David L. Weisburd (born 1954), is an Israeli/American criminologist who is well known for his research on crime and place, policing and white collar crime. Weisburd was the 2010 recipient of the prestigious , and was recently awarded the Israel Prize in Social Work and Criminological Research, considered the state's highest honor. Weisburd holds joint tenured appointments as §ciety at George Mason University. and Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and Criminal Justice in the Institute of Criminology of the Hebrew University Faculty of Law, At George Mason University Weisburd was founder of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy and is now its executive director. Weisburd also serves as a senior fellow at the Police Foundation in Washington, D.C., and chair of its Research Advisory Committee. Weisburd was the founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology, and is now the general editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.
Weisburd is a prolific researcher, who by 2014 had received more than $10 million in competitive grant funding and published over 25 books, 85 journal articles and 60 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 microplaces, such as street blocks, 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.