Scott M. Mourtgos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. His applied research focuses on policing and criminal justice policy, with particular attention to public perceptions of police use of force, crime deterrence policies, police personnel issues, and the application of Bayesian statistics in criminal justice research. He has more than twenty peer reviewed publications on these and related topics, and his work has appeared in the top general interest journals of both criminal justice and public administration, including Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Public Administration Review.
Before entering academia full time, Mourtgos spent two decades with the Salt Lake City Police Department, rising to Deputy Chief of Police. Over his career he served in patrol, public order, strategic deployment, and community intelligence as an officer; narcotics and special victims as a detective; patrol, strategic deployment, and professional standards as a sergeant; investigations and support as a lieutenant; and training as a captain. He also served as the agency’s Intelligence Commander. As Deputy Chief, he oversaw patrol, airport, data and crime analysis, and crime reduction operations. He restructured the department’s Data and Crime Analysis Section around the Stratified Policing model, a period during which the city recorded its lowest crime levels in fifteen years, including a 12 percent reduction in Part I violent crime and a 14 percent reduction in Part I property crime citywide. Earlier, as a special victims detective, he developed an evidence based interviewing approach for sexual assault investigations and trained the entire department in its use, improving both victim engagement and investigative outcomes.
Mourtgos is committed to integrating police practice and high quality scientific evidence, an aim reflected in his appointment as a 2020 NIJ LEADS Scholar and his induction into the George Mason University Evidence Based Policing Hall of Fame in 2024. He serves on the Research Advisory Board for the Police Executive Research Forum, sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Criminal Justice and Police Practice & Research: An International Journal, and is an affiliate of the Police Staffing Observatory at Michigan State University, the Police Accountability and Policy Evaluation Research (PAPER) Lab, and the Governance and Responsible AI Laboratory (GRAIL) at Purdue University. He is a past doctoral fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (2022) and a graduate of the FBI National Academy (Session 280). His public facing commentary has appeared in written, radio, and podcast outlets.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice from Weber State University, a Master’s degree in Forensic Psychology from the University of North Dakota, a Graduate Certificate in Criminal Justice Education from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Utah
