Jerry Lee (born April 20, 1936, in Sharon, Pennsylvania) is a noted crime prevention philanthropist, proponent of evidence-based policy-making, and the former owner of the Philadelphia radio station WBEB-FM 101.1.
Currently he is working on promoting the effectiveness of radio commercials, owns SpotQ Services, Inc.,[1] is the President of the Jerry Lee Foundation,[2] and is involved in continuing to encourage the adoption of evidence-based criminology.
David Kurtz was trained as an Engineer and gave Jerry Lee the opportunity to work for the fledgling station.
Some of the sales strategies that came out of that initial meeting included installing new technology like the new automatic IBM typewriter to use as a conversation piece and a continental height bar that was accessed by a sliding door adjacent to his office.
In late 1967 a deal with one of the top AM “Rep Firms” in the country (Petry Media Corp) was brokered and business with national advertising brands rose dramatically.
Taking a picture inside this car was a major attraction for advertisers, political fundraisers and visiting dignitaries.
[8] One of Lee’s promotions in the mid-1980s focused on giving away 50,000 deluxe rosewood cabinet radios with 6-inch speakers to retailers in the region.
At the time it was relatively common to walk into a salon, barbershop, grocery store or other place of business and hear one of these radios playing 101.1 FM.
Lee purchased the rest of the station's shares from Dave Kurtz's estate in 2005 and left the organization in 2018 with the sale to Entercom (now called Audacy).
[7] While a National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Board Member in the early 1980s, Jerry Lee became concerned that the United States was experiencing reduced levels of productivity.
In 1997, the University of Maryland’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice invited Jerry Lee to serve as Chair of the Advisory Board of its multi-million dollar “Preventing Crime” program, which extended the work of its landmark 1997 Report to the US Congress on Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising.
Their work helped to lead to the founding in 2001 of the international Campbell Collaboration, of which Jerry Lee was one of three original incorporators and David Farrington was the first chair of the Coordinating Committee on Crime and Justice.
The Jerry Lee Center's goal is to foster collaboration among outstanding criminologists from around the world to further the discipline as a multi-disciplinary science in research, education and public service.
Dr. Anthony Braga, an award-winning experimental criminologist, was appointed the first Jerry Lee Professor of Criminology at Pennsylvania University.
In 2001, Jerry Lee and Lawrence Sherman, in conjunction with Stockholm University Professor Jerzy Sarnecki, created an annual prize in criminology that recognized the contributions the field makes to the reduction of human suffering.
In most years the Prize has been presented to the winners by Queen Silvia of Sweden or another member of the Swedish Royal Family.
The mission of the centre, the first of its kind at any university, is to promote the use and development of experimental criminology with operational partners who wish to test new interventions.
Experimental criminology consists principally of randomized controlled field trials to develop and test theoretically coherent ideas about reducing harm from crime.
The Director of Research at the Cambridge Jerry Lee Centre, Professor Lawrence W. Sherman, is known for his success in mobilizing serving police officers to design and carry out their own experiments across the UK and in other countries.
[10] The Director of the Cambridge Lee Centre, Dr. Heather Strang, is highly cited for the 12 randomized experiments in restorative justice [11] that she led in Australia and the UK.
Doubly Robust Internal Bench- marking and False Discovery Rates for Detecting Racial Bias in Police Stops.