In this chapter we summarize the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report on proactive policing, focusing on impacts on crime and communities. We begin the paper with a description of how proactive policing was defined in the report, and a summary of the wide scale use of proactive policing approaches in American police agencies. We then turn to summaries of the evidence on crime control and community outcomes. The report concluded that there was sufficient scientific evidence to support the adoption of many proactive policing practices. We argue that successful prevention programs rely on greater focusing of police resources, and expansion of the tools of policing (for crime prevention). The Committee also found that crime prevention outcomes can often be obtained without producing negative community reactions, and that some community-based strategies have begun to show evidence of improving the relations between the police and public. In concluding, we argue that future proactive policing programs should seek to maximize both crime prevention and positive community outcomes and suggest how this can be done given the report’s findings.

Pity the poor soul who, more than twenty years ago, would have predicted that hard-core street cops would be sitting down with serious violent offenders, telling them politely to cease and desist, asking them what they and their families need, and going to extreme lengths to keep them safe and out of jail. Exactly that has in fact become standard practice with police officers nationally; beyond that, and not coincidentally, that standard practice is increasingly understood to work very well indeed. The “focused deterrence” strategies piloted in Boston in the mid-1990s and implemented since then in a range of other jurisdictions are racking up impressive results in preventing violent crime and have become essentially mainstream. What was once seen as at best innovative – but more often to be fringe bordering on the bizarre, as in the face-to-face meetings between authorities and offenders that the Boston strategy invented – is now standard practice and routine not just for special interventions but as a philosophy of policing: it is, one hears police chiefs say, “what we do.”

CompStat tributes are extensive. Compstat has been described as “perhaps the single most important organizational/administrative innovation in policing during the latter half of the 20th century” (Kelling & Sousa, 2001: 6). A Criminology and Public Policy journal editor termed Compstat “arguably one of the most significant strategic innovations in policing in the last couple of decades” (Weisburd et al., 2003: 419). The authors of a major study note that Compstat “has already been recognized as a major innovation in American policing” (Weisburd et al., 2003: 422). In 1996, Compstat was awarded the prestigious Innovations in American Government Award from the Ford Foundation and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Former New York City Mayor Giuliani proclaimed Compstat as his administration’s “crown jewel” (Giuliani, 2002: 7).

In this volume, a group of leading scholars presented contrasting perspectives on eleven major innovations in American policing developed over the course of the last three decades. Police departments needed to improve their performance and relationships with the community and innovation provided the opportunity to make these improvements. These innovations represent fundamental changes to the business of policing. However, as many of our authors point out, improving police performance through innovation is often not straightforward. Police departments are highly resistant to change and police officers often experience difficulty in implementing new programs (Sparrow, Moore, & Kennedy, 1990; Bayley & Nixon, 2010; Maguire, 2014; Lum & Koper, 2017). The available evidence on key dimensions of police performance associated with these innovations, such as crime control effectiveness and community satisfaction with services provided, is sometimes limited. These observations are not unique to the policing field. For example, as Elmore (1997) suggests, the field of education was awash in innovation during the 1990s, but there is little evidence examining whether those innovations advanced the performance of schools, students, or graduates.

For nearly forty years, policymakers within law enforcement, commercially motivated interest groups, and scholars have made the case for an augmented implementation of technology in policing, particularly information technologies. The prominent discourse is efficiency and cost-effectiveness of operations, as technology is hypothesized to improve the quality of law enforcement on a wide range of outcomes and outputs. Prima facie, technology can revolutionize law enforcement; ample examples indicate where this is the case. Research areas in support of technology in policing include computers, GPS-based technologies, video recording of crime scenes, and forensic evidence, such as DNA testing. Our collective view should be that the pertinent question is one of scale: why not more? Why are information technologies not more pronounced in law enforcement? What stopped the information revolution from establishing a more prominent place in policing?

The concept of community policing is very popular with politicians and the general public – so popular that few police chiefs want to be caught without some program they can call community policing. As early as 1997, a survey of police departments conducted by the Police Foundation found that 85 percent reported they had adopted community policing or were in the process of doing so (Skogan, 2005). The biggest reason they gave for not doing so was that community policing was “impractical” for their community. In my own tabulations of the data, this reply was mostly from small departments with only a few officers. Bigger cities included in the survey (those with populations greater than 100,000) all claimed to have adopted community policing – half (they recalled) by 1991 and the other half between 1992 and 1997. The most recent similar figures come from a national survey of departments conducted in 2013. In my tabulations, about 95 percent of the departments in cities of more than 250,000 in population that had an official mission statement included a commitment to community policing (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2015).

Looking at the major police innovations of the last few decades, what is most striking from a criminologist’s perspective is the extent to which new programs and practices have been developed without reference to either criminological theory or research evidence. Some institutional theorists might argue that this is understandable given the limited ability of police agencies to reliably demonstrate their successes, and the political environments within which police agencies must operate (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Mastrofski & Ritti, 2000; Willis, Mastrofski & Weisburd, 2004). However, this reality is very much at odds with a model of policing that would seek to draw new policies and practices from a solid research base (Sherman, 1998; Weisburd & Neyroud, 2011), and suggests an approach to policing that is based more on intuition and luck than on research and experimentation. Studies of the adoption of police innovation reinforce this problematic portrait of American police innovation. Widely touted programs such as community policing or CompStat have been widely diffused across the landscape of American policing absent any reliable evidence that they accomplish the goals that they set out to achieve (Weisburd et al., 2003; Weisburd & Eck, 2004).

Over the last decades of the twentieth century, American policing went through a period of significant change and innovation. In what is a relatively short historical time frame, the police began to reconsider their fundamental mission, the nature of the core strategies of policing, and the character of their relationships with the communities that they serve. Innovations in policing in this period were not insular and restricted to police professionals and scholars, but were often seen on the front pages of America’s newspapers and magazines, and spoken about in the electronic media. Some approaches, like broken windows policing – termed by some as zero tolerance policing – became the subject of heated political debate. Community policing, one of the most important police programs that emerged during this period, was even used to give its name to a large federal agency – The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services – created by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.

Despite attacks from the criminological, legal, and academic left, “broken windows” theory is a robust policy option in criminal justice practice and crime prevention. It has not only fueled the community policing movement, it has also informed the evolution of community courts, community prosecution, and community probation and parole. The Mid-town Manhattan Community Court, to give just one example, emphasizes broken windows’ ideas in its philosophy and practice. Moreover, the ideas embodied in broken windows have moved beyond criminal justice and criminology to areas like public health, education, parks, and business improvement districts (BIDs).

In Third-Party Policing (hereafter TPP), police partner with others to proactively reduce crime and disorder, often focusing on places with recurrent crime problems, or people at high risk of offending. Partnerships in policing are not new. Police have always sought out and formed partnerships with a range of different entities to tackle a myriad of different types of problems. What is new for police is the expectation, and sometimes the legislated mandate, that they will partner with others. In the United States, the emphasis for police is on partnerships with communities to co-produce public safety (see President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 2015). In the United Kingdom, police are compelled by law to involve local authorities in setting priorities and developing plans (see Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011; Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012), and numerous reports (see Independent Police Commission, 2013: 14–15; and National Debate Advisory Group, 2015, ch. 2) have expressed a vision for policing in which partnerships are central to most policing functions.

At the First Predictive Policing Symposium held in Los Angeles in 2009, Assistant Attorney General Laurie Robinson noted, “Law enforcement leaders are using predictive techniques in a variety of forms, but we don’t necessarily have a handle on all of them.” Predictive policing is starting to demonstrate modest positive results; however it is still a nascent field where the dimensions of predictive policing are still not clear. It comprises multiple elements and often means different things to different people.

The goal of procedural justice policing is to promote long-term crime reduction through creating and maintaining widespread popular legitimacy among the people in policed communities. This trust in the police has a set of desirable consequences. First, it lowers the rate of crime because those who view the law as legitimate are less likely to break it. Second, it transforms the relationship between the police and the public from coercive to consensual, with people more likely to willingly accept and defer to police authority. Third, it promotes voluntary cooperation, facilitating police efforts to manage social order. And finally, it promotes community development by creating a climate of reassurance within which people more willingly engage with others, leading to economic, social, and political vibrancy. This climate helps communities to develop out of the conditions promoting crime, rather than trying to arrest their way forward.

Looking at the major police innovations of the last few decades, what is most striking from a criminologist’s perspective is the extent to which new programs and practices have been developed without reference to either criminological theory or research evidence. Some institutional theorists might argue that this is understandable given the limited ability of police agencies to reliably demonstrate their successes, and the political environments within which police agencies must operate (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Mastrofski & Ritti, 2000; Willis, Mastrofski & Weisburd, 2004). However, this reality is very much at odds with a model of policing that would seek to draw new policies and practices from a solid research base (Sherman, 1998; Weisburd & Neyroud, 2011), and suggests an approach to policing that is based more on intuition and luck than on research and experimentation. Studies of the adoption of police innovation reinforce this problematic portrait of American police innovation. Widely touted programs such as community policing or CompStat have been widely diffused across the landscape of American policing absent any reliable evidence that they accomplish the goals that they set out to achieve (Weisburd et al., 2003; Weisburd & Eck, 2004).

Why would a hospital have such a policy? This is question Herman Goldstein (1979) asked, but he asked it of policing. His answer was that, “All bureaucracies risk becoming preoccupied with running their organizations and getting so involved in their method of operating that they lose sight of the primary purposes for which they were created. The police seem unusually susceptible to this phenomenon” (1979: 236–237). He called this phenomenon the “means over ends syndrome” (p. 238). Although Goldstein gave numerous examples of the means over ends syndrome in policing, he emphasized the overuse of law enforcement, particularly arrests and the use of the criminal justice system. The law, and its enforcement, are tools to solve problems, according to Goldstein. They are not ends in themselves. They are one of numerous means for accomplishing something greater. Enforcing the law should no more define policing than the claw hammer defines carpenters, the toilet plunger defines plumbers, the drafting table defines architects, or Power Point slides define college professors.