The use of scientific evidence for public policy decision-making began more intensively in the area of public health, with studies that aimed to evaluate the causes of diseases and the results of certain drugs and vaccines to identify those solutions that really worked and did not cause serious side effects.
This form of decision making process was later expanded to different areas, such as agriculture, social development and education, always seeking to make these public policies more effective and efficient.
In the 1960s and 1970s, this movement made its way into the field of citizen security at the global level, with the use of experimental and quasi-experimental studies targeted at evaluating what works and what does not work in reducing crime and violence.
Since then, the field of empirical criminology or "crime science" has been developing and has increasingly accumulated a significant body of knowledge on what is effective in reducing different types of crime and violence. Thousands of impact evaluations have been accumulated over the past fifty years.

Most of these evaluations are from Anglo-Saxon countries, which were systematized in online repositories available only in English. To change this situation and encourage the production and dissemination of evidence in Latin America and the Caribbean, the IDB decided to create this digital platform to disseminate evidence on citizen security and justice in the region.