimental studies, in which increasing sample size often has the unintended consequence of reducing the observed statistical power of a study. Finally, Weisburd has also made significant contributions to our understanding of
white-collar crime. In a large-scale empirical study of white-collar crime, he found that white-collar criminals were often from the middle classes, had multiple contacts with the criminal justice system, and that much white-collar crime was mundane and everyday in character. == Education ==