39. Alfred Blumstein

In the 1950s, when operations research (OR) analysts were making the first inroads in applying OR to non-military settings, few would have envisaged public policy to emerge as a fertile area of application for the scientific-based methods of OR. In the 1960s, however, the value of OR thinking in the analysis of public policy issues was demonstrated with considerable success. A major exemplar of this success was the seminal work of Alfred Blumstein in his role as the Director of the Science and Technology Task Force of President Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in 1966–1967. Al, who was first introduced to OR by working on air defense and air traffic control problems, became an internationally recognized pioneer, missionary, and driving force in the application of OR to public policy, crime, and criminal justice.