Social scientific research has made a very substantial contribution to specialist academic understanding of crime and its control. This chapter sketches out the contribution that has been made in three areas: our understanding of crime trends; our knowledge of policing and its effects on crime; and the factors that encourage people to comply with the law. The ways in which practitioners and academics think about these issues have been transformed over the last half-century, and social scientific research is a significant factor in achieving this transformation. However, the same research has achieved a very much more tenuous hold on political and public discourse about crime, and there are signs that this is a worsening trend. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the factors that appear to be marginalising the voice of criminological experts in the political domain, and it offers some thoughts on how social science might maintain or even extend its reach into highly politicised issues such as ‘law and order’.