history of problem solving policing

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The origins of problem-oriented policing, the idea of pop, the influence of pop, adoption, adaptation, alignment and elaboration of pop, the future of pop.

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The Past, Present and Future of POP 1

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Nick Tilley, Michael S. Scott, The Past, Present and Future of POP, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice , Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2012, Pages 122–132, https://doi.org/10.1093/police/pas011

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Problem-oriented policing (POP) was the brainchild of Herman Goldstein. The core principles were first formulated in the late 1970s. They continue to exert a major influence on both police and partnership work, especially in the UK and US. POP has profoundly affected the work of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at UCL. It involves a scientific approach—using systematically assembled evidence on the nature and extent of relevant recurrent problems to develop evidence based and ethical responses, which are systematically assessed for lessons learned. The concept has even broader implications for improving policing insofar as it responds to concerns about how police exercise discretion, how they are held accountable to the citizenry, their legal authority, and how their many functions are prioritized. Many later ideas in policing may usefully complement POP, but none challenges its basic approach. Situational crime prevention, which was originally developed at much the same time as POP, has many affinities with it and in practice the ideas complement one another well. The assessments of POP projects have often been weak. The implementation of POP also poses major challenges for policing and has in practice often been halting and weak. Robust assessments both of projects and of the approach as a whole, however, show it to be highly outcome effective. POP continues to offer a broad approach to developing and delivering effective and ethical policing. A series of suggestions for its future development are made.

First described in a journal article in 1979, with further elaboration at book length in 1990, ‘problem-oriented policing’ (POP) was the brainchild of Herman Goldstein ( Goldstein 1979 , 1990 ). It grew out of the 25 years Goldstein had spent immersed in studying and working in policing. The most influential parts of that experience were (1) the roughly 2 years he spent directly observing activities of police officers in the field, on the street, responding to incidents, etc. 2 ; and (2) the 4 years he spent as executive assistant to the Superintendent of Police in Chicago.

In the course of his work, Goldstein came to recognize the complexity of policing, uncovering the many and often conflicting roles and functions of the police that go largely unacknowledged. This surfaces, for example, in the broad range of functions the police perform and the accompanying diverse demands made of them; the puzzling and persistent nature of the behavioural problems they are expected to address; the relationships they have to the criminal justice system; the discretion they have to exercise; the chronic shortfalls in resources and alternatives they can draw on to achieve what is expected of them; the legal constraints on what they can do; and the influence exerted by external forces and by their internal subcultures. Goldstein also noticed that practically all reform efforts at the time he was formulating his ideas aimed to improve the structure and efficiency of the police organization. They paid little or no attention to the substantive aspects of policing: the behavioural problems on which the police were expected to have some impact.

Goldstein concluded that no single reform effort (for example, consolidation of agencies, more streamlined structure, better training, college education, or technology) would correct the fundamental difficulties faced by the police. Rather, what was needed was a different, larger, more realistic and ambitious integrated framework for improving policing as an institution. It is this that he described as a ‘problem-oriented approach to policing’, subsequently simplified by others as ‘problem-oriented policing’, ‘problem-solving policing’, or ‘POP’.

For Goldstein, the essence of the police reform he was advocating in promoting problem-oriented policing had two major thrusts: (1) building, almost from scratch, an effort to understand in depth the diverse behavioural problems police are expected to handle—a body of knowledge about the true ‘business of policing’; and (2) gradually revising all the elements in the structuring of a police agency so that they are shaped more directly by what is learned about what they are expected to do.

In problem-oriented policing, a concern for ‘effectiveness’ in dealing with ‘clearly defined pieces’ of their business thus takes priority over ‘efficiency’ in delivery with little knowledge of the impact of what was delivered. Moreover, the ends of policing determine the means, rather than the reverse. Hence, there is a deep concern about the ‘substance’ of policing as the basis for determining police methods, practices, and the design and staffing of the organization, rather than the reverse.

This approach comprised a radical departure from past efforts to improve policing—one that would take a long time to accomplish. Building a body of knowledge to support everyday policing, with so little accomplished up to that point, was an awesome task. This change in approach, however, would embrace much that was then going on in policing, such as the move to engage the community, although in a more precise and focused way. It would also come to align with efforts of those, often outside policing, who studied the behaviours of concern to police and who worked on efforts to prevent crime. These scholars who studied policing problems, as opposed to those who studied the police institution and its personnel, would no longer be on the periphery of policing, but of central importance to reform efforts: they would fit within the POP framework.

[Problem-oriented policing] is open ended. It invites criticism, alterations, additions, and subtractions. I stress this point lest the effort to be as specific as possible in communicating the idea is interpreted as unduly definitive of its shape. Throughout the book, I raise questions with the specific intent of stimulating others to contribute to further development of this overall approach to improving policing and to critique what is set forth here .

Let us now turn to what befell Goldstein’s ideas in practice. What we shall see is a mix of enthusiasm, uneven development, adaptation, appropriation, and reversal. This is to be expected from the literature on diffusion of innovation. As Rogers ( 2003 : 1), puts it, ‘Getting a new idea adopted, even when it has obvious advantages, is difficult. Many innovations require a lengthy period of many years from the time they become available to the time they are widely adopted’. Influential new ideas are typically first picked up be a few, who then champion them. The ideas may then spread and when taken up often metamorphose in the process making them more palatable to adopters. In organizations, such as police agencies, innovations are adjusted (or ‘re-invented’) better to fit existing needs and structures. Full adoption eventually occurs (if it happens at all) with ‘routinisation … when the innovation has become incorporated into the regular activities of the organization and loses its separate identity’ ( Rogers 2003 : 434).

Goldstein’s vision of POP has been widely championed, especially in the United States and in Britain, but in other countries too, for example, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand. Government offices (for example, the COPS Office at the US Department of Justice and the British Home Office Police Research Group) have encouraged and supported individual police-services and crime-reduction partnerships in their efforts to embrace it. Many past and present senior police officers in the UK, for example, Mike Barton (Lancashire and Durham), Dr Stuart Kirby (Lancashire), Dr Steve Brookes (Leicestershire), Pauline Clare (Lancashire), Sir Kenneth Newman (MPS), Ian Macpherson (Norfolk and MPS), Sir Charles Pollard (Thames Valley), and Sir Paul Stephenson (Lancashire and MPS), have attempted to have their organizations implement it. Numerous individual, front-line officers, often winners of the International Goldstein Awards in the US or the Tilley Awards in the UK, have been inspired by it in their imaginative and practical efforts better to serve their communities. A cadre of criminologists and police scholars in universities, for example, Karen Bullock, Ron Clarke, John Eck, Ron Glensor, Gary Cordner, Rachel Boba, Stuart Kirby, Gloria Laycock, Graeme Newman, Johannes Knutsson, Deborah Lamm Weisel, Tamara Madensen, Rob Guerette, Samuel Walker, Malcolm Sparrow, Anthony Braga, George Kelling, and Bill Spelman, has been persuaded that POP describes the ways in which evidence about problems can best be produced and used to reduce crime and antisocial behaviour. Not-for-profit police-serving organizations too have been influenced and have in turn influenced police services. The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) under the leadership of Gary Hayes, and subsequently Darrel Stephens, was important in early efforts to promote and enable the effective implementation of POP in the US, and Barrie Irving when heading the British Police Foundation was also highly supportive in the UK. More recently, the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (pocenter.org) has been formed expressly to do the same. PERF and, subsequently, the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing have successively run the annual International Goldstein Award and associated POP conference in the US. The Home Office has done likewise with the Tilley Award and the Problem Solving Partnerships conference in the UK. POP has had further influence on how prosecutors and courts conceive and approach their work, much of which has been described and shaped by the Center for Court Innovation in the US. Additionally, it has begun to be adapted to the work of some federal regulatory agencies in the US ( Sparrow, 2000 ).

It is difficult to assess accurately whether the problem-oriented approach, as Goldstein conceived it, has become routinized in the practices of police agencies worldwide. At various times, surveys have been conducted seeking to ascertain the police agency prevalence of POP—or, more commonly, of community policing, under which some surveyors subsume POP, as it has been adapted to fit existing police needs and structures ( Maguire, 2002 ; He et al. , 2005 ; Read and Tilley, 2000 ). The results typically conclude that POP efforts are fairly widespread, although adoption is not necessarily deep or sophisticated. Gauging the prevalence of POP practice by agencies’ participation in the two major POP award programmes—the Goldstein Awards (international) and the Tilley Awards (UK only)—reveals substantial [nearly universal in the UK (Bullock et al. , 2006), but nowhere near universal in the US ( Scott, 2000 )] participation among agencies, at least over a period of years. But these survey methods yield only incomplete information about the extent to which the principles of POP are being put into practice, leaving more unanswered than answered questions, such as: Are police claiming to be practicing POP, but not in fact? Conversely, are police practicing POP, but not claiming to, such as when problem-oriented work is done under the auspices of community policing, hot spots policing, intelligence-led policing, or some other label that is compatible with POP, or under no label at all? We know from experience, if not careful documentation, that the practice of POP has waxed and waned within particular police agencies over time, as police leadership changes ( Cordner and Biebel, 2005 ). Perhaps most profoundly, no one has yet proposed a precise measure of the proportion of police agencies’ time and resources that ought to be devoted to the explicit practice of POP, as opposed to, say, preventive patrol, incident response, and criminal investigation (see, Manning, 2005 , for a useful reminder about the persistence of more-conventional policing styles and methods, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding). No one has ever argued that police should be ‘problem solving’ at all times, to the complete exclusion of other duties and methods of operation. Explicit problem solving of the sort contemplated by POP should only be undertaken to the extent warranted, and there is no universal standard for that. Hence, what we have is widespread adoption of a kind but, as expected, adaptation to existing police structures and needs.

The university-based authors of this article count themselves amongst those who have been profoundly influenced by Goldstein’s thinking. Moreover, University College London’s Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science (UCL JDI), whose tenth anniversary this issue of Policing marks, attempts to serve efforts by police and partnerships to deliver problem-oriented ways of working in its teaching, research, and consultancy. The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing which is largely run by university-based scholars at Rutgers (Ron Clarke), the University at Albany (Graeme Newman), and the University of Wisconsin (Mike Scott), has much of its work funded by the COPS Office of the US Department of Justice, and has contracted POP-supportive guidance from sympathetic scholars from many universities including those from the JDI at UCL, as well as other non-university-based experts. Much of this work entails publishing research- and practice-based guidebooks for police on specific policing problems, responses to them, and methods for analysing them: the beginnings of the very body of substantive knowledge that Goldstein has long advocated. In addition, it collects and makes accessible reports on POP initiatives undertaken by police, as well as other POP and situational crime prevention (SCP) research. In more than 30 years since Goldstein published his original paper, thus, his ideas have been widely taken up by those who see them as fundamental to improving policing in general and crime control in particular.

As with many innovative ideas that have been taken up, interpretations have varied and some of those adopting or adapting the rhetoric of POP may neither have read nor understood what Goldstein meant or what was involved in developing and delivering POP. In the USA, for example, POP has often been equated with community policing ( Trojanowicz et al. , 1990 ; Peak and Glensor, 2008 ). It has been embraced by many involved in community policing because of its clear affinities and because it provides a basis for delivering benefits for those involved in community policing. Community policing, however, is rather a loose term that tends to prioritize local community relations and grass-roots community involvement in dealing with problems. Whilst POP certainly does not eschew concerns with community, it embraces an account of policing that emphasizes police-relevant problems (wherever they come from, including the local community, but not exclusively so) and finding effective responses to them (including involving the local community where relevant, but again not exclusively so). In Britain, intelligence-led policing has been formally embraced by police services throughout the country as a business model for dealing with crime problems by using information, analysis, and tasking processes to target enforcement agencies towards disrupting areas of concentrated offending. Again POP does not eschew interest in addressing crime problems effectively and the use of ‘intelligence’ in doing so, but its concerns extend beyond police concerns with crime to embrace also other problems they are expected to address, and it also extends beyond traditional (patrol, detection, and disruption) methods of addressing it ( Tilley, 2008 ). The POP approach has been applied to a quite wide range of problems, from those involving clearly criminal conduct (theft, robbery, burglary, fraud, homicide, or assault) to those involving more-ambiguous disorder (intimidation, fear, panhandling, public inebriation, noise, crowd disorder, harassment, or loitering) to those involving accidental and self-inflicted injury (traffic crashes, drug overdoses, drowning, or suicides) to those involving potential injury (runaway juveniles, truancy, missing children, or child custody disputes) to those that have elements of all of these (drug dealing, manufacturing, and abuse) ( Scott, 2000 : 147–149; Bullock et al. , 2006: 70–72; Clarke, 1997 : 87–91; Rojek, 2003 : 499–503). For POP, the police-relevant problem comes first (whether it be crime or some other issue) and the analysis and choice of response methods have to do with ethics and efficacy, and the mobilization of those best placed to deal with it, rather than necessarily the police and other agencies with enforcement powers. POP, thus, may make use of some of the business processes associated with intelligence-led policing but the latter is neither a substitute for nor an advance on POP, which adopts a rather more comprehensive and open-ended reform agenda. POP has been variously linked, compared, and contrasted with many other policing models over the years, including hot spots policing, Compstat, broken windows policing, zero tolerance policing, and evidence-based policing (see, Scott, 2000 ; Weisburd and Braga, 2006 ). Some conceptual confusion between and among these models persists, but suffice to say that POP was always meant to be a broad and comprehensive framework for improving policing, rather than a discrete policing strategy. Echoes of POP can be seen in these (often very welcome) police innovations, although as expected in the diffusion of innovation literature they represent adaptations and elaborations to meet particular needs.

Where POP has been explicitly adopted, as theoretically expected from the diffusion of innovation literature, it has often not been quite as had originally been anticipated, even when outstanding work has been undertaken ( Scott, 2000 ; Goldstein, 2003 ; Townsley et al. , 2003 ; Braga and Weisburd, 2006 ). Goldstein had originally thought that POP would be performed at the highest levels of a police organization, such as the planning units that are commonly found in larger agencies: what would be required are newly trained staff and a reorientation of management that comes to appreciate that practice needs to be informed by knowledge. In practice, POP was introduced and implemented much closer than expected to front-line service delivery. In Baltimore County, for example, early efforts to deliver POP were initiated by special POP units that were close to the street level ( Taft, 1986 ; Higdon and Huber, 1987 ). Such work, when undertaken by talented individual officers, has sometimes been inspired and has had substantial apparent effects. Line-level workers, however, generally lack the time or methodological skills rigorously to identify, analyse, and evaluate the results of efforts to address problems. Similar patterns have been found in UK police services ostensibly adopting POP; for example, East Area in Leicestershire ( Leigh et al. , 1996 ). In some cases, ‘problem-solving’ has replaced POP, by which we mean that individual one-off (sometimes quite imaginative) responses to idiosyncratic, one-off difficulties have been presented as POP, whereas POP’s focus is supposedly on patterned, recurrent, and similar police-relevant problems ( Clarke, 1998 ). Line-level problem solving is important and useful work that should be encouraged, but POP also requires a commitment to more ambitious efforts to improve the police and community response to whole classes of problems. Many of the instances of higher-level problem solving that have been undertaken—often but not always involving the assistance of trained researchers—demonstrate quite persuasively its merit, even though the number of such cases is relatively small. (See, for example, Goldstein and Susmilch, 1982a , 1982b ; Hoare et al. , 1984 ; Eck and Spelman, 1987 ; Braga, et al., 2001 ; California Highway Patrol, 2002 ; Clarke and Goldstein, 2003a , 2003b ; Vestfold Police District, 2004 ; Port St. Lucie Police Department, 2006 ; Chula Vista Police Department, 2009 ; Greater Manchester Police, 2009 ; Manitoba Auto Theft Task Force, 2009 ; Transport for London and Metropolitan Police Service, 2011 .) And yet there is also an abundance of examples of effective, albeit not terribly sophisticated, problem solving that has been undertaken by line officers addressing smaller, more discrete problems (see, for example, many of the projects submitted to the Goldstein and Tilley Award programmes that did not have the assistance of trained researchers or senior command staff). There are various explanations for why police agencies and researchers have not undertaken more high-level POP, and conversely, why most problem solving that does occur is rather shallow and superficial. Whatever one believes the ideal model to be, we take the view that there is need and room for both high-level, sophisticated POP and for low-level, shallower problem solving, and that, ideally, both forms will continue to increase in frequency and in sophistication, with the right form being applied taking account of the scope and seriousness of the problem at hand, and the resources available to address it. That the sort of high-level, systemic, and sophisticated form of problem solving has not occurred more often than it has is more due to widespread failures of police executives and external researchers to build the research infrastructure needed to undertake this work on a routine basis than it is to a failure of line-level personnel to be more thoughtful and creative in their work ( Kennedy, 1999 ; Scott, 2000 ; Goldstein, 2003 ). The literature on diffusion of innovation is clear about the importance of leadership in effecting change across organizations, although in decentralized organizations, innovation can more easily occur at the periphery and this seems to be the pattern with the adoption of POP ( Rogers, 2003 : 402–435).

The Scanning, Analysis, Response, Assessment (SARA) mnemonic, devised by Eck and Spelman (1987) , has been almost universally adopted as a simple way to capture the logic of POP as a way of doing policing and as an approach to building an evidence base. Perceived complexity is a known barrier to the adoption of innovation, and the simplified and formulaic adoption of SARA reflects the facility with which its benefits and processes can be grasped and communicated ( Rogers, 2003 : 218–266). The ubiquity of SARA, however, has been a mixed blessing ( Sidebottom and Tilley, 2011 ). On the one hand, it does capture the compelling, basic, scientific logic of POP and is easily understood. On the other, it creates a misleading impression that POP is simple to do and linear in character. It has, therefore, led to rather simplistic notions of what is involved in and what has been delivered through POP. The SARA process has come now commonly to be represented as a recursive process with feedback loops. There have been suggestions for its replacement with alternative models that better capture what is involved in POP ( Ekblom, 2005 ). That said, it seems unlikely that SARA will be dislodged. Within the SARA process, it has been widely observed that the analysis and assessment elements tend to be undertaken superficially. This may, in part, have to do with availability of the analytic skills required. In regard to analysis it may also have to do with an understandable impatience to act once a problem has been identified. Hasty action, however, is liable to lead to traditional or ill-directed responses. In regard to assessment, once a project is over, there is often little interest in looking back at what was achieved. Rather the disposition is to move on to deal with the next problem and not to ‘waste’ time and effort on the past. (For the argument in favour of assessment, see Eck, 2002 .)

There has been some alignment between POP and Situational Crime Prevention, which have affinities with one another. Those with an interest in SCP have seen POP as a vehicle for its implementation. Those with an interest in POP have seen SCP as a major resource for working out what to do in dealing with problems. SCP’s beginnings were roughly contemporaneous with those of POP, albeit on the other side of the Atlantic. SCP adopts an action–research method that sits comfortably with the logic of POP ( Clarke, 1992 ). SCP also focuses on specific problems as with POP (Cornish and Smith, 2012) and it also suggests a way of identifying effective and practical measures to address them ( Clarke and Eck, 2003 ). Ronald Clarke, who is to SCP what Goldstein is to POP in terms of his intellectual and personal contribution, has played a key part in driving the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing ( Scott and Goldstein, 2012 ; Eck and Madensen, 2012 ). He has also collaborated with Goldstein in some specific initiatives ( Clarke and Goldstein, 2003a , 2003b ). Goldstein conceived POP as essentially open to development and elaboration and its connection to SCP illustrates this. SCP, however, is not coterminous with POP. It differs in five key respects. First, unlike SCP it is not concerned only with crime but with all police-relevant problems. Second, POP is open to any practical, effective, and ethical interventions to deal with specified problems, and is not confined to situational measures, even though the latter often have obvious advantages. Third, POP was conceived as something for police agencies, even though it would often mean police services engaging third parties ( Goldstein, 1990 ; Scott, 2005 ), whilst SCP emerged out of a recognition of the limits to what the police could achieve by way of crime prevention ( Clarke and Hough, 1984 ) and hence a need to assign responsibility elsewhere ( Laycock, 1996 ). Fourth, POP is rooted in organizational and institutional reform theories and principles, whereas SCP is rooted in criminological theory. Fifth, POP has, to date, been willing to accept less academically rigorous standards of effectiveness than has SCP. The British origins of SCP and hence emphasis on partnership ( Home Office, 1984 , 1990 ) have led to POP’s changed referents in the UK where the letters are often taken to refer to Problem-Oriented Partnership rather than Problem-Oriented Policing , as local statutory partnerships try to embrace the approach. Notwithstanding these differences, many scholars currently embrace both POP and SCP and do much of their work at its intersection.

Over the past 30 years, POP has continued to attract new adherents, without having taken off to become the orthodoxy for policing. It has not become routinized, albeit that adapted versions of it are widely practiced. Many other developments competing for attention in policing, for example, hot spots policing, pulling-levers policing, intelligence-led policing, evidence-based policing, reassurance policing, and Compstat, draw some of their inspiration from POP and can provide useful complements to POP, but they do not replace it as an overarching philosophy for policing. So POP has been highly influential, albeit that it has not yet taken over as the overarching animus for policing.

Doing POP as originally envisaged presents profound challenges and its slow, hesitant, and uneven development is no surprise. It may be that POP will never be fully adopted. Indeed the in-built critical reflection on practice and evidence, the changing nature of the problems facing policing, and alterations in the social, political, and economic context of policing mean that POP may best be considered a means of travel for police agencies (or partnerships charged with policing functions) rather than a destination. Put another way, because societies and their public safety problems constantly evolve, so too must policing, and POP promises police a method for constant change and improvement.

Specifically, what might be needed for an agency to help POP along its way? The following are suggested.

Line-level officers, alone or in groups, should continue to be encouraged and supported in the local problem solving of which they have shown themselves to be highly capable.

Authentic implementation of POP requires that larger problems also be addressed. This requires the support of skilled analysts in the collection and analysis of data. Provision for local officers to refer the problems they are addressing locally for attention on a wider scale would also be useful.

In distinguishing larger problems that cannot be addressed adequately at a local level it may be helpful to develop typologies of problems. One such typology breaks problems down territorially (e.g. beat, district, area, city, state, region, nation, and international). Another seeks to distinguish problems based on the volume of incidents encountered.

The analysis of problems needs to be more thorough than it has generally been in the past. The widely translated crime analysis for problem solvers publication (in 55 steps in the British edition and 60 steps in the American version) by Clarke and Eck (2005) has gone a long way towards making available guidance on what constitutes an in-depth inquiry regarding a problem.

Closer collaborative alliances with competent and sympathetic universities and research organizations could yield substantial mutual benefits. Police departments produce a continuous stream of interesting problems for analysis and projects for evaluation. Properly oriented to trying to work out ways of improving problem-solving, skilled researchers have much to offer police departments in understanding their problems and in assessing their responses. Likewise, problem-oriented research comprises a way of generating interesting, informative, and useful academic publications.

All those attempting POP should keep up with and make use of the ever-expanding, regularly updated, and thoroughly vetted resources made available by the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (popcenter.org). This will help POP to achieve its potential benefits.

Situational crime prevention and its cognate theories (rational choice theory, crime pattern analysis, and routine activities theory) provide underutilized frameworks for identifying promising points of intervention to address the crime problems police (and their crime-prevention partners) are expected to address.

The training of the police needs to concentrate above all on the substance of policing: the behavioural issues they are asked to address. This focus is needed at all levels of police training, from initial induction to the education of officers taking on command positions. Leadership, management, law, technical skills, and political awareness are, of course, important, but they are subordinate to learning about policing problems, about what might be done about them, and about building the capacity effectively and ethically to address them, drawing on and contributing to the relevant evidence base.

In a more general way, for POP to thrive as a dominant policing model, people must come to expect it of police. The police are accountable to the public which fund them and popular views of the role of policing, of course, have to be listened to. The advent of directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales in November 2012 will give even more power of the electorate to shape the policing they receive. To the extent to which the public endorse traditional views of police and police methods, emphasizing crime fighting, enforcement, and preventive patrol, many aspects of POP including the open-ended search for ethical and effective ways of dealing with the diverse problems within the remit of the police, will be difficult to deliver. At present, it seems fair to say that some police agencies offer POP to the community, which seems generally glad to get this sort of police service, even if it does not fully comprehend all that it entails. Because police in democratic societies respond to external demands placed upon them, those who shape those demands—to include government officials, business and community leaders, and other criminal justice professionals, from now on most notably to include the Police and Crime Commissioners—must come to expect that their police have the capacity to identify emerging public safety problems; to properly and thoroughly analyse them; to respond to them on the basis of sound professional knowledge innovatively and equitably, going beyond traditional criminal law enforcement; and to demonstrate that they have been effective. When anything less is deemed unacceptable, the conditions for full adoption of POP will firmly and finally have arrived. It is profoundly to be hoped that at least some of the candidate commissioners will offer a vision of POP as part of their manifesto.

1 Whilst the authors take full responsibility for what is said in this article, it rests very heavily indeed on extensive discussions with Herman Goldstein. All errors, however, are the authors’.

2 This field work was undertaken as part of the American Bar Foundation’s 10-year Survey of Criminal Justice Administration , published in several separate volumes (see, LaFave, 1965 ; Newman, 1966 ; Tiffany et al. , 1967 ; McIntyre, 1967 ; Miller and Remington, 1969 ; Dawson, 1969 ).

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What Works in Policing?

Home › Evidence-Based Policing › What Works in Policing? › Review of the Research Evidence › Problem-Oriented Policing

Review of the Research Evidence
Seattle Police Case Study

What is Problem-Oriented Policing?

What is Problem-Oriented Policing (POP)? (Center for Problem-Oriented Policing)
The SARA Model (Center for Problem-Oriented Policing)
Problem-Oriented Policing (Herman Goldstein, 1990, McGraw-Hill; Book front matter available here)
Problem-Oriented Policing and Crime Prevention (Anthony A. Braga, 2008, Criminal Justice Press; introduction and first two chapters here)
On the Beat: Police and Community Problem Solving (Wesley Skogan et al.)

What is the Evidence on Problem-Oriented Policing?*

Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence (National Research Council)
See also Crime Prevention Research Review No. 4: The Effects of Problem-Oriented Policing on Crime and Disorder
Problem-oriented policing (CrimeSolutions.gov)

What Should Police Be Doing to Implement Problem-Oriented Policing?

Problem-Oriented Hot Spots Studies:

Problem-Oriented Policing in Violent Crime Places: A Randomized Controlled Experiment (Anthony Braga, David Weisburd, Elin Waring, Lorraine Mazerolle, William Spelman, and Frank Gajewski)
Policing Crime and Disorder Hot Spots: A Randomized Controlled Trial (Anthony Braga and Brenda Bond)
A Randomized Controlled Trial of Different Policing Strategies at Hot Spots of Violent Crime in Jacksonville (Bruce G. Taylor, Christopher S. Koper, and Daniel J. Woods)Vi

Strategies for Implementing POP:

25 Techniques of Situational Crime Prevention (Center for Problem-Oriented Policing)
Problem-Solving Tips: A Guide to Reducing Crime and Disorder Through Problem-Solving Partnerships (Center for Problem-Oriented Policing)
Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in 60 Small Steps (Center for Problem-Oriented Policing)

Seattle Police officer image courtesy of Flickr user Hollywata and used under a Creative Commons license.

In 1979 Herman Goldstein critiqued police practices of the time by noting that they were more focused on the “means” of policing than its “ends.” He advocated for a paradigm shift in policing that would replace the primarily reactive, incident driven “standard model of policing” (Weisburd & Eck, 2004) with a model that required the police to be proactive in identifying underlying problems that could be targeted to alleviate crime at its roots. He termed this new approach “problem-oriented policing” to highlight the call for police to focus on problems instead of on single calls or incidents. Goldstein also argued that the police had to deal with an array of problems in the community, including not only crime but also social and physical disorders. He also called for the police to expand their toolbox to address problems. In Goldstein’s view, the police needed to draw on not only the criminal law but also civil statutes and rely on other municipal and community resources if they were to address crime and disorder problems.

Goldstein’s approach was elaborated by Eck and Spelman’s (1987) SARA model. SARA is an acronym representing four steps they suggest police should follow when implementing POP. “Scanning” involves the police identifying and prioritizing potential problems. The next step is “Analysis,” which involves the police thoroughly analyzing the problem(s) using a variety of data sources so that tailored responses can be developed. The “Response” step has the police developing and implementing interventions designed to solve the problem(s). The final step is “Assessment,” which involves assessing whether the response worked. The SARA process has become widely accepted and adopted by police agencies implementing problem-oriented policing.

Wesley Skogan and colleagues (1999) describe a five-step model used for problem solving as part of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) :

Identify and prioritize recurring problems
Analyze problems using a variety of data sources
Design response strategies based on what was learned from analyzing the problem
Implement response strategies
Assess the success of response strategies

Problem-oriented policing is listed under “What works?” on our Review of the Research Evidence.

Weisburd, Telep, Hinkle, and Eck (2010) conducted a Campbell review on the effects of POP (i.e. studies that followed the SARA model) on crime and disorder, finding a modest but statistically significant impact among 10 experimental and quasi-experimental studies. Some of the studies in this review that showed smaller effects (or backfire effects) experienced implementation issues that threatened treatment fidelity. The more successfully implemented studies tended to show stronger effects.

Additionally, Weisburd et al. (2010) also collected less rigorous but more numerous pre/post studies without a comparison group. While the internal validity of these studies is weaker than those in the main analysis, these studies are notable in the remarkable consistency of positive findings. Weisburd et al. (2010: 164) concluded that “POP as an approach has significant promise to ameliorate crime and disorder problems broadly defined.”

* We do not include pulling levers or focused deterrence studies in this section as they are reviewed elsewhere. Pulling levers policing can be viewed as a type of problem-oriented policing though.

Problem-oriented policing covers a broad array of responses to a wide range of problems and the evidence base of rigorous studies remains limited. This makes it difficult to give specific recommendations as to how police agencies should deal with certain types of problems. Goldstein’s notion of problem-oriented policing, however, was not designed to provide agencies with specific ways of handling problems. Indeed, Goldstein rejected such one-size fits all tactics that had been typical in the “standard model of policing.” Essential to problem-oriented policing is the careful analysis of problems to design tailor-made solutions. While individualized solutions are important, it is also the case that police agencies across the U.S. often face very similar types of problems that may respond to similar types of solutions. The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing has recognized this, creating more than 70 problem-specific guides for police that provide recommendations on how agencies can tackle a number of different problems.

Weisburd, Telep, Hinkle, and Eck (2008) provided some limited guidance on the types of problem-oriented policing interventions that seem to be most effective:

1. Hot spots policing interventions that use POP have shown particularly successful results. In such studies, it is difficult to disentangle whether problem solving or the focus on small geographic areas is driving the success, but the two strategies seem to work quite well in concert.

2. Problem-oriented policing appears most effective when police departments are on board and fully committed to the tenets of problem-oriented policing. In a problem-oriented policing project in Atlanta public housing, for example, the program suffered greatly because the police were not fully committed to problem-oriented policing.

3. Program expectations must be realistic. Officer case load must be kept to a manageable level and police should not be expected to tackle major problems in a short period of time. In the Minneapolis Repeat Call Address Policing study for example, officers were overwhelmed by dealing with more than 200 problem addresses in a 12-month period. Conversely,in the Jersey City POP at hot spots experiment , officers were given a more manageable 12 hot spot case load, and officers were more effective in implementing the response.

4. Based on limited evidence, collaboration with outside criminal justice agencies appears to be an effective approach in problem-oriented policing. The two probationer-police partnerships included in the review were particularly successful in reducing recidivism.

5. In terms of using the SARA model to guide POP, police agencies typically fail to conduct in-depth problem-analysis. Indeed they often engage in a form of “shallow problem solving” that involves only peripheral analysis of crime data and a largely law enforcement-oriented response. While we do not want to advocate shallow adherence to the SARA model, the evidence suggests that even shallow problem analysis is effective in reducing crime and disorder. This also suggests that if police were to more closely follow the SARA model and expand their repertoire of responses beyond traditional law enforcement they might enjoy even greater crime control benefits from problem-oriented policing. The assessment phase in SARA also tends to be a weak area for many police agencies, but one that is incredibly important to inform police practice. As Sherman (1998) notes, evidence-based policing involves not only police using strategies and tactics shown to be effective, but also agencies constantly evaluating their practices. The assessment phase of the SARA model provides a framework for agencies to consistently learn from and improve their problem solving projects.

Micro Place Studies from the Evidence-Based Policing Matrix

Not all micro place studies are POP studies. Problem-oriented policing studies represent 12 of the 49 micro place studies in the Matrix.

Problem-Oriented Policing Studies from the Evidence-Based Policing Matrix

Y-axis : F = focused; G= general

Z-axis : R = reactive, P = proactive, HP = highly proactive

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Problem-Oriented Policing

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Braga, A.A. (2014). Problem-Oriented Policing. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_266

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Community-Oriented Policing and Problem-Oriented Policing

In 1979, Hermon Goldstein observed from several studies conducted at the time on standard policing practices that law enforcement agencies seemed to be more concerned about the means rather than the goals of policing. He argued that law enforcement agencies should shift away from the traditional, standard model of policing and that police become more proactive, rather than reactive, in their approaches to crime and disorder (Hinkle et al., 2020; Weisburd et al., 2010). Goldstein’s work set the stage for the development of two new models of policing: community-oriented policing (COP) and problem-oriented policing (POP).

COP is a broad policing strategy that relies heavily on community involvement and partnerships, and on police presence in the community, to address local crime and disorder. POP provides law enforcement agencies with an analytic method to develop strategies to prevent and reduce crime and disorder, which involves problem identification, analysis, response, and assessment (National Research Council, 2018).

Although COP and POP differ in many ways, including the intensity of focus and diversity of approaches (National Research Council, 2004), there are several important similarities between them. For example, COP and POP both represent forms of proactive policing, meaning they focus on preventing crime before it happens rather than just reacting to it after it happens. Further, both COP and POP require cooperation among multiple agencies and partners, including community members (National Research Council, 2018). In addition, POP and COP overlap in that each involves the community in defining the problems and identifying interventions (Greene, 2000).

Although few studies focus on youth involvement in COP and POP, youths can play an important role in both strategies. In COP, youths often are part of the community with whom police work to identify and address problems. Youths can be formally involved in the process (i.e., engaging in local community meetings) or informally involved in efforts to strengthen the relationship between the police and members of the community. For example, a police officer on foot patrol may decide to engage with youths in the community through casual conversation, as part of a COP approach (Cowell and Kringen, 2016). Or police might encourage youth to participate in activities, such as police athletic leagues, which were designed to prevent and reduce the occurrence of juvenile crime and delinquency, while also seeking to improve police and youth attitudes toward each other (Rabois and Haaga, 2002). Using POP, law enforcement agencies may specifically focus on juvenile-related problems of crime and disorder. For example, the Operation Ceasefire intervention, implemented in Boston, MA, is a POP strategy that concentrated on reducing homicide victimization among young people in the city (Braga and Pierce, 2005).

This literature review discusses COP and POP in two separate sections. In each section, definitions of the approaches are provided, along with discussions on theory, examples of specific types of programs, overlaps with other policing strategies, and outcome evidence.

Specific research on how police and youth interact with each other in the community will not be discussed in this review but can be found in the Interactions Between Youth and Law Enforcement literature review on the Model Programs Guide.

Community-Oriented Policing Definition

Community-oriented policing (COP), also called community policing, is defined by the federal Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services as “a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies that support the systemic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime” (Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services, 2012:3). This policing strategy focuses on developing relationships with members of the community to address community problems, by building social resilience and collective efficacy, and by strengthening infrastructure for crime prevention. COP also emphasizes preventive, proactive policing; the approach calls for police to concentrate on solving the problems of crime and disorder in neighborhoods rather than simply responding to calls for service. This model considerably expands the scope of policing activities, because the targets of interest are not only crimes but also sources of physical and social disorder (Weisburd et al., 2008).

After gaining acceptance as an alternative to traditional policing models in the 1980s, COP has received greater attention and been used more frequently throughout the 21st century (Greene, 2000; National Research Council, 2018; Paez and Dierenfeldt, 2020). The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 articulated the goal of putting 100,000 additional community police officers on the streets and established the federal Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services. Research from 2013 suggests that 9 out of 10 law enforcement agencies in the United States that serve a population of 25,000 or more had adopted some type of community policing strategy (Reaves, 2015).

COP comprises three key components (Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services, 2012):

Community Partnerships. COP encourages partnerships with stakeholders in the community, including other government agencies (prosecutors, health and human services, child support services and schools); community members/groups (volunteers, activists, residents, and other individuals who have an interest in the community); nonprofits/service providers (advocacy groups, victim groups, and community development corporations); and private businesses. The media also are an important mechanism that police use to communicate with the community.
Organizational Transformation. COP emphasizes the alignment of management, structure, personnel, and information systems within police departments to support the philosophy. These changes may include increased transparency, leadership that reinforces COP values, strategic geographic deployment, training, and access to data.
Problem-Solving. Proactive, systematic, routine problem-solving is the final key component of COP. COP encourages police to develop solutions to underlying conditions that contribute to public safety problems, rather than responding to crime only after it occurs. The SARA model (which stands for Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment) is one major conceptual model of problem-solving that can be used by officers (for a full description of the SARA model, see Problem-Oriented Policing below).

At the heart of COP is a redefinition of the relationship between the police and the community, so that the two collaborate to identify and solve community problems. Through this relationship, the community becomes a “co-producer” of public safety in that the problem-solving process draws on citizen expertise in identifying and understanding social issues that create crime, disorder, and fear in the community (Skolnick and Bayley, 1988; Gill et al., 2014; National Research Council, 2018).

COP is not a single coherent program; rather, it encompasses a variety of programs or strategies that rest on the assumption that policing must involve the community. Elements typically associated with COP programs include the empowerment of the community; a belief in a broad police function; the reliance of police on citizens for authority, information, and collaboration; specific tactics (or tactics that are targeted at particular problems, such as focused deterrence strategies) rather than general tactics (or tactics that are targeted at the general population, such as preventive patrol); and decentralized authority to respond to local needs (Zhao, He, and Lovrich, 2003). One Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) survey of MCCA members found that some of the most common COP activities were officer representation at community meetings, bicycle patrols, citizen volunteers, foot patrols, police “mini-stations” (see description below), and neighborhood storefront offices (Scrivner and Stephens, 2015; National Research Council, 2018).

Community members who engage in COP programs generally report positive experiences. For example, residents who received home visits by police officers as part of a COP intervention reported high confidence in police and warmth toward officers, compared with residents who did not receive visits (Peyton et al., 2019). Notably, however, those who participate in COP–related activities, such as community meetings, may not be representative of the whole community (Somerville, 2008). Many individuals in communities remain unaware of COP activities, and those who are aware may choose not to participate (Adams, Rohe, and Arcury, 2005; Eve et al., 2003). Additionally, it can be difficult to sustain community participation. While police officers are paid for their participation, community members are not, and involvement could take time away from family and work (Coquilhat, 2008).

Specific Types of COP Programs

Because COP is such a broad approach, programs that involve the community may take on many different forms. For example, some COP programs may take place in a single setting such as a community center, a school, or a police mini-station. Other COP–based programs, such as police foot patrol programs, can encompass the entire neighborhood. The following are different examples of specific types of COP programs and how they can affect youth in a community.

School Resource Officers (SROs) are an example of a commonly implemented COP program in schools. SROs are trained police officers who are uniformed, carry firearms and a police department badge, and have arrest powers. They are tasked with maintaining a presence at schools to promote safety and security (Stern and Petrosino, 2018). The use of SROs is not new; SRO programs first appeared in the 1950s but increased significantly in the 1990s as a response to high-profile incidents of extreme school violence and the subsequent policy reforms (Broll and Howells, 2019; Lindberg, 2015). SROs can fulfill a variety of roles. They are intended to prevent and respond to school-based crime; promote positive relationships among law enforcement, educators, and youth; and foster a positive school climate (Thomas et al., 2013).

The National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), the largest professional organization of SROs, formally defines the SRO roles using a “triad model,” which aligns with community policing models (May et al., 2004), and includes the three primary functions of SROs: 1) enforcing the law; 2) educating students, school staff, and the community; and 3) acting as an informal counselor or mentor (Broll and Howells, 2019; Fisher and Hennessy, 2016; Javdani, 2019; Thomas et al., 2013). There may be significant variability in how these roles and responsibilities are balanced, as they are usually defined through a memorandum of understanding between the local law enforcement agency and the school district (Fisher and Hennessy, 2016). Even with the SRO responsibilities formally spelled out, there may still be tensions and ambiguities inherent to the SRO position based on their positioning at the intersection of the education system and the juvenile justice system, which often have competing cultures and authority structures (Fisher and Hennessy, 2016). As members of the police force, the SROs may view problematic behaviors as crimes, whereas educators view them as obstacles to learning. Another ambiguity is that as an informal counselor/mentor, the SRO is expected to assist students with behavioral and legal issues, which may result in a conflict of interest if the adolescent shares information about engaging in illegal activities (Fisher and Hennessy, 2016).

Evaluation findings with regard to the effectiveness of the presence of SROs in schools have been inconsistent. In terms of school-related violence and other behaviors, some studies have found that SROs in schools are related to decreases in serious violence (Sorensen, Shen, and Bushway, 2021; Zhang, 2019), and decreases in incidents of disorder (Zhang, 2019). Others have found increases in drug-related crimes (Gottfredson et al., 2020; Zhang, 2019) associated with the presence of SROs in schools, and other studies have shown no effects on bullying (Broll and Lafferty, 2018; Devlin, Santos, and Gottfredson, 2018). In terms of school discipline, one meta-analysis (Fisher and Hennessy, 2016) examined the relationship between the presence of SROs and exclusionary discipline in U.S. high schools. Analysis of the seven eligible pretest–posttest design studies showed that the presence of SROs was associated with rates of school-based disciplinary incidents that were 21 percent higher than incident rates before implementing an SRO program. However, in another study, of elementary schools, there was no association found between SRO presence and school-related disciplinary outcomes, which ranged from minor consequences, such as a warning or timeout, to more serious consequences such as suspension from school (Curran et al., 2021).

Further, several studies have been conducted on the effects of SROs on students’ attitudes and feelings. One example is a survey of middle and high school students (Theriot and Orme, 2016), which found that experiencing more SRO interactions increased students’ positive attitudes about SROs but decreased school connectedness and was unrelated to feelings of safety. Conversely, findings from a student survey, on the relationship between awareness and perceptions of SROs on school safety and disciplinary experiences, indicated that students’ awareness of the presence of SROs and their perceptions of SROs were associated with increased feelings of safety and a small decrease in disciplinary actions. However, students belonging to racial and ethnic minority groups reported smaller benefits related to SROs, compared with white students (Pentek and Eisenberg, 2018).

Foot Patrol is another example of a program that uses COP elements. Foot patrol involves police officers making neighborhood rounds on foot. It is a policing tactic that involves movement in a set area for the purpose of observation and security (Ratcliffe et al., 2011). The primary goals of foot patrol are to increase the visibility of police officers in a community and to make greater contact and increase rapport with residents. Officers sometimes visit businesses on their beat, respond to calls for service within their assigned areas, and develop an intimate knowledge of the neighborhood. Additionally, police officers on foot patrols may offer a level of “citizen reassurance” to community members and may decrease a resident’s fear of crime by bringing a feeling of safety to the neighborhood (Wakefield, 2006; Ratcliffe et al., 2011; Walker and Katz, 2017). Another duty of foot patrol officers is to engage youth in the community, and some are instructed to go out of their way to engage vulnerable youth. For example, if an officer sees a group of youths hanging out on a street corner, the officer may stop and initiate casual conversation in an effort to build a relationship (Cowell and Kringen, 2016).

Though foot patrols limit the speed at which an officer can respond to a call (compared with patrol in a vehicle), research has found that community members are more comfortable with police being in the neighborhood on foot. Residents are more likely to consider an officer as “being there for the neighborhood” if they are seen on foot (Cordner, 2010; Piza and O’Hara, 2012).

While there are mixed findings regarding the effectiveness of foot patrols on crime (Piza and O’Hara, 2012), improved community relationships are one of the strongest benefits. Research has shown that foot patrol improves the relationships between community members and police officers through increasing approachability, familiarity, and trust Ratcliffe et al. 2011; Kringen, Sedelmaier, and Dlugolenski, 2018). Foot patrols can also have a positive effect on officers. Research demonstrates that officers who participate in foot patrol strategies have higher job satisfaction and a higher sense of achievement (Wakefield, 2006; Walker and Katz, 2017).

Mini-Stations are community-forward stations that allow police to be more accessible to members of a community. Mini-stations (also known as substations, community storefronts, and other names) can be based in many places—such as local businesses, restaurants, or community centers—and can be staffed by police officers, civilian employees, volunteers, or a combination of these groups, and have fewer officers stationed in them (Maguire et al., 2003). These stations allow officers to build on existing relationships with businesses in the area and give citizens easier access to file reports and share community concerns. Additionally, they are a means to achieving greater spatial differentiation, or a way for a police agency to cover a wider area, without the cost of adding a new district station (Maguire et al., 2003). Residents can also go to mini-stations to receive information and handouts about new policing initiatives and programs in the community. Police mini-stations also increase the overall amount of time officers spend in their assigned patrol areas. The concept of mini-stations stems from Japanese kobans , which gained prominence in the late 1980s. Officers who worked in kobans became intimately familiar with the neighborhood they served and were highly accessible to citizens (usually within a 10-minute walk of residential homes) [Young, 2022].

Mini-stations can also be helpful to youth in the community. For example, Youth Safe Haven mini-stations are mini-stations that are deployed in 10 cities by the Eisenhower Foundation. These mini-stations were first developed in the 1980s and are located in numerous youth-related areas, including community centers and schools (Eisenhower Foundation, 2011). In addition to crime outcomes (such as reduced crime and fear of crime), goals of youth-oriented mini-stations include homework help, recreational activities, and providing snacks and social skills training. Older youths can be trained to be volunteers to assist younger youths with mentoring and advocacy. There are mixed findings regarding mini-stations and their effect on crime rates, but research has shown that adults and older youths who participate in mini-station community programs (or have children who participate) are more likely to report crime, and younger youths are more comfortable speaking with police (Eisenhower Foundation, 1999; Eisenhower Foundation, 2011).

Theoretical Foundation

COP approaches are usually rooted in two different theories of crime: broken windows theory and social disorganization theory (Reisig, 2010; National Research Council, 2018). Both focus on community conditions to explain the occurrence of crime and disorder.

Broken Windows Theory asserts that minor forms of physical and social disorder, if left unattended, may lead to more serious crime and urban decay (Wilson and Kelling, 1982). Visual signs of disorder (such as broken windows in abandoned buildings, graffiti, and garbage on the street) may cause fear and withdrawal among community members. This in turn communicates the lack of or substantial decrease in social control in the community, and thus can invite increased levels of disorder and crime (Hinkle and Weisburd, 2008). In response, to protect the community and establish control, the police engage in order maintenance (managing minor offenses and disorders). Four elements of the broken windows strategy explain how interventions based on this approach may lead to crime reduction (Kelling and Coles, 1996). First, dealing with disorder puts police in contact with those who commit more serious crimes. Second, the high visibility of police causes a deterrent effect for potential perpetrators of crime. Third, citizens assert control over neighborhoods, thereby preventing crime. And finally, as problems of disorder and crime become the responsibility of both the community and the police, crime is addressed in an integrated fashion. COP programs rooted in broken windows theory often use residents and local business owners to help identify disorder problems and engage in the development and implementation of a response (Braga, Welsh, and Schnell, 2015).

Social Disorganization Theory focuses on the relationship between crime and neighborhood structure; that is, how places can create conditions that are favorable or unfavorable to crime and delinquency (Kubrin and Weitzer, 2003). Social disorganization refers to the inability of a community to realize common goals and solve chronic problems. According to the social disorganization theory, community factors such as poverty, residential mobility, lack of shared values, and weak social networks decrease a neighborhood’s capacity to control people’s behavior in public, which increases the likelihood of crime (Kornhauser, 1978; Shaw and McKay, 1969 [1942]). Researchers have used various forms of the social disorganization theory to conceptualize community policing, including the systemic model and collective efficacy (Reisig, 2010). The systemic model focuses on how relational and social networks can exert social controls to mediate the adverse effects of structural constraints, such as concentrated poverty and residential instability. The model identifies three social order controls with decreasing levels of influence: 1) private, which includes close friends and family; 2) parochial , which includes neighbors and civic organizations; and 3) public, which includes police (Bursik and Grasmick, 1993; Hunter, 1985). Community policing efforts based on the systemic model can increase informal social controls by working with residents to develop stronger regulatory mechanisms at the parochial and public levels (Kubrin and Weitzer, 2003; Resig, 2010). Collective efficacy, which refers to social cohesion and informal social controls, can mitigate social disorganization. Community policing can promote collective efficacy by employing strategies that enhance police legitimacy in the community and promote procedurally just partnerships, to encourage residents to take responsibility for public spaces and activate local social controls (Resig, 2010).

Outcome Evidence

Although there are numerous programs that incorporate COP, there are limited examples of COP programs that directly target youth, and fewer that have been rigorously evaluated (Forman, 2004; Paez and Dierenfeldt, 2020). The following programs, which are featured on CrimeSolutions , are examples of how COP has been implemented and evaluated in different cities.

The Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS , developed in 1993, incorporates aspects of both community and problem-oriented policing (see Problem-Oriented Policing, below). The CAPS approach has been implemented by dividing patrol officers into beat teams and rapid response teams in each of the districts. Beat teams spend most of their time working their beats with community organizations, while rapid response teams concentrate their efforts on excess or low-priority 911 calls. Meetings occur monthly for both teams, and they receive extensive training. This structure enables officers to respond quickly and effectively to problems that they have not been traditionally trained to handle but have learned how to do by receiving training, along with residents, in problem-solving techniques. Civic education, media ads, billboards, brochures, and rallies have been used to promote awareness of the program in the community (Skogan, 1996; Kim and Skogan, 2003).

To evaluate the effects of the CAPS program, one study (Kim and Skogan, 2003) examined the impact on crime rates and 911 calls. Data were collected from January 1996 to June 2002, using a time-series analysis. The study authors found statistically significant reductions in crime rates and 911 calls in police beats that implemented the CAPS program, compared with police beats that did not implement the program.

Some studies have found that foot-patrol interventions make varying impacts on different types of street violence. Operation Impact , a saturation foot-patrol initiative in the Fourth Precinct of Newark, NJ, was selected as the target area based on an in-depth analysis of the spatial distribution of street violence. The initiative primarily involved a nightly patrol of 12 officers in a square-quarter-mile area of the city, which represented an increase in police presence in the target area. Officers also engaged in proactive enforcement actions that were expected to disrupt street-level disorder and narcotics activity in violence-prone areas. One study (Piza and O’Hara, 2012) found that the target area that implemented Operation Impact experienced statistically significant reductions in overall violence, aggravated assaults, and shootings, compared with the control area that implemented standard policing responses. However, there were no statistically significant differences between the target and control areas in incidents of murder or robbery.

With regard to community-based outcomes, other studies have shown that COP programs have demonstrated positive results. A COP intervention implemented in New Haven, CT , consisted of a single unannounced community home visit conducted by uniformed patrol officers from the New Haven Police Department. During the visits, the patrol officers articulated their commitment to building a cooperative relationship with residents and the importance of police and residents working together to keep the community safe. One evaluation found that residents in intervention households who received the COP intervention reported more positive overall attitudes toward police, a greater willingness to cooperate with police, had more positive perceptions of police performance and legitimacy, had higher confidence in police, reported higher scores on perceived warmth toward police, and reported fewer negative beliefs about police, compared with residents who did not receive home visits. These were all statistically significant findings. However, there was no statistically significant difference in willingness to comply with the police between residents in households that received home visits, compared with those who did not (Peyton et al., 2019).

Problem-Oriented Policing Definition

Problem-oriented policing (POP) is a framework that provides law enforcement agencies with an iterative approach to identify, analyze, and respond to the underlying circumstances that lead to crime and disorder in the community and then evaluate and adjust the response as needed (Braga et al., 2001; Hinkle et al., 2020; National Research Council, 2004). The POP approach requires police to focus their attention on problems rather than incidents (Cordner and Biebel, 2005). Problems, in this model, are defined “as chronic conditions or clusters of events that have become the responsibility of the police, either because they have been reported to them, or they have been discovered by proactive police investigation, or because the problems have been found in an investigation of police records” (National Research Council, 2004:92).

The POP strategy contrasts with incident-driven crime prevention approaches, in which police focus on individual occurrences of crime. Instead, POP provides police with an adaptable method to examine the complicated factors that contribute and lead to crime and disorder, and develop customized interventions to address those factors (National Research Council, 2018).

As noted previously, the idea behind the POP approach emanated several decades ago (Goldstein, 1979) from observations that law enforcement agencies seemed to be more concerned about the means rather than the goals of policing, or “means-over-ends syndrome” (Goldstein, 1979; Eck, 2006; MacDonald, 2002). In 1990, this work was expanded to systematically define and describe what it meant to use POP approaches in policing. During the 1990s, law enforcement agencies in the United States and other countries (such as Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom) began to implement POP strategies (Scott, 2000).

The traditional conceptual model of problem-solving in POP, known as the SARA model, consists of the following four steps (Weisburd et al., 2010; Hinkle et al., 2020; National Research Council, 2004):

Scanning. Police identify problems that may be leading to incidents of crime and disorder. They may prioritize these problems based on various factors, such as the size of the problem or input from the community.
Analysis. Police study information about the identified problem or problems, using a variety of data sources, such as crime databases or surveys of community members. They examine information on who is committing crimes, victims, and crime locations, among other factors. Police then use the information on responses to incidents — together with information obtained from other sources — to get a clearer picture of the problem (or problems).
Response. Police develop and implement tailored strategies to address the identified problems by thinking “outside the box” of traditional police enforcement tactics and creating partnerships with other agencies, community organizations, or members of the community, depending on the problem. Examples of responses in POP interventions include target hardening, area cleanup, increased patrol, crime prevention through environmental design measures, multiagency cooperation, and nuisance abatement.
Assessment. Police evaluate the impact of the response through self-assessments and other methods (such as process or outcome evaluations) to determine how well the response has been carried out and what has been accomplished (or not accomplished). This step may also involve adjustment of the response, depending on the results of the assessment.

The SARA model was first defined by a POP project conducted in Newport News, VA, during the 1980s. The Newport News Task Force designed a four-stage problem-solving process . A case study of the project revealed that officers and their supervisors identified problems, analyzed, and responded to these problems through this process, thus leading to the SARA model (Eck and Spelman, 1987).

Since the creation and development of SARA, other models have been established, in part to overcome some noted weaknesses of the original model, such as an oversimplification of complex processes or a process in which problem-solving is nonlinear. These other models include the following 1) PROCTOR (which stands for PROblem, Cause, Tactic or Treatment, Output, and Result); 2) the 5I’s (Intelligence, Intervention, Implementation, Involvement, and Impact); and 3) the ID PARTNERS (which stands for I dentify the demand; D rivers; P roblem; A im, R esearch and analysis; T hink creatively; N egotiate and initiate responses; E valuate; R eview; and S uccess) [Sidebottom and Tilley, 2010]. However, compared with these models, the SARA model appears to be used more often by agencies that apply a POP approach to law enforcement (Sidebottom and Tilley, 2010; Borrion et al., 2020).

A POP approach can be used by law enforcement agencies to address youth-related issues, including offenses committed by youths (such as gun violence, vandalism, graffiti, and other youth-specific behaviors such as running away from home or underage drinking.

For example, in the 2019–20 school year, about one third of public schools experienced vandalism (Wang et al., 2022). If a police agency wanted to tackle the problem of school vandalism , often committed by youth, they could apply the SARA model to determine the scope of the problem, develop an appropriate response, and conduct an overall assessment of efforts. A problem-oriented guide, put together by the Problem-Oriented Policing Center at Arizona State University, outlines the steps that law enforcement agencies can take to use the SARA model and address the issues of vandalism committed specifically at schools (Johnson, 2005).

Thus, during the scanning step of the SARA model, to identify the problem police would focus on the specific problem of school vandalism by examining multiple sources of data, including information gathered from both police departments and school districts. During the analysis step, police would ask about the specific school vandalism problems they are targeting, such as 1) how many and which schools reported vandalism to the police, 2) which schools were vandalized, 3) what are the characteristics (such as the age, gender, school attendance rate) of any youth identified as committing the vandalism, and 4) on what days and times the vandalism occurred. The analysis step also should include information from various data sources, including official reports to the police of school vandalism incidents, interviews with SROs, and information from students at the school (Johnson, 2005).

Once police have analyzed the school vandalism problem and have a clear picture of the issue, they would then move on to the response step. The response depends on what police learn about the vandalism problem at schools. For example, if police find that vandalism occurs because youths have easy access to school grounds, especially after school hours, they might suggest a response that improves building security. Finally, during the assessment stage, police would determine the degree of effectiveness of their response to school vandalism through various measures of success, such as the reduction in the number of incidents of vandalism, the decrease in the costs for repair of damaged property, and the increase of incidents (when they do occur) in which the person or persons who engaged in vandalism are identified and apprehended (Johnson, 2005).

Overlap of POP With Other Policing Strategies

POP shares several similarities and overlapping features with other policing models, such as focused deterrence strategies and hot-spots policing. Hot-spots policing involves focusing police resources on crime “hot spots,” which are specific areas in the community where crime tends to cluster. Hot-spots policing interventions tend to rely mostly on traditional law enforcement approaches (National Research Council, 2004; Braga et al., 2019). Focused deterrence strategies (also referred to as “pulling levers” policing) follow the core principles of deterrence theory. These strategies target specific criminal behavior committed by a small number of individuals who repeatedly offend and who are vulnerable to sanctions and punishment (Braga, Weisburd, and Turchan, 2018).

While POP, focused deterrence, and hot spots policing are three distinct policing strategies, there can be an overlap in techniques. For example, a POP approach can involve the identification and targeting of crime hot spots, if the scanning and analysis of the crime problems in a community reveal that crime is clustering in specific areas. Further, a hot-spots policing intervention may use a problem-oriented approach to determine appropriate responses to address the crime in identified hot spots. However, POP can go beyond examination of place-based crime problems, and hot-spots policing does not require the detailed analytic approach used in POP to discern which strategy is appropriate to prevent or reduce crime (Hinkle et al., 2020; National Research Council, 2018; Gill et al., 2018). Similarly, POP involves targeting resources to specific, identified problems, in a similar way that focused deterrence strategies target specific crimes committed by known high-risk offenders. However, focused deterrence strategies tend to rely primarily on police officers to implement programs, whereas POP may involve a variety of agencies and community members (National Research Council, 2004).

Although POP, focused deterrence, and hot-spots policing differ in some distinct ways (such as intensity of focus and involvement of other agencies), these strategies may often overlap (National Research Council, 2004).

POP draws on theories of criminal opportunity to explain why crime occurs and to identify ways of addressing crime, often by altering environmental conditions (Reisig, 2010). While much criminological research and theory are concerned with why some individuals offend in general, POP strategies often concentrate on why individuals commit crimes at particular places, at particular times, and against certain targets (Braga, 2008; Goldstein, 1979; Eck and Spelman, 1987; Eck and Madensen, 2012). Thus, POP draws on several theoretical perspectives that focus on how likely individuals (including those who may commit a crime and those who may be victimized) make decisions based on perceived opportunities. These include rational choice theory, routine activities theory , and situational crime prevention (Braga, 2008; Braga et al., 1999; Eck and Madensen, 2012; Hinkle et al., 2020; McGarrell, Freilich, and Chermak, 2007). These three theories are considered complements to one another (Tillyer and Eck, 2011).

Rational Choice Theory focuses on how incentives and constraints affect behavior (Cornish and Clark 1986; Gull, 2009). In criminology, rational choice theory draws on the concepts of free will and rational thinking to examine an individual’s specific decision-making processes and choices of crime settings by emphasizing their motives in different situations. The starting point for rational choice theory is that crime is chosen for its benefits. Thus, rational choice theory informs POP by helping to examine and eliminate opportunities for crime within certain settings. Eliminating these opportunities should help to intervene with a potential offender’s motives to commit a crime (Karğın, 2010).

Routine Activity Theory , formulated by Cohen and Felson (1979), is the study of crime as an event, highlighting its relation to space and time and emphasizing its ecological nature (Mir ó–Llinares , 2014). It was originally developed to explain macro-level crime trends through the interaction of targets, offenders, and guardians (Eck, 2003). The theory explains that problems are created when offenders and targets repeatedly come together, and guardians fail to act. Since its formulation, routine activity theory has expanded. In terms of POP, routine activity theory implies that crime can be prevented if the chances of the three elements of crime (suitable target, motivated offender, and accessible place) intersecting at the same place and at the same time are minimized (Karğın, 2010). The SARA problem-solving methodology allows law enforcement agencies to examine and identify the features of places and potential targets that might generate crime opportunities for a motivated offender and develop solutions to eliminate these opportunities, thereby preventing future crime (Hinkle et al., 2020).

Situational Crime Prevention was designed to address specific forms of crime by systematically manipulating or managing the immediate environment with the purpose of reducing opportunities for crime. The goal is to change an individual’s decisionmaking processes by altering the perceived costs and benefits of crime by identifying specific settings (Clarke, 1995; Tillyer and Eck, 2011). Situational crime prevention has identified a number of ways to reduce opportunity to commit crime, such as: 1) increase the effort required to carry out the crime, 2) increase the risks faced in completing the crime, 3) reduce the rewards or benefits expected from the crime, 4) remove excuses to rationalize or justify engaging in criminal action, and 5) avoid provocations that may tempt or incite individuals into criminal acts (Clarke 2009). Certain POP strategies make use of situation crime prevention tactics during the response phase, such as physical improvements to identified problem locations. These may include fixing or installing street lighting, securing vacant lots, and getting rid of trash from the streets (Braga et al., 1999).

Although the POP approach is a well-known and popular approach in law enforcement, there have been a limited number of rigorous program evaluations, such as randomized controlled trials (National Research Council 2018; Gill et al. 2018), and even fewer evaluations specifically centered on youth.

One meta-analysis (Weisburd et al., 2008) reviewed 10 studies, which examined the effects of problem-oriented policing on crime and disorder. These included various POP interventions and took place in eight cities across the United States (Atlanta, GA; Jersey City, NJ; Knoxville, TN; Oakland, CA; Minneapolis, MN; Philadelphia, PA; San Diego, CA; and one suburban Pennsylvania area.) and six wards in the United Kingdom. The studies evaluated interventions focused on reducing recidivism for individuals on probation or parole; interventions on specific place-based problems (such as drug markets, vandalism and drinking in a park, and crime in hot spots of violence); and interventions that targeted specific problems such as school victimization. Findings across these studies indicated that, on average, the POP strategies led to a statistically significant decline in measures of crime and disorder.

The following programs, which are featured on CrimeSolutions, provide a brief overview of how POP has been implemented and evaluated in the United States. Programs with examined youth-related outcomes or a specific focus on youth are noted; however, most of the research on POP interventions does not focus on youth.

Operation Ceasefire in Boston (first implemented in 1995) is a problem-oriented policing strategy that was developed to reduce gang violence, illegal gun possession, and gun violence in communities. Specifically, the program focused on reducing homicide victimization among young people in Boston (Braga and Pierce, 2005). The program involved carrying out a comprehensive strategy to apprehend and prosecute individuals who carry firearms, to put others on notice that carrying illegal firearms faces certain and serious punishment, and to prevent youth from following in the same criminal path. The program followed the steps of the SARA model, which included bringing together an interagency working group of criminal justice and other practitioners to identify the problem (scanning); using different research techniques (both qualitative and quantitative) to assess the nature of youth violence in Boston ( analysis ); designing and developing an intervention to reduce youth violence and homicide in the city, implementing the intervention, and adapting it as needed ( response ); and evaluating the intervention’s impact ( assessment ). An evaluation of the program found a statistically significant reduction (63 percent) in the average number of youth homicide victims in the city following the implementation of the program. There were also statistically significant decreases in citywide gun assaults and calls for service (Braga et al., 2001). Similarly, another study found a statistically significant reduction (24.3 percent) in new handguns recovered from youth (Braga and Pierce, 2005).

Another program implemented in the same city, the Boston Police Department’s Safe Street Teams (SSTs) , is an example of a place-based, problem-oriented policing strategy to reduce violent crime and includes some components targeting youth. Using mapping technology and violent index crime data, the Boston Police Department identified 13 violent crime hot spots in the city where SST officers could employ community- and problem-oriented policing techniques such as the SARA model. SST officers implemented almost 400 distinct POP strategies in the crime hot spots, which fell into three broad categories: 1) situational/environment interventions, such as removing graffiti and trash or adding or fixing lighting, designed to change the underlying characteristics and dynamics of the places that are linked to violence; 2 ) enforcement interventions, including focused enforcement efforts on drug-selling crews and street gangs, designed to arrest and deter individuals committing violent crimes or contributing to the disorder of the targeted areas; and 3) community outreach/social service interventions, designed to involve the community in crime prevention efforts. Examples of these activities included providing new recreational opportunities for youth (i.e., basketball leagues), partnering with local agencies to provide needed social services to youth, and planning community events. One evaluation (Braga, Hureau, and Papachristos, 2011) found that over a 10-year observation period areas that implemented the SSTs interventions experienced statistically significant reductions in the number of total violent index crime incidents (17.3 percent), in the number of robbery incidents (19.2 percent), and in the number of aggravated assault incidents (15.4 percent), compared with the comparison areas that did not implement the interventions. However, there were no statistically significant effects on the number of homicides or rape/sexual assault incidents. The study also did not examine the impact on youth-specific outcomes.

The Problem-Oriented Policing in Violent Crime Places (Jersey City, N.J.) intervention used techniques from hot spots policing and POP to reduce violent crime in the city. The program and evaluation design followed the steps of the SARA model. During the scanning phase, the Jersey City Police Department and university researchers used computerized mapping technologies to identify violent crime hot spots. During the analysis phase, officers selected 12 pairs of places for random assignment to the treatment group, which received the POP strategies, or to the control group. During the response phase, the 11 officers in the department’s Violent Crime Unit were responsible for developing appropriate POP strategies at the hot spots. For example, to reduce social disorder, aggressive order maintenance techniques were applied, including the use of foot and radio patrols and the dispersing of groups of loiterers. During the assessment phase, the police department evaluated the officers’ responses to the problems, and either adjusted the strategies or closed down the program to indicate that the problem was alleviated. An evaluation found statistically significant reductions in social and physical incivilities (i.e., disorder), the total numbers of calls for service, and criminal incidents at the treatment locations that implemented POP techniques, compared with the control locations (Braga et al., 1999).

COP and POP are two broad policing approaches that, while sharing many characteristics, are still distinct—owing to the focus of their respective approaches. COP’s focus is on community outreach and engagement and does not necessarily rely on analysis methods such as the SARA model. For POP, the primary goal is to find effective solutions to problems that may or may not involve the participation of the community (Gill et al., 2014).

Though COP and POP may differ in their approaches, the end goal is the same in both models. Both are types of proactive policing that seek to prevent crime before it happens. COP and POP also both rely on cooperation from numerous different parties and agencies, including community members (National Research Council, 2018). The two models are similar enough that they often overlap in implementation. For example, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) incorporates elements from both models. Using aspects of COP, police officers divide into beat teams and spend most of their time working with community organizations. With regard to POP, CAPS trains officers and residents to use problem-solving techniques that stem from its theoretical basis (Skogan, 1996; Kim and Skogan, 2003).

There are, however, limitations in the research examining the effectiveness of these models. For example, evaluation studies on COP and POP tend to focus on results related to crime and disorder; other outcomes, such as collective efficacy, police legitimacy, fear of crime, and other community-related outcomes are often overlooked or not properly defined (Hinkle et al., 2020; Gill et al., 2014). Exploring other community-related outcomes would be useful, as community involvement is an important component to both models. Further, some researchers have noted specific limitations to the implementation of COP and POP interventions. With regard to COP programs, for example, the definition of “community” is sometimes lacking. This can be an important factor to define, as community may mean something different across law enforcement agencies (Gill et al., 2014). Regarding POP programs, it has been noted that the rigor of the SARA process is limited and that law enforcement agencies may take a “shallow” approach to problem-solving (National Research Council, 2018:193; Borrion et al., 2020). To date, the research on both models has lacked focus on youth; only a few evaluations have focused on youth in either in the implementation process or in examined outcomes (Braga et al., 2001; Gill et al., 2018). Despite these limitations, however, the outcome evidence supports the effectiveness of COP and POP interventions to reduce crime and disorder outcomes.

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About this Literature Review

Suggested Reference: Development Services Group, Inc. January 2023. “Community-Oriented Policing and Problem-Oriented Policing.” Literature review. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/model-programs-guide/literature-reviews/community-oriented-problem-oriented-policing

Prepared by Development Services Group, Inc., under Contract Number: 47QRAA20D002V.

Last Update: January 2023

Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (2018)

Chapter: summary.

Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term “proactive policing” to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Specifically, the elements of proactivity include an emphasis on prevention, mobilizing resources based on police initiative, and targeting the broader underlying forces at work that may be driving crime and disorder. This contrasts with the standard model of policing, which involves an emphasis on reacting to particular crime events after they have occurred, mobilizing resources based on requests coming from outside the police organization, and focusing on the particulars of a given criminal incident.

Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing.

TABLE S-1 Four Approaches to Proactive Policing

The United States has once again been confronted by a crisis of confidence in policing. Instances of perceived or actual police misconduct have given rise to nationwide protests against unfair and abusive police practices. Although this report is not intended to respond directly to the crisis of confidence in policing that can be seen in the United States today, it is nevertheless important to consider how proactive policing strategies may bear upon this crisis. It is not enough to simply identify “what works” for reducing crime and disorder; it is also critical to consider issues such as how proactive policing affects the legality of policing, the evaluation of the police in communities, potential abuses of police authority, and the equitable application of police services in the everyday lives of citizens.

To that end, the National Institute of Justice and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to review the evidence and discuss the data and methodological gaps on (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. The Committee on Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime, Communities, and Civil Liberties was appointed by the National Academies to carry out this task.

The committee made a decision to prioritize proactive policing strategies that are commonly applied in U.S. police agencies; cutting-edge strategies that, though not yet widely adopted, represent important new methods for preventing crime; and strategies that raise concerns about biased or abusive outcomes. In the context of this report, proactive policing is regarded as a strategic concern and refers to the policy decisions of departments regarding the means and goals of policing and not to the individual actions of officers.

Proactive policing has taken a number of different forms over the past two decades, and these variants often overlap in practice. The four broad approaches for proactive policing described in this report are (1) place-based interventions, (2) problem-solving interventions, (3) person-focused interventions, and (4) community-based interventions. Table S-1 summarizes the four approaches and the strategies they encompass. The rest of this summary discusses the consequences of these approaches for law and legality, crime and disorder, community reactions, and racial bias and disparities.

LAW AND LEGALITY

However effective a policing practice may be in preventing crime, it is impermissible if it violates the law. The most important legal constraints on proactive policing are the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Equal Protection Clause (of the Fourteenth Amendment), and related statutory provisions.

Although proactive policing strategies do not inherently violate the Fourth Amendment, any proactive strategy could lead to Fourth Amendment violations 1 to the degree that it is implemented by having officers engage in stops, searches, and arrests that violate constitutional standards. This risk is especially relevant for stop, question, and frisk (SQF); 2 broken windows policing; 3 and hot spots policing interventions 4 if they use an aggressive practice of searches and seizures to deter criminal activity.

In addition, in conjunction with existing Fourth Amendment doctrine, proactive policing strategies may limit the effective strength or scope of constitutional protection or reduce the availability of constitutional remedies. For example, when departments identify “high crime areas” pursuant to place-based proactive policing strategies, courts may allow stops by officers of individuals within those areas that are based on less individualized behavior than they would require without the “high crime” designation. In this way, geographically oriented proactive policing may lead otherwise identical citizen-police encounters to be treated differently under the law.

The Equal Protection Clause guarantees equal and impartial treatment of citizens by government actors. It governs all policies, decisions, and acts taken by police officers and departments, including those in furtherance of proactive policing strategies. As a result, Equal Protection claims may arise with respect to any proactive policing strategy to the degree that it discriminates against individuals based on their race, religion, or national origin, among other characteristics. Since most policing policies today do not expressly target racial or ethnic groups, most Equal Protection challenges require proving discriminatory purpose in addition to discriminatory effect in order to establish a constitutional violation.

Specific proactive policing strategies, such as SQF and “zero tolerance” versions of broken windows policing, have been linked to violations of both the Fourth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause by courts in private litigation and by the U.S. Department of Justice in its investigations

___________________

1 The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

2 When carried out as a proactive policing strategy, an SQF program relies upon the legal authority granted by court decisions to engage in frequent stops in which suspects are questioned about their activities, frisked if possible, and often searched, usually with consent.

3 In broken windows policing, the police seek to prevent crime by addressing disorder and less serious crime problems. Such police interventions are expected to reinforce and enhance informal social controls within communities.

4 Hot spots policing efforts focus on “micro” units of geography where crime is concentrated. Microgeographic areas are commonly defined to include a single street or a cluster of street segments.

of police departments. Ethnographic studies and theoretical arguments further support the idea that proactive strategies that use aggressive stops, searches, and arrests to deter criminal activity may decrease liberty and increase Fourth Amendment and Equal Protection violations. However, empirical evidence is insufficient—using the accepted standards of causality in social science—to support any conclusion about whether proactive policing strategies systematically promote or reduce constitutional violations [ Conclusion 3-1 ]. In order to establish a causal link, studies would ideally determine the incidence of problematic behavior by police under a proactive policy and compare that to the incidence of the same behavior in otherwise similar circumstances in which a proactive policy is not in place.

However, even when proactive strategies do not lead to constitutional violations, they may raise concerns about deeper legal values such as privacy, equality, autonomy, accountability, and transparency [ Conclusion 3-2 ]. Even procedural justice policing and community-oriented policing, neither of which are likely to violate legal constraints on policing (and, to the extent that procedural justice operates as intended, may make violations of law less likely), may, respectively, undermine the transparency about the status of police-citizen interactions and alter the structure of decision making and accountability in police organizations.

CRIME AND DISORDER

The available scientific evidence suggests that certain proactive policing strategies are successful in reducing crime and disorder. This important conclusion provides support for a growing interest among American police in innovating to develop effective crime prevention strategies. At the same time, there is substantial heterogeneity in the effectiveness of different proactive policing interventions in reducing crime and disorder. For some types of proactive policing, the evidence consistently points to effectiveness, but for others the evidence is inconclusive. Evidence in many cases is also restricted to localized crime prevention impacts, such as specific places, or to specific individuals. Relatively little evidence-based knowledge exists about whether and to what extent the approaches examined in this report will have crime prevention benefits at the larger jurisdictional level (e.g., a city as a whole or even large administrative areas such as precincts within a city), or across all offenders. Furthermore, the crime prevention outcomes that are observed are generally observed only in the short term, so the evidence seldom addresses long-term crime prevention outcomes.

It is important to note here that, in practice, police departments typically implement crime reduction programs that include elements typical of several prevention strategies (as combining elements from multiple strategies may produce more positive outcomes for police agencies). Given this

hybridization of tactics in practice, the committee’s review of the evidence was often hindered by the overlapping character of the real-world proactive policing interventions evaluated in many of the published research studies.

The available research evidence suggests that hot spots policing strategies generate statistically significant crime reduction effects without simply displacing crime into immediately surrounding areas, though there is an absence of evidence on either the long-term impacts of hot spots policing strategies on crime or on possible jurisdictional outcomes (e.g., on crime in a city or in large administrative areas such as precincts). Hot spots policing studies that do measure possible displacement effects tend to find that these programs generate a diffusion of crime control benefits into immediately adjacent areas [ Conclusion 4-1 ].

Another place-based strategy is “predictive policing,” which uses sophisticated computer algorithms to predict changing patterns of future crime. At present, there are insufficient rigorous empirical studies to draw any firm conclusions about either the efficacy of crime prediction software or the effectiveness of associated police operational tactics. It also remains difficult to distinguish a predictive policing approach from hot spots policing [ Conclusion 4-2 ].

A technology relevant to improving police capacity for proactive intervention at specific places is closed circuit television (CCTV), which can be used either passively or proactively. The results from studies examining the introduction of CCTV camera schemes are mixed, but they tend to show modest outcomes in terms of property crime reduction at high-crime places for passive monitoring approaches [ Conclusion 4-3 ]. However, with regard to the proactive use of CCTV, there are insufficient studies to draw conclusions regarding its impact on crime and disorder reduction [ Conclusion 4-4 ].

Despite its popularity as a crime-prevention strategy, there are surprisingly few rigorous program evaluations of problem-oriented policing. Much of the available evaluation evidence consists of non-experimental analyses that find strong associations between problem-oriented interventions and crime reduction. Randomized experimental evaluations generally show smaller, but statistically significant, crime reductions generated by problem-oriented policing programs. Program evaluations also suggest that it is difficult for police officers to fully implement problem-oriented policing. Many problem-oriented policing projects are characterized by weak problem analysis and a lack of non-enforcement responses to targeted problems. Nevertheless, even these limited applications of problem-oriented policing have been shown by rigorous evaluations to generate statistically significant short-term crime prevention impacts. These studies do not address possible jurisdictional impacts of problem-oriented policing and generally do not

assess the long-term impacts of the evaluated interventions on crime and disorder [ Conclusion 4-5 ].

Third party policing, which leverages nonpolice “third parties” (e.g., public housing agencies, property owners, parents, health and building inspectors, and business owners) who are believed to offer significant new resources for preventing crime and disorder, also draws upon the insights of problem solving. Though there are only a small number of program evaluations, the impact of third party policing interventions on crime and disorder has been assessed using randomized controlled trials and rigorous quasi-experimental designs. The available evidence suggests that third party policing generates statistically significant short-term reductions in crime and disorder; there is more limited evidence of long-term impacts. However, little is known about possible jurisdictional outcomes [ Conclusion 4-6 ].

With regard to person-focused interventions, a growing number of quasi-experimental evaluations suggest that focused deterrence programs generate statistically significant short- and long-term areawide crime-reduction impacts. Crime-control impacts have been reported by controlled evaluations testing the effectiveness of focused deterrence programs in reducing gang violence and street crime driven by disorderly drug markets and by non-experimental studies that examine repeat individual offending. It is noteworthy that the size of the effects observed are large, though many of the largest impacts are in studies with evaluation designs that are less rigorous [ Conclusion 4-7 ].

A more controversial person-focused intervention is SQF. Non-experimental evidence regarding the crime-reduction impact of SQF, when implemented as a general citywide crime-control strategy, is mixed [ Conclusion 4-8 ]. A separate body of controlled evaluation research examining the effectiveness of SQF (combined with other self-initiated enforcement activities by officers) in targeting places with serious gun crime problems and focusing on high-risk repeat offenders reports consistent statistically significant short-term crime-reduction effects; jurisdictional impacts, when estimated, are modest. There is an absence of evidence on the long-term impacts of focused uses of SQF on crime [ Conclusion 4-9 ].

The committee also reviewed the crime-prevention impacts of community-based crime-prevention strategies, including community-oriented policing, procedural justice policing (which seeks to impress upon citizens and the wider community that the police exercise their authority in legitimate ways), and broken windows policing. Although a large number of studies of community-oriented policing programs were identified, many of these programs were implemented in tandem with tactics typical of other approaches, such as problem solving. This is not surprising, given that typical implementations of community-oriented policing used by police departments often have included problem solving as a key programmatic

element. The studies also varied in their outcomes, reflecting the broad range of tactics and practices that are included in community-oriented policing programs, and many of the studies were characterized by weak evaluation designs. With these caveats, the committee did not identify a consistent crime-prevention benefit for community-oriented policing programs [ Conclusion 4-10 ].

There is currently only a very small evidence base from which to support conclusions about the impact of procedural justice policing on crime prevention. Existing research does not support a conclusion that procedural justice policing impacts crime or disorder outcomes. At the same time, because the evidence base is small, the committee also cannot conclude that such strategies are ineffective [ Conclusion 4-11 ].

The impacts of broken windows policing are mixed across evaluations, again complicating the ability of the committee to draw strong inferences. However, the available program evaluations suggest that aggressive, misdemeanor arrest–based approaches to control disorder generate small to null impacts on crime [ Conclusion 4-12 ]. In contrast, controlled evaluations of place-based approaches that use problem-solving interventions to reduce social and physical disorder provide evidence of consistent short-term crime-reduction impacts. Little is known about long-term or areawide impacts [ Conclusion 4-13 ].

COMMUNITY REACTIONS

There is broad recognition that a positive relationship with the police has value in its own right, irrespective of any influence it may have on crime or disorder. Democratic theories assert that the police, as an arm of government, are to serve the community and should be accountable to it in ways that elicit public approval and consent. Given this premise and the recent conflicts between the police and the public, the committee thought it very important to assess the impacts of proactive policing on issues, such as fear of crime, collective efficacy, and community evaluation of police legitimacy.

Place-based, person-focused, and problem-solving interventions are distinct from community-based proactive strategies in that they do not directly seek to engage the public to enhance legitimacy evaluations and cooperation. In this context, the concerns regarding community outcomes for these approaches have often focused not on whether they improve community attitudes toward the police but rather on whether the focus on crime control leads inevitably to declines in positive community attitudes. Community-based strategies, in contrast, specifically seek to reduce fear, increase trust and willingness to intervene in community problems, and increase trust and confidence in the police.

There is only an emerging body of research evaluating the impact of

place-based strategies on community attitudes, including both quasi-experimental and experimental studies. However, the consistency of the findings suggests that place-based proactive policing strategies rarely have negative short-term impacts on community outcomes. (There is virtually no evidence on the long-term and jurisdiction-level impacts of place-based policing on community outcomes.) At the same time, the existing evidence does suggest that such strategies rarely improve community perceptions of the police or other community outcome measures [ Conclusion 5-1 ].

The research literature on community impacts of problem-solving interventions is larger. Although much of the literature relies on quasi-experimental designs, a few well-implemented randomized experiments also provide information on community outcomes. Studies show consistent small-to-moderate positive short-term impacts of problem-solving strategies on community satisfaction with the police; there is very little evidence available on the long-term and jurisdiction-level impacts of problem-solving strategies on community outcomes [ Conclusion 5-2 ]. Because problem-solving strategies are so often implemented in tandem with tactics typical of community-based policing (i.e., community engagement), it is difficult to determine what role the problem-solving aspect plays in community outcomes, compared to the impact of the community engagement element. At the same time, there is little consistency found in problem-solving policing’s impacts on perceived disorder/quality of life, fear of crime, and perceived police legitimacy. However, the near absence of backfire effects in the evaluations of problem-solving strategies suggests that the risk of harmful community effects from problem-solving strategies is low [ Conclusion 5-3 ].

The body of research evaluating the impact of person-focused strategies on community outcomes is relatively small, even in comparison with the evidence base on problem-solving and place-based strategies. (Also, the long-term and jurisdictionwide community consequences of person-focused proactive strategies remain untested.) These studies involve qualitative or correlational designs that make it difficult to draw causal inferences about typical impacts of these strategies. Correlational studies show strong negative associations between exposure to such strategies and the attitudes and orientations of individuals who are the subjects of aggressive law enforcement interventions (SQF and proactive traffic enforcement) [ Conclusion 5-4 ]. The studies that measure the impact on the larger community show a more complicated and unclear pattern of outcomes.

The available empirical research on community-oriented policing’s community effects focuses on citizen perceptions of police performance (in terms of what they do and the consequences for community disorder), satisfaction with police, and perceived legitimacy. The evidence suggests that community-oriented policing contributes modest improvements to the community’s view of policing and the police in the short term. (Very

few studies of community-oriented policing have traced its long-term effects on community outcomes or its jurisdictionwide consequences.) This occurs with greatest consistency for measures of community satisfaction and less so for measures of perceived disorder, fear of crime, and police legitimacy. Evaluations of community-oriented policing rarely find “backfire” effects from the intervention on community attitudes. Hence, the deployment of community-oriented policing as a proactive strategy seems to offer prospects of modest gains at little risk of negative consequences [ Conclusions 6-1 and 6-2 ].

Broken windows policing is often evaluated directly in terms of its short-term crime control impacts. The logic model for broken windows policing seeks to alter the community’s levels of fear and collective efficacy as a method of enhancing community social controls and reducing crime in the long run. While this is a key element of the broken windows policing model, the committee’s review of the evidence found that these outcomes have seldom been examined. The evidence was insufficient to draw any conclusions regarding the impact of broken windows policing on community social controls [ Conclusion 6-3 ]. Studies of the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime do not support the model’s claim that such programs will reduce levels of fear in the community, at least in the short run.

While there is a rapidly growing body of research on the community impacts of procedural justice policing, it is difficult to draw causal inferences from these studies. In general, the studies show that perceptions of procedurally just treatment are strongly associated with subjective evaluations of police legitimacy and cooperation with the police. However, the extant research base was insufficient for the committee to draw conclusions about whether procedurally just policing causally influences either perceived legitimacy or cooperation [ Conclusion 6-4 ].

Although this committee finding may appear to be at odds with a growing movement to encourage procedurally just behavior among the police, the committee thinks it is important to stress that a finding that there is insufficient evidence to support the expected outcomes of procedural justice policing is not the same as a finding that such outcomes do not exist. Moreover, although the application of procedural justice to policing is relatively new, there is a more extensive evidence base on procedural justice in social psychology and organizational management, as well as on procedural justice with other legal authorities such as the courts. Those studies are often designed in ways that make causal inferences more compelling, and results in those areas suggest meaningful impacts of procedural justice on legitimacy of the institutions and authorities involved. Thus, the application of procedural justice ideas to policing has promise, although further studies are needed to examine the degree to which the success of such implemen-

tations in other social contexts can be replicated in the arena of policing [ Conclusion 6-5 ].

RACIAL BIAS AND DISPARITIES

Concerns about racial bias loom especially large in discussions of policing. The interest of this report was to assess whether and to what extent proactive policing affects racial disparities in police-citizen encounters and racial bias in police behavior. Recent high-profile incidents of police shootings and abusive police-citizen interaction caught on camera have raised questions regarding basic fairness, racial discrimination, and the excessive use of force of all forms against non-Whites, and especially Blacks, in the United States. In considering these incidents, the committee stresses that the origins of policing in the United States are intimately interwoven with the nation’s history of racial prejudice. When the laws of the United States were designed to produce and maintain racial stratification, it was the job of police officers and sheriff’s deputies to enforce those laws. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, as the country moved away from de jure systems of racial hierarchy, law enforcement tactics under the “War on Crime” and “War on Drugs” were characterized, if not by racial prejudice, then by racially disparate consequences. Although in recent decades, police have often made a strong effort to address racially biased behavior, there remain wide disparities in the extent to which non-White people and White people are stopped or arrested by police. Moreover, the U.S. Department of Justice has identified continued racial disparities and biased behavior in policing in a number of major police agencies.

As social norms have evolved to make overt expressions of bigotry less acceptable, psychologists have developed tools to measure more subtle forms of biased behavior. A series of studies in field settings with police suggest that negative racial attitudes may influence police behavior—although there is no direct research on proactive policing. There is a further growing body of research identifying how these psychological mechanisms may affect behavior, and what types of situations, policies, or practices may exacerbate or ameliorate racially biased behaviors. In a number of studies, social psychologists have found that race may affect decision making, especially under situations where time is short and such decisions need to be made quickly. More broadly, social psychologists have identified dispositional (i.e., individual characteristics) and situational and environmental factors that are associated with higher levels of racially biased behavior.

Proactive strategies often facilitate increased officer contact with residents particularly in high-crime areas involve contacts that are often enforcement-oriented and uninvited, and may allow greater officer discretion compared to standard policing models. These elements align with

broad categories of possible risk factors for racially biased behavior by police officers. For example, when contacts involve stops or arrests, police may be put in situations where they have to “think fast” and react quickly. Social psychologists have argued that such situations may be particularly prone to the emergence of what they call “implicit biases.”

Inferring the role of racial animus or other dispositional and situational risk factors in contributing to disparate impacts is a challenging question for research. There are likely to be large racial disparities in the volume and nature of police–citizen encounters when police target high-risk people or high-risk places, as is common in many proactive policing programs (though focused policing approaches may also reduce overall levels of police intrusion) [ Conclusion 7-1 ]. However, studies that benchmark citizen–police interactions against simple population counts or broad measures of criminal activity do not yield conclusive information regarding the potential for racially biased behavior in proactive policing efforts. Identifying an appropriate benchmark would require detailed information on the geography and nature of the proactive strategy, as well as localized knowledge of the relative importance of the problem.

Such benchmarks are not currently available, and existing evidence does not establish conclusively whether and to what extent the racial disparities associated with concentrated person-focused and place-based enforcement are indicators of statistical prediction, racial animus, or other factors that may motivate biased behavior. However, the history of racial justice in the United States, in particular in the area of criminal justice and policing, as well as ethnographic research that has identified disparate impacts of policing on non-White communities, makes the investigation of the causes of racial disparities a key research and policy concern [ Conclusion 7-2 ].

Per the charge to the committee, this report reviewed a relatively narrow area of intersection between race and policing. This focus, though, is nested in a broader societal framework of possible disparities and behavioral biases across a whole array of social contexts. These factors can affect proactive policing in, for example, the distribution of crime in society and the extent of exposure of specific groups to police surveillance and enforcement. However, it was beyond the scope of this study to review them systematically in the context of the committee’s work.

THE FUTURE OF PROACTIVE POLICING

Proactive policing has become a key part of police efforts to do something about crime in the United States. This report supports the general conclusion that there is sufficient scientific evidence to support the adoption of some proactive policing practices, certainly if the primary policy goal is to reduce crime. Proactive policing efforts that focus on high concentra-

tions of crimes at places or among the high-rate subset of offenders, as well as practices that seek to solve specific crime-fostering problems, show consistent evidence of effectiveness without evidence of negative community outcomes. Community-based strategies have also begun to show evidence of improving the relations between the police and public.

At the same time, there are key gaps in the knowledge base. As was discussed earlier, few studies to date have examined long-term outcomes, and there is typically little or no information about the larger areawide or jurisdictional impacts of these approaches. There are also significant gaps in the evidence that do not allow one to identify with reasonable confidence the effects of proactive policing on other outcomes. For example, existing research provides little guidance as to whether police programs to enhance procedural justice will improve community perceptions of police legitimacy or community cooperation with the police. Little is known about the impacts of proactive policing on the legality of police behavior and on racially biased behavior; these are critical issues that must be addressed in future studies.

Much has been learned over the past two decades about proactive policing programs. But, now that scientific support for these approaches has accumulated, it is time for greater investment in understanding what is cost-effective, how such strategies can be maximized to improve the relationships between the police and the public, and how they can be applied in ways that do not lead to violations of the law by the police.

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Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.

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Experts say approach must be comprehensive as roots are embedded in culture

“ Unequal ” is a multipart series highlighting the work of Harvard faculty, staff, students, alumni, and researchers on issues of race and inequality across the U.S. The first part explores the experience of people of color with the criminal justice legal system in America.

It seems there’s no end to them. They are the recent videos and reports of Black and brown people beaten or killed by law enforcement officers, and they have fueled a national outcry over the disproportionate use of excessive, and often lethal, force against people of color, and galvanized demands for police reform.

This is not the first time in recent decades that high-profile police violence — from the 1991 beating of Rodney King to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 — ignited calls for change. But this time appears different. The police killings of Breonna Taylor in March, George Floyd in May, and a string of others triggered historic, widespread marches and rallies across the nation, from small towns to major cities, drawing protesters of unprecedented diversity in race, gender, and age.

According to historians and other scholars, the problem is embedded in the story of the nation and its culture. Rooted in slavery, racial disparities in policing and police violence, they say, are sustained by systemic exclusion and discrimination, and fueled by implicit and explicit bias. Any solution clearly will require myriad new approaches to law enforcement, courts, and community involvement, and comprehensive social change driven from the bottom up and the top down.

While police reform has become a major focus, the current moment of national reckoning has widened the lens on systemic racism for many Americans. The range of issues, though less familiar to some, is well known to scholars and activists. Across Harvard, for instance, faculty members have long explored the ways inequality permeates every aspect of American life. Their research and scholarship sits at the heart of a new Gazette series starting today aimed at finding ways forward in the areas of democracy; wealth and opportunity; environment and health; and education. It begins with this first on policing.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people.

Photo by Martha Stewart

The history of racialized policing

Like many scholars, Khalil Gibran Muhammad , professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School , traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people. This legacy, he believes, can still be seen in policing today. “The surveillance, the deputization essentially of all white men to be police officers or, in this case, slave patrollers, and then to dispense corporal punishment on the scene are all baked in from the very beginning,” he told NPR last year.

Slave patrols, and the slave codes they enforced, ended after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th amendment, which formally ended slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” But Muhammad notes that former Confederate states quickly used that exception to justify new restrictions. Known as the Black codes, the various rules limited the kinds of jobs African Americans could hold, their rights to buy and own property, and even their movements.

“The genius of the former Confederate states was to say, ‘Oh, well, if all we need to do is make them criminals and they can be put back in slavery, well, then that’s what we’ll do.’ And that’s exactly what the Black codes set out to do. The Black codes, for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn’t criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man’s terms.” In particular, he said the Ku Klux Klan “took about the business of terrorizing, policing, surveilling, and controlling Black people. … The Klan totally dominates the machinery of justice in the South.”

When, during what became known as the Great Migration, millions of African Americans fled the still largely agrarian South for opportunities in the thriving manufacturing centers of the North, they discovered that metropolitan police departments tended to enforce the law along racial and ethnic lines, with newcomers overseen by those who came before. “There was an early emphasis on people whose status was just a tiny notch better than the folks whom they were focused on policing,” Muhammad said. “And so the Anglo-Saxons are policing the Irish or the Germans are policing the Irish. The Irish are policing the Poles.” And then arrived a wave of Black Southerners looking for a better life.

In his groundbreaking work, “ The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America ,” Muhammad argues that an essential turning point came in the early 1900s amid efforts to professionalize police forces across the nation, in part by using crime statistics to guide law enforcement efforts. For the first time, Americans with European roots were grouped into one broad category, white, and set apart from the other category, Black.

Citing Muhammad’s research, Harvard historian Jill Lepore has summarized the consequences this way : “Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.”

“History shows that crime data was never objective in any meaningful sense,” Muhammad wrote. Instead, crime statistics were “weaponized” to justify racial profiling, police brutality, and ever more policing of Black people.

This phenomenon, he believes, has continued well into this century and is exemplified by William J. Bratton, one of the most famous police leaders in recent America history. Known as “America’s Top Cop,” Bratton led police departments in his native Boston, Los Angeles, and twice in New York, finally retiring in 2016.

Bratton rejected notions that crime was a result of social and economic forces, such as poverty, unemployment, police practices, and racism. Instead, he said in a 2017 speech, “It is about behavior.” Through most of his career, he was a proponent of statistically-based “predictive” policing — essentially placing forces in areas where crime numbers were highest, focused on the groups found there.

Bratton argued that the technology eliminated the problem of prejudice in policing, without ever questioning potential bias in the data or algorithms themselves — a significant issue given the fact that Black Americans are arrested and convicted of crimes at disproportionately higher rates than whites. This approach has led to widely discredited practices such as racial profiling and “stop-and-frisk.” And, Muhammad notes, “There is no research consensus on whether or how much violence dropped in cities due to policing.”

Gathering numbers

In 2015 The Washington Post began tracking every fatal shooting by an on-duty officer, using news stories, social media posts, and police reports in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Brown, a Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. According to the newspaper, Black Americans are killed by police at twice the rate of white Americans, and Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

Such efforts have proved useful for researchers such as economist Rajiv Sethi .

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute , Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers, a difficult task given that data from such encounters is largely unavailable from police departments. Instead, Sethi and his team of researchers have turned to information collected by websites and news organizations including The Washington Post and The Guardian, merged with data from other sources such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Census, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Rajiv Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers,

Courtesy photo

They have found that exposure to deadly force is highest in the Mountain West and Pacific regions relative to the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states, and that racial disparities in relation to deadly force are even greater than the national numbers imply. “In the country as a whole, you’re about two to three times more likely to face deadly force if you’re Black than if you are white” said Sethi. “But if you look at individual cities separately, disparities in exposure are much higher.”

Examining the characteristics associated with police departments that experience high numbers of lethal encounters is one way to better understand and address racial disparities in policing and the use of violence, Sethi said, but it’s a massive undertaking given the decentralized nature of policing in America. There are roughly 18,000 police departments in the country, and more than 3,000 sheriff’s offices, each with its own approaches to training and selection.

“They behave in very different ways, and what we’re finding in our current research is that they are very different in the degree to which they use deadly force,” said Sethi. To make real change, “You really need to focus on the agency level where organizational culture lies, where selection and training protocols have an effect, and where leadership can make a difference.”

Sethi pointed to the example of Camden, N.J., which disbanded and replaced its police force in 2013, initially in response to a budget crisis, but eventually resulting in an effort to fundamentally change the way the police engaged with the community. While there have been improvements, including greater witness cooperation, lower crime, and fewer abuse complaints, the Camden case doesn’t fit any particular narrative, said Sethi, noting that the number of officers actually increased as part of the reform. While the city is still faced with its share of problems, Sethi called its efforts to rethink policing “important models from which we can learn.”

Fighting vs. preventing crime

For many analysts, the real problem with policing in America is the fact that there is simply too much of it. “We’ve seen since the mid-1970s a dramatic increase in expenditures that are associated with expanding the criminal legal system, including personnel and the tasks we ask police to do,” said Sandra Susan Smith , Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice at HKS, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. “And at the same time we see dramatic declines in resources devoted to social welfare programs.”

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson, but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work,” said Brandon Terry, assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies.

Kris Snibble/Harvard file photo

Smith’s comment highlights a key argument embraced by many activists and experts calling for dramatic police reform: diverting resources from the police to better support community services including health care, housing, and education, and stronger economic and job opportunities. They argue that broader support for such measures will decrease the need for policing, and in turn reduce violent confrontations, particularly in over-policed, economically disadvantaged communities, and communities of color.

For Brandon Terry , that tension took the form of an ice container during his Baltimore high school chemistry final. The frozen cubes were placed in the middle of the classroom to help keep the students cool as a heat wave sent temperatures soaring. “That was their solution to the building’s lack of air conditioning,” said Terry, a Harvard assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies. “Just grab an ice cube.”

Terry’s story is the kind many researchers cite to show the negative impact of underinvesting in children who will make up the future population, and instead devoting resources toward policing tactics that embrace armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and spy planes. Terry’s is also the kind of tale promoted by activists eager to defund the police, a movement begun in the late 1960s that has again gained momentum as the death toll from violent encounters mounts. A scholar of Martin Luther King Jr., Terry said the Civil Rights leader’s views on the Vietnam War are echoed in the calls of activists today who are pressing to redistribute police resources.

“King thought that the idea of spending many orders of magnitude more for an unjust war than we did for the abolition of poverty and the abolition of ghettoization was a moral travesty, and it reflected a kind of sickness at the core of our society,” said Terry. “And part of what the defund model is based upon is a similar moral criticism, that these budgets reflect priorities that we have, and our priorities are broken.”

Terry also thinks the policing debate needs to be expanded to embrace a fuller understanding of what it means for people to feel truly safe in their communities. He highlights the work of sociologist Chris Muller and Harvard’s Robert Sampson, who have studied racial disparities in exposures to lead and the connections between a child’s early exposure to the toxic metal and antisocial behavior. Various studies have shown that lead exposure in children can contribute to cognitive impairment and behavioral problems, including heightened aggression.

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson,” said Terry, “but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work.”

Policing and criminal justice system

Alexandra Natapoff , Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, sees policing as inexorably linked to the country’s criminal justice system and its long ties to racism.

“Policing does not stand alone or apart from how we charge people with crimes, or how we convict them, or how we treat them once they’ve been convicted,” she said. “That entire bundle of official practices is a central part of how we govern, and in particular, how we have historically governed Black people and other people of color, and economically and socially disadvantaged populations.”

Unpacking such a complicated issue requires voices from a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, and fields of expertise who can shine light on the problem and possible solutions, said Natapoff, who co-founded a new lecture series with HLS Professor Andrew Crespo titled “ Policing in America .”

In recent weeks the pair have hosted Zoom discussions on topics ranging from qualified immunity to the Black Lives Matter movement to police unions to the broad contours of the American penal system. The series reflects the important work being done around the country, said Natapoff, and offers people the chance to further “engage in dialogue over these over these rich, complicated, controversial issues around race and policing, and governance and democracy.”

Courts and mass incarceration

Much of Natapoff’s recent work emphasizes the hidden dangers of the nation’s misdemeanor system. In her book “ Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal ,” Natapoff shows how the practice of stopping, arresting, and charging people with low-level offenses often sends them down a devastating path.

“This is how most people encounter the criminal apparatus, and it’s the first step of mass incarceration, the initial net that sweeps people of color disproportionately into the criminal system,” said Natapoff. “It is also the locus that overexposes Black people to police violence. The implications of this enormous net of police and prosecutorial authority around minor conduct is central to understanding many of the worst dysfunctions of our criminal system.”

One consequence is that Black and brown people are incarcerated at much higher rates than white people. America has approximately 2.3 million people in federal, state, and local prisons and jails, according to a 2020 report from the nonprofit the Prison Policy Initiative. According to a 2018 report from the Sentencing Project, Black men are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are 3.1 times as likely.

Reducing mass incarceration requires shrinking the misdemeanor net “along all of its axes” said Natapoff, who supports a range of reforms including training police officers to both confront and arrest people less for low-level offenses, and the policies of forward-thinking prosecutors willing to “charge fewer of those offenses when police do make arrests.”

She praises the efforts of Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins in Massachusetts and George Gascón, the district attorney in Los Angeles County, Calif., who have pledged to stop prosecuting a range of misdemeanor crimes such as resisting arrest, loitering, trespassing, and drug possession. “If cities and towns across the country committed to that kind of reform, that would be a profoundly meaningful change,” said Natapoff, “and it would be a big step toward shrinking our entire criminal apparatus.”

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner cites the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

Sentencing reform

Another contributing factor in mass incarceration is sentencing disparities.

A recent Harvard Law School study found that, as is true nationally, people of color are “drastically overrepresented in Massachusetts state prisons.” But the report also noted that Black and Latinx people were less likely to have their cases resolved through pretrial probation — a way to dismiss charges if the accused meet certain conditions — and receive much longer sentences than their white counterparts.

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner also notes the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons. She points to the way the 1994 Crime Bill (legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware) ushered in much harsher drug penalties for crack than for powder cocaine. This tied the hands of judges issuing sentences and disproportionately punished people of color in the process. “The disparity in the treatment of crack and cocaine really was backed up by anecdote and stereotype, not by data,” said Gertner, a lecturer at HLS. “There was no data suggesting that crack was infinitely more dangerous than cocaine. It was the young Black predator narrative.”

The First Step Act, a bipartisan prison reform bill aimed at reducing racial disparities in drug sentencing and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018, is just what its name implies, said Gertner.

“It reduces sentences to the merely inhumane rather than the grotesque. We still throw people in jail more than anybody else. We still resort to imprisonment, rather than thinking of other alternatives. We still resort to punishment rather than other models. None of that has really changed. I don’t deny the significance of somebody getting out of prison a year or two early, but no one should think that that’s reform.”

Not just bad apples

Reform has long been a goal for federal leaders. Many heralded Obama-era changes aimed at eliminating racial disparities in policing and outlined in the report by The President’s Task Force on 21st Century policing. But HKS’s Smith saw them as largely symbolic. “It’s a nod to reform. But most of the reforms that are implemented in this country tend to be reforms that nibble around the edges and don’t really make much of a difference.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Smith, who cites studies suggesting a majority of Americans hold negative biases against Black and brown people, and that unconscious prejudices and stereotypes are difficult to erase.

“Experiments show that you can, in the context of a day, get people to think about race differently, and maybe even behave differently. But if you follow up, say, a week, or two weeks later, those effects are gone. We don’t know how to produce effects that are long-lasting. We invest huge amounts to implement such police reforms, but most often there’s no empirical evidence to support their efficacy.”

Even the early studies around the effectiveness of body cameras suggest the devices do little to change “officers’ patterns of behavior,” said Smith, though she cautions that researchers are still in the early stages of collecting and analyzing the data.

And though police body cameras have caught officers in unjust violence, much of the general public views the problem as anomalous.

“Despite what many people in low-income communities of color think about police officers, the broader society has a lot of respect for police and thinks if you just get rid of the bad apples, everything will be fine,” Smith added. “The problem, of course, is this is not just an issue of bad apples.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Sandra Susan Smith, a professor of criminal justice Harvard Kennedy School.

Community-based ways forward

Still Smith sees reason for hope and possible ways forward involving a range of community-based approaches. As part of the effort to explore meaningful change, Smith, along with Christopher Winship , Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at HKS, have organized “ Reimagining Community Safety: A Program in Criminal Justice Speaker Series ” to better understand the perspectives of practitioners, policymakers, community leaders, activists, and academics engaged in public safety reform.

Some community-based safety models have yielded important results. Smith singles out the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets program (known as CAHOOTS ) in Eugene, Ore., which supplements police with a community-based public safety program. When callers dial 911 they are often diverted to teams of workers trained in crisis resolution, mental health, and emergency medicine, who are better equipped to handle non-life-threatening situations. The numbers support her case. In 2017 the program received 25,000 calls, only 250 of which required police assistance. Training similar teams of specialists who don’t carry weapons to handle all traffic stops could go a long way toward ending violent police encounters, she said.

“Imagine you have those kinds of services in play,” said Smith, paired with community-based anti-violence program such as Cure Violence , which aims to stop violence in targeted neighborhoods by using approaches health experts take to control disease, such as identifying and treating individuals and changing social norms. Together, she said, these programs “could make a huge difference.”

At Harvard Law School, students have been studying how an alternate 911-response team might function in Boston. “We were trying to move from thinking about a 911-response system as an opportunity to intervene in an acute moment, to thinking about what it would look like to have a system that is trying to help reweave some of the threads of community, a system that is more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” said HLS Professor Rachel Viscomi, who directs the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and oversaw the research.

The forthcoming report, compiled by two students in the HLS clinic, Billy Roberts and Anna Vande Velde, will offer officials a range of ideas for how to think about community safety that builds on existing efforts in Boston and other cities, said Viscomi.

But Smith, like others, knows community-based interventions are only part of the solution. She applauds the Justice Department’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of Brown. The 102-page report shed light on the department’s discriminatory policing practices, including the ways police disproportionately targeted Black residents for tickets and fines to help balance the city’s budget. To fix such entrenched problems, state governments need to rethink their spending priorities and tax systems so they can provide cities and towns the financial support they need to remain debt-free, said Smith.

Rethinking the 911-response system to being one that is “more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” is part of the student-led research under the direction of Law School Professor Rachel Viscomi, who heads up the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

Jon Chase/Harvard file photo

“Part of the solution has to be a discussion about how government is funded and how a city like Ferguson got to a place where government had so few resources that they resorted to extortion of their residents, in particular residents of color, in order to make ends meet,” she said. “We’ve learned since that Ferguson is hardly the only municipality that has struggled with funding issues and sought to address them through the oppression and repression of their politically, socially, and economically marginalized Black and Latino residents.”

Police contracts, she said, also need to be reexamined. The daughter of a “union man,” Smith said she firmly supports officers’ rights to union representation to secure fair wages, health care, and safe working conditions. But the power unions hold to structure police contracts in ways that protect officers from being disciplined for “illegal and unethical behavior” needs to be challenged, she said.

“I think it’s incredibly important for individuals to be held accountable and for those institutions in which they are embedded to hold them to account. But we routinely find that union contracts buffer individual officers from having to be accountable. We see this at the level of the Supreme Court as well, whose rulings around qualified immunity have protected law enforcement from civil suits. That needs to change.”

Other Harvard experts agree. In an opinion piece in The Boston Globe last June, Tomiko Brown-Nagin , dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, pointed out the Court’s “expansive interpretation of qualified immunity” and called for reform that would “promote accountability.”

“This nation is devoted to freedom, to combating racial discrimination, and to making government accountable to the people,” wrote Brown-Nagin. “Legislators today, like those who passed landmark Civil Rights legislation more than 50 years ago, must take a stand for equal justice under law. Shielding police misconduct offends our fundamental values and cannot be tolerated.”

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Police: Community Policing

Origins and evolution of community policing.

Community policing has been evolving slowly since the civil rights movement in the 1960s exposed the weaknesses of the traditional policing model. Even though its origin can be traced to this crisis in police-community relations, its development has been influenced by a wide variety of factors over the course of the past forty years.

The Civil Rights Movement (1960s). Individual elements of community policing, such as improvements in police-community relations, emerged slowly from the political and social upheavals surrounding the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Widespread riots and protests against racial injustices brought government attention to sources of racial discrimination and tension, including the police. As visible symbols of political authority, the police were exposed to a great deal of public criticism. Not only were minorities underrepresented in police departments, but studies suggested that the police treated minorities more harshly than white citizens (Walker). In response to this civil unrest, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967) recommended that the police become more responsive to the challenges of a rapidly changing society.

One of the areas that needed the most improvement was the hostile relationship separating the police from minorities, and in particular the police from African Americans. Team policing, tried in the late 1960s and early 1970s, developed from this concern, and was the earliest manifestation of community policing (Rosenbaum). In an attempt to facilitate a closer police community relationship, police operations were restructured according to geographical boundaries (community beats). In addition, line officers were granted greater decision-making authority to help them be more responsive to neighborhood problems. Innovative though it was, staunch opposition from police managers to decentralization severely hampered successful team implementation, and team policing was soon abandoned.

Academic interest (1970s). All the attention surrounding the police and the increased availability of government funds for police research spawned a great deal of academic interest. Researchers began to examine the role of the police and the effectiveness of traditional police strategies much more closely. In 1974 the Kansas City Patrol Experiment demonstrated that increasing routine preventive patrol and police response time had a very limited impact on reducing crime levels, allaying citizens' fear of crime, and increasing community satisfaction with police service. Similarly, a study on the criminal investigation process revealed the limitations of routine investigative actions and suggested that the crime-solving ability of the police could be enhanced through programs that fostered greater cooperation between the police and the community (Chaiken, Greenwood, and Petersilia).

The idea that a closer partnership between the police and local residents could help reduce crime and disorder began to emerge throughout the 1970s. One of the reasons why this consideration was appealing to police departments was because the recognition that the police and the community were co-producers of police services spread the blame for increasing crime rates (Skogan and Hartnett). An innovative project in San Diego specifically recognized this developing theme by encouraging line officers to identify and solve community problems on their beats (Boydstun and Sherry).

The importance of foot patrol. It is clear that challenges to the traditional policing model and the assumption that the police could reduce crime on their own, helped generate interest in policing alternatives. However, it was not until the late 1970s that both researchers and police practitioners began to focus more intently on the specific elements associated with communityoriented policing. The major catalyst for this change was the reimplementation of foot patrol in U.S. cities. In 1978, Flint, Michigan, became the first city in a generation to create a city-wide program that took officers out of their patrol cars and assigned them to walking beats (Kelling and Moore). Meanwhile, a similar foot patrol program was launched in Newark, New Jersey.

The difference between these two lay primarily in their implementation. In Flint, foot patrol was part of a much broader program designed to involve officers in community problem-solving (Trojanowicz). In contrast, the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment , which was modeled on the study of preventive patrol in Kansas City, focused specifically on whether the increased visibility of officers patrolling on foot helped deter crime. Results from these innovative programs were encouraging. It appeared that foot patrol in Flint significantly reduced citizens' fear of crime, increased officer morale, and reduced crime. In Newark, citizens were actually able to recognize whether they were receiving higher or lower levels of foot patrol in their neighborhoods. In areas where foot patrol was increased, citizens believed that their crime problems had diminished in relation to other neighborhoods. In addition, they reported more positive attitudes toward the police. Similarly, those officers in Newark who were assigned to foot patrol experienced a more positive relationship with community members, but, in contrast to Flint, foot patrol did not appear to reduce crime. The finding that foot patrol reduced citizen fear of crime demonstrated the importance of a policing tactic that fostered a closer relationship between the police and the community.

As foot patrol was capturing national attention, Herman Goldstein proposed a new approach to policing that helped synthesize some of the key elements of community policing into a broader and more innovative framework. Foot patrol and police-community cooperation were integral parts of Goldstein's approach, but what distinguished problem-oriented policing (POP) was its focus on how these factors could contribute to a police officer's capacity to identify and solve neighborhood problems. By delineating a clear series of steps, from identifying community problems to choosing among a broad array of alternative solutions to law enforcement, Goldstein showed how increased cooperation between the police and community could do more than reduce fear of crime. An intimate familiarity with local residents could also provide the police with an invaluable resource for identifying and solving the underlying causes of seemingly unrelated and intractable community problems. With its common emphasis on police-community partnerships, parts of the philosophy of problem-oriented policing were readily incorporated into ideas about community policing.

The beginnings of a coherent community policing approach (1980s). Interest in the development of community policing accelerated with the 1982 publication of an article entitled "Broken Windows." Published in a national magazine, The Atlantic Monthly , the article received a great deal of public exposure. Drawing upon the findings of the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment , James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling constructed a compelling and highly readable argument challenging the traditional crime-fighting role of the police, and exploring the relationship between social disorder, neighborhood decline, and crime.

According to Wilson and Kelling, officers on foot patrol should focus on problems such as aggressive panhandling or teenagers loitering on street corners that reduce the quality of neighborhood life. Similar to a broken window, the aggressive panhandler, or the rowdy group of teenagers, represent the initial signs of social disorder. Left unchecked they can make citizens fearful for their personal safety and create the impression that nobody cares about the neighborhood. Over time, this untended behavior increases the level of fear experienced by lawabiding citizens, who begin to withdraw from neighborhood life. As residents retreat inside their homes, or even choose to leave the area altogether, local community controls enervate and disorderly elements take over the neighborhood. Eventually, this process of neighborhood deterioration can lead to an increase in predatory crime. Wilson and Kelling argue that by patrolling beats on foot and focusing on initial problems of social disorder, the police can reduce fear of crime and stop the process of neighborhood decay.

Goldstein's work and Wilson and Kelling's article sparked widespread interest in problem solving, foot patrol, and the relationship between the police and the community, all of which were becoming broadly associated with community policing. Police departments were quick to seize upon the ideas and publicity generated by these scholars, and in the 1980s they experimented with numerous problem-and communityoriented initiatives. In 1986 problem-oriented policing programs were implemented in Baltimore County, Maryland, and Newport News, Virginia (Taft; Eck and Spelman). In Baltimore County, small units composed of fifteen police officers were assigned to specific problems and responsible for their successful resolution. In Newport News, the police worked with the community to identify burglaries as a serious problem in the area. The solution involved the police acting as community organizers and brokering between citizens and other agencies to address the poor physical condition of the buildings. Ultimately the buildings were demolished and residents relocated, but more importantly problem-oriented policing demonstrated that the police were capable of adopting a new role, and it did appear to reduce crime (Eck and Spelman).

An initiative to reduce the fear of crime in Newark and Houston through different police strategies, such as storefront community police stations and a community-organizing police response team, was successful in reducing citizens' fear of crime (Pate et al.). Interestingly, the results in Houston suggested that generally the program was more successful in the areas that needed it least. Whites, middle-class residents, and homeowners in low-crime neighborhoods were more likely to visit or call community substations than minorities, those with low incomes, and renters (Brown and Wycoff).

These studies further catalyzed interest in community policing and problem solving, and from 1988 to 1990 the National Institute of Justice sponsored the Perspectives on Policing Seminars at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Not only did this help popularize these innovations in policing, but it helped scholars and practitioners refine and synthesize the mixture of ideas and approaches labeled community-and problem-oriented policing. One policing seminar paper in particular received a great deal of scholarly attention. The Evolving Strategy of Policing , by George Kelling and Mark Moore, summarized the history of policing and identified what was unique about recent developments in the field. In contrasting three different policing approaches and finishing with the advent of the "community problem-solving era," Kelling and Moore appeared to be sounding a clarion call, announcing the arrival of a complete paradigm shift in law enforcement.

In the face of such bold proclamations, it is unsurprising that scholars began to examine community policing more critically, and queried whether it could fulfill its advocates' many promises. Contributors to an edited volume on community policing entitled Community Policing: Rhetoric or Reality? noted that without a workable definition of community policing, its successful implementation was difficult. They also suggested that community policing might just be "old wine in new bottles," or even a communityrelations exercise employed by police departments to boost their legitimacy in the eyes of the public (Greene and Mastrofski). The outgrowth of these thoughtful criticisms was to encourage researchers to design more rigorous methodological studies that could evaluate the effects of community policing more clearly.

Community policing as a national reform movement (1990s and beyond). By the 1990s, community policing had become a powerful national movement and part of everyday policing parlance. Encouraged by the federal funds made available through the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), police departments across the country shifted their attention toward implementing community policing reforms. Annual conferences on community policing became commonplace, and researchers began to study community-policing programs in cities all over America. Besides the availability of funds and promising research findings, the political appeal of community policing and its close affinity to long-term trends in societal organization contributed to the widespread acceptance of community policing (Skogan and Hartnett).

Given the large concentration of African Americans and Hispanics in American cities, groups who have historically been engaged in a hostile relationship with the police, an approach to law enforcement that promised to improve police-community relations by working with, rather than targeting, racial and ethnic minorities held great appeal for local politicians concerned with pleasing their constituents. In addition, community policing reflected a more general underlying trend in the structure, management, and marketing practices of large organizations. In contrast to rigid bureaucracies and their dependence on standard rules and policies, decentralization created smaller, more flexible units to facilitate a speedier and more specialized response to the unique conditions of different organizational environments. Rather than emphasizing control through a strict organizational hierarchy, management layers were reduced, organizational resources were made more accessible, and both supervisors and their subordinates were encouraged to exercise autonomy and independence in the decision-making process. Finally, the extent to which consumers were satisfied with the market produce, in this case police services, became an important criteria for measuring police performance (Skogan and Hartnett).

At the outset of the twenty-first century, the momentum behind community policing shows no signs of slowing down. Even though police departments may have been slow to adopt all the philosophical precepts, tactical elements, and organizational changes commensurate with the entire community-policing model, its slow and steady evolution suggests that it is a permanent fixture on the landscape of American policing (Zhao and Thurman).

Additional topics

Police: Community Policing - The Theory And Practice Of Community Policing
Police: Community Policing - Definition Of Community Policing
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Problem-Oriented Policing: The SARA Model
😊 History of problem oriented policing. Community Policing. 2019-02-01
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problem solving policing theory
Problem Solving Policing by Sian Moran
FIGURE 1 THE SARA MODEL OF PROBLEM-SOLVING

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COMMENTS

History of Problem-Oriented Policing
History of Problem-Oriented PolicingIn the late 1970's, researchers, police professionals, and policymakers became interested in improving the effectiveness of policing. Research during this period pointed out the limitations of random patrol, rapid response, and follow-up criminal investigations-practices that had been the foundation of policing for many years.
Past, Present and Future of POP1
Problem-oriented policing (POP) was the brainchild of Herman Goldstein. The core principles were first formulated in the late 1970s. They continue to exert a major influence on both police and partnership work, especially in the UK and US. POP has profoundly affected the work of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at UCL.
PDF Problem-Oriented Policing: Reflections on the First 20 Years
problem-oriented policing is open-ended; that it invites criticism, alterations, additions, and subtractions; and that my intent was to stimulate others to contribute to further developing this overall approach to improving policing.
Problem-oriented policing
Problem-oriented policing (POP), coined by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Herman Goldstein, is a policing strategy that involves the identification and analysis of specific crime and disorder problems, in order to develop effective response strategies. POP requires police to identify and target underlying problems that can lead to crime. Goldstein suggested it as an improvement on ...
Problem-Oriented Policing
Essential to problem-oriented policing is the careful analysis of problems to design tailor-made solutions. While individualized solutions are important, it is also the case that police agencies across the U.S. often face very similar types of problems that may respond to similar types of solutions.
The Use and Effectiveness of Problem-Oriented Policing
However, as it was put into practice in multiple cities and nations, the effectiveness and strength of problem-oriented policing came into question (History of problem-oriented policing, 2014). The quintessential component of problem-oriented policing is the concept of problem solving (Eisenberg & Glasscock, 2001, p. 2).
Problem‐oriented policing for reducing crime and disorder: An updated
Having more complete and current evidence on POP is especially important given an increasing focus on problem-solving and other proactive policing approaches around ... expressed some concern over the possibility of unknown history effects, noting that at least one motel location was disqualified from their study after being the target of ...
Problem-Oriented Policing
Overview. Problem-oriented policing is an alternative approach to crime reduction that challenges police officers to understand the underlying situations and dynamics that give rise to recurring crime problems and to develop appropriate responses to address these underlying conditions. Problem-oriented policing is often given operational ...
The diffusion of police innovation: A case study of problem-oriented
The history of policing is filled with innovation. One such innovation is problem-oriented policing (POP), proposed by Herman Goldstein in 1979 as a framework for improving police effectiveness through paying greater attention to resolving the substantive community problems that fall within the police remit rather than responding to calls for service as they arrive.
Problem-Oriented Policing
Overview. Problem-oriented policing (POP) means diagnosing and solving problems that are increasing crime risks, usually in areas that are seeing comparatively high levels of crime (e.g., "hot spots"). POP is challenging in that agencies need to diagnose and solve what could be any of a wide range of crime-causing problems.
PDF Identifying and Defining Policing Problems
A policing problem is different from an incident or a case. Under problem-oriented policing a problem has the following basic characteristics: A problem is of concern to the public and to the police. A problem involves conduct or conditions that fall within the broad, but not unlimited, responsibilities of the police.
Problem-solving policing
9 mins read. Problem-solving policing is also known as problem-oriented policing. It's an approach to tackling crime and disorder that involves: identification of a specific problem. thorough analysis to understand the problem. development of a tailored response. assessment of the effects of the response. The approach assumes that identifying ...
Full article: Problem-oriented policing in England and Wales: barriers
Introduction. Problem-oriented policing (also known as problem-solving) is an approach which calls for in-depth exploration of the substantive problems that the police are called on to tackle and the development and evaluation of tailor-made responses to them (Goldstein Citation 1990, Eck Citation 2019).The practice of problem-oriented policing usually involves four main processes ...
Police perceptions of problem-oriented policing and evidence-based
The history of policing is littered with reform programmes, which aim to improve effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy. Problem-oriented policing (POP) and evidence-based policing (EBP) are two popular and enduring reform efforts, both of which have generated significant researcher and practitioner attention. ... Problem solving is an ...
Problem-Oriented Policing in Depth
Problem-oriented policing (POP) is perhaps the most aptly named policing strategy—it means resolving problems that are increasing crime risks, typically in areas that are seeing comparatively high levels of crime (e.g., "hot spots"). What types of problems are solved and the strategies for solving them vary widely, depending on the situation.
The SARA Model
History of Problem-Oriented Policing Key Elements of POPThe SARA Model The Problem Analysis Triangle Situational Crime Prevention 25 Techniques Links to Other POP Friendly Sites About POP en EspañolThe SARA ModelA commonly used problem-solving method is the SARA model (Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment).
Community-Oriented Policing and Problem-Oriented Policing
Community-oriented policing (COP), also called community policing, is defined by the federal Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services as "a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies that support the systemic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder ...
Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities
At the same time, there is little consistency found in problem-solving policing's impacts on perceived disorder/quality of life, fear of crime, and perceived police legitimacy. However, the near absence of backfire effects in the evaluations of problem-solving strategies suggests that the risk of harmful community effects from problem-solving ...
PDF Implementing POP
IMPLEMENTINGPOP Leading, Structuring, and Managing a Problem-Oriented Police Agency. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Prepare Yourself and the Agency. POP has been succinctly summarized by Herman Goldstein as follows: "Problem-oriented policing is an approach to policing in which discrete pieces of police business.
Solving racial disparities in policing
The history of racialized policing. Like many scholars, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, traces the history of policing in America to "slave patrols" in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people ...
Police: Community Policing
The Evolving Strategy of Policing, by George Kelling and Mark Moore, summarized the history of policing and identified what was unique about recent developments in the field. In contrasting three different policing approaches and finishing with the advent of the "community problem-solving era," Kelling and Moore appeared to be sounding a ...
PDF A practice guide
The best evidence we have tells us that problem-solving is the way to improve policing, make best use of resources, and serve the public ... There is a long history of police problem-solving in England and Wales. Police services have experimented with the idea of problem-solving for over three decades. Presently there is a resurgence of ...
Problem Solving
Community policing emphasizes proactive problem solving in a systematic and routine fashion. Rather than responding to crime only after it occurs, community policing encourages agencies to proactively develop solutions to the immediate underlying conditions contributing to public safety problems. Problem solving must be infused into all police ...
Attorney General Bonta Secures Settlement ...
Enhance, promote, and strengthen partnerships within the community, to continue engaging constructively with the community to ensure collaborative problem-solving and bias-free policing, and to increase transparency and community confidence in VPD.