Law Enforcement and Justice Administration

Picture of LeeSeungmug (Zech) Lee, Associate Professor

Stipes Hall 410
Phone: 309/298-2746
E-mail: S-Lee5@wiu.edu

Lee received his Ph.D. from the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers-Newark (2008) and his Masters in Protection Management from John Jay College of Criminal Justice (2001) and in Police Administration from Dong-guk University in Seoul, South Korea (1997).  He is currently an assistant professor at the School of Law Enforcement & Justice Administration at Western Illinois University.  He has lectured on various criminal justice topics.

The primary research interests concentrate on areas of crime prevention, focusing, in particular, on private security and comparative (international) criminal justice systems.  His doctoral research focused on the impact of the burglar alarms on residential burglary to examine the deterrent effect of burglar alarms on crime reduction.  The critical issue of spatial displacement and diffusion of benefits was carefully examined, using advanced quantitative and spatial analyses.  The project received financial support from the Alarm Industry Research & Educational Foundation (AIREF), the research arm of the National Burglar & Fire Alarm Association (NBFAA).  His study and press release documents are available from www.alarm.org.  Research articles have been published in the Journal of Applied Security Research (2010) and others.  His current research agenda, focusing on the effectiveness of alarm systems on crime, includes: (1) the impact study of burglar alarms on commercial burglary; (2) the quasi-experimental study of the impact of burglar alarms on repeat victimization; and (3) the inmate interview charged for burglaries.  Data collection from inmate interview is in progress.

In addition, his interest in research methods is to use GIS (geographic information system) for spatial analyses of crimes and crime prevention programs.  He has presented at the NIJ MAPS conference.  He has applied GIS technology to study the impact of burglar alarms on burglaries and sex offenders.

His other research interest is on international organized crime.  His research article has appeared in the Trends in Organized Crime (2006), and he continues to work on research and publications with this topic.  He has also actively engaged in research in domestic violence among Korean-American women in the U.S.