Free Research?

This is an interesting comment:

• I was talking with our "intelligence officer" a couple nights ago. I was asking how 35th st comes up with the names on the "Top 20" list they give us. He said at the training class he had at 35th st he was told the list is determined by a couple people who are not CPD. Two people at two colleges were named. Got on the computer and started looking for the names and schools and here's what I eventually found:
  
  Academic #1 is named Andrew Papachristos, He is a sociologist at Yale. His bio can be found here--
  
  http://papachristos.org/AboutMe.html
  
  His specialty is in examining how violent crime spreads. The "two degrees of association" is his theory that identifies gangsters who may be at most risk becasue they hang out with murderers and murder victimes and calls for intervention. So, basically he calls for babysitting at-risk gangsters so they dont end up dead gangsters. Work with sociologists - get social work.
  
  Academic #2 is a bit more perplexing. He is a professor here at IIT named Miles Wernick. You didn’t know IIT had a research program in criminal justice? Well don’t feel bad – they don’t. Wernick is the director of the Medical Imaging Research Center in the Pritzker Institute of Biomedical Science and Engineering. His bio can be found here—
  
  http://www.iit.edu/engineering/ece/faculty/wernick_miles.shtml
  
  His specialty is “Medical imaging, image processing, pattern recognition,” and he has degrees in physics and optics. That’s very impressive, but how does that qualify him to work with crime data to reduce violence? Well, it doesn’t actually. But it seems he’s done some research in pattern recognition in medical images for diagnosing...bad medical stuff. And naturally, since the pattern recognition in medical imaging for bad stuff is identical to recognizing patterns of human behavior in unpredictable, violent gang members, the transfer of diagnostics is simple.
  
  So there you have it. From the mouths of those working with these two junior crimefighter merit badge hopefuls and a little internet searching we find that those working on the Supe’s big violence reduction effort are a sociologist with no criminal justice education or experience and a medical imaging researcher with no criminal justice education or experience.
  
  Now get out there and make contact with your top 20!

So are these guys getting free research out of the Department?

Or even more disturbing - are they running the Department, writing policy and conducting a giant social experiment with the lives of Chicago citizens in order to further research or write some crime theory book? If so, when did it begin, what impact have they had on manpower decisions, and were they running things in 2012 when homicides spiked upward after years of reductions?