Ideas inAmericanPolicing

By Stephen D. Mastrofski

Policing For People

March 1999

Ideas in American Policing presentscommentary and insight fromleading criminologists on issues ofinterest to scholars, practitioners,and policy makers. The paperspublished in this series are from thePolice Foundation lecture series ofthe same name.

Some of the research reported inthis document was supported byGrant No. 95-IJ-CX-0071 from theNational Institute of Justice, Officeof Justice Programs, U.S. Depart-ment of Justice. Points of view inthis document are those of theauthor and do not necessarilyrepresent the official position orpolicies of the U.S. Department ofJustice or the Police Foundation.

© 1999 Police Foundation andStephen D. Mastrofski. All rights reserved.

Stephen D. Mastrofski is aprofessor in the School ofCriminal Justice at MichiganState University.

POLICEFOUNDATION

Ever since Americans firstformed full-time public policeforces, they have busiedthemselves improving them.Improvements come in all shapesand sizes, but reform movementsare energized by big, ambitiousgoals. Community policing is thecurrent catchword for reform,and it too embraces a number ofambitious goals: reducing crimeand disorder, calming fears aboutthreats to public safety, reducingthe public’s alienation from socialinstitutions once thought toengender a common sense ofpurpose. Reformers usuallypresent these objectives as theultimate end-product or bottomline of what public police are allabout. As important andintriguing as these objectives are,they are not my topic. But Ibegin by mentioning them

because I think that we oftenplant our gaze so firmly on thegrand objectives that wesometimes overlook the littlethings we can do to improvesocial institutions such as thepolice.

I get anxious when peopletalk about the bottom line inpolicing because that perspectivemakes it easy to forget that oursystem of government requires abalancing among competing andsometimes conflicting goals. Tocontribute to that balance, I willfocus on the processes ofpolicing, which receive littlereform attention but whichdeserve equal billing. Theseprocesses involve the moremundane aspects of police work,what police do when they policefor people. I will consider whatpolicing for people is, and could

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be, in terms of service to people.To begin, I identify sixcharacteristics that Americansassociate with “good service”from their police, adapted from ageneral characterization of servicequality in the private sector(Parasuraman et al., 1988). I willthen turn to some evidence onhow well American police areproviding these services, and willconclude with a reform agendathat promotes policing forpeople.

What Policing forPeople Means

Attentiveness is the firstelement of policing for people.Americans want their serviceproviders to pay attention tothem. Putting 100,000 moreofficers on the street has appealbecause it increases the capacityof America’s police forces to bemore attentive. It is nowfashionable to denigratepreventive patrol and reactivepolicing, but they remain popularbecause Americans want policewho are “around.” What appealsto the public about communitypolicing is the promise thatoutreach programs will increasethe public’s access to the police.Neighborhoods fight to keeptheir community policing officersnot just because they grow fondof the individuals, but becausetheir presence demonstrates thedepartment’s commitment toserve them.

Reliability is the secondelement of policing for people.

People expect a degree ofpredictability in what police do.They want service that is timelyand error-free. McDonald’ssucceeds not because the cuisineis superb but because the food ispredictable and more-or-lesserror-free. When it works well,911-service is like McDonald’s. Itis not a five-star restaurant, but itprovides service fast, fulfillingbasic “people-processing” needsto deal with problemsimmediately (Mastrofski andRitti forthcoming).

People also want responsiveservice. Americans expect more oftheir police than mere adherenceto bureaucratic rules (Bordua andReiss 1967, 297). They expect“client-centered” service. Thiscan mean giving clients what theywant, but clients themselves oftenconstrue it more broadly. Agood-faith effort by an officer isoften appreciated as much as afavorable outcome. Citizens aredelighted, and often surprised,when their police see a jobthrough to completion, checkingback later to see how thingsworked out. Police can beresponsive even when they deny a

citizen’s request, by explainingthe denial. G. K. Chestertonobserved, “Many a man wouldrather you heard his story thangranted his request.” Andsometimes about all the policecan do is “pick up the pieces”after some traumatic event. Whencitizens are traumatized, whateverelse police might accomplish, itcosts little to offer some measureof comfort or reassurance.

The public wantscompetence—service providerswho can get the job done. Whenyou get your car repaired, youexpect the mechanic to knowwhat he or she is doing. Whenyou call the police to report atheft, deal with a domesticdisturbance, or quell a noisy partynext door, you expect theresponding officer to know howto deal with the situation. Thepublic judges police competenceprimarily in terms of the tangiblethings they can readily observe.They do not use crime statisticsor other so-called outcomemeasures. They watch the officerat work and make judgmentsabout his or her ability to get thejob done.

Police can be responsive evenwhen they deny a citizen’srequest, by explaining thedenial.

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How the average citizendefines police competence may bedifferent from how anexperienced and skilled policeofficer defines it. The popularview on these differences is thatthey are a mile wide. Policeregard the public as ignorant andill-informed about whatconstitutes good police work,while the more alienated amongthe public regard the police aspoorly trained and lackingmotivation to do what thetaxpayers define as good policing.These differences may beoverstated, and where they dooccur they may do so inunanticipated directions. Forexample, the vast majority of theAmerican public approves ofpolice striking a citizen whoattacks an officer with his fists,and about two-thirds approve ofa police officer striking a citizenwho tries to escape custody(Maguire and Pastore 1997,132). Very few approve of apolice officer striking a citizen inresponse to vulgar comments orwhen questioning a murdersuspect. I would not be surprisedto see a similar distribution ofresponses if these questions wereput to a national sample of policeofficers.

Where citizens may differmost from police in assessingpolice competence is inoverestimating officers’ capacities,both in terms of their legalauthority and their ability tomobilize resources. Where suchdifferences do exist, rather thanmerely lament them or try to

convince one side that the otheris right, we should encouragediscussion and debate, which willprobably do a great deal toenlighten people of allviewpoints. Further, it may bemost productive to considerdomains of police competencethat are not commonly expectedby either the police or the public.For example, police skill inhelping crime victims might bedefined not just in terms ofbringing the offender to justicebut also helping victims reducethe risk of future harm (Herman1998).

An essential element ofquality service is having propermanners. Studies show that a badmanner is among the mostfrequent complaints citizens haveabout their contacts with police(Skogan 1994, 33; Walker et al.1996, 102). Studies also showthat the most powerful predictorsof citizen satisfaction with thepolice have more to do with howpolice treated the citizen, ratherthan what the policeaccomplished (Skogan 1994, 31).Social scientists have repeatedlydemonstrated that when policeare nasty to the public, the publicis more likely to be nasty inretaliation, despite citizens’tendencies to defer to theofficer’s authority and status(Reiss 1971, 144; Sykes andClark 1975). Finally, for thoseconcerned about reducing crimeand disorder, a number of studiesshow that citizens are more likelyto obey the law and less likely tobe disorderly or violent in the

future when those who enforcethe law do so in a manner that isnot disrespectful (Mastrofski et al.1996; Paternoster et al. 1997;Tyler 1990).

The final element of policingfor people is fairness, particularlyimportant for public officialswhose special trust is to apply awide range of powers to enforcethe laws and maintain peace. TomTyler (1990; 1997) found thatcitizens who perceived that theywere treated fairly by legalofficials, such as the police, alsoreported a stronger inclination toobey the law in the future. Thefactor having the greatest impacton people’s feelings about lawand legal authority was theirperception of a fair procedure, animpact substantially greater thanthat of the citizen’s sense of thefavorableness or fairness of theoutcome. Tyler found that themost important elements ofprocedural fairness were people’strust in the authorities’ motives,

An essentialelement ofqualityservice ishavingpropermanners.

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treating citizens with dignity andrespect, a sense of decision-makerneutrality, and providing citizenswith an opportunity to participatein the decision. Studies focusingon police have supported Tyler’sresearch (Mastrofski et al. 1996;Paternoster et al. 1997).

How Are We Doing?These six criteria—

attentiveness, reliability,responsiveness, competence,manners, and fairness—illuminatethe service aspects of policing andconstitute what I have termedpolicing for people. These criteriaare not new, and we pay lipservice to them from time totime, but there is very little in thecurrent police reform movementthat promotes these ideals andthat gives them the attention theydeserve. Virtually all of thefederal dollars supportingnationwide collection of data onpolice performance go tomeasuring crime, victimization,and fear of crime. In 1996,Congress commissioned acomprehensive evaluation of theeffectiveness of the $3 billiongiven out each year by the U.S.Department of Justice to preventcrime. No such evaluation wassponsored for the criteriadiscussed above. Somehigh-visibility police leaderspreach the gospel of crimereduction as the “bottom line”when it comes to figuring outwho is doing a good job and whois not. It would be valuable ifthey became equally energetic

about policing for people. Finally,researchers and scholars havedevoted most of their attentionto assessing whether communitypolicing reduces crime, fear ofcrime, and assorted disorders,but, by comparison, researchoutlets display very few piecesabout policing for people.

One might presume that thislack of interest is a reflection ofthe high standards to whichpolice in the United Statesalready perform. Perhaps incomparison to police of manyother nations, American policeperform well. And in recent yearsAmericans express moreconfidence in the police thanmost other social institutions,such as the Supreme Court,public schools, and churches.Nonetheless, they noteconsiderable room forimprovement (Maguire andPastore 1997, 117, 119). A 1997Gallup survey found that 61percent of white Americans had“quite a lot” or “a great deal” ofconfidence in their local police.The remainder had only “some”or “very little” confidence. Only39 percent of African Americanshad “quite a lot” or “a greatdeal” of confidence in the police.So, a substantial portion of thewhite population sees room forimprovement, and an even largerportion of African Americans seeit that way.

Public opinion surveys do nottell us what police are actuallydoing in their daily interactionswith the public. However, datafrom systematic field observations

of police are available thatprovide specifics aboutperformance in policing forpeople. Such studies have beenconducted on American police onan irregular basis in a fewcommunities since the 1960s.They are few in number, so thefindings should be taken assuggestive, not necessarilygeneralizable to all urban police.What follows are some illustrativeexamples from these data.

I have suggested that whenpolice comfort citizens, they arebeing responsive to them.Citizens who have beentraumatized in some way—whoare injured or ill, assaulted,emotionally upset, or mentallyill—may be especially needful ofcomfort and reassurance from thepolice. Data from the PoliceServices Study, conducted in1977 (Caldwell 1978), show that26 percent of citizens who werethus traumatized were comfortedby police. The Project onPolicing Neighborhoods(POPN), conducted twenty yearslater (Mastrofski et al. 1998),shows in a different sample ofurban departments that about31 percent were comforted. Theseverity of traumas in both datasets had a wide range, suggestingthat the intensity of need variedas well. Nonetheless, thereappears to be ample opportunityfor increased responsiveness ofthis sort in urban America.

Levels of police disrespecttoward the public may haveremained fairly stable over recentdecades. Data from Reiss’s 1966

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study for the President’s CrimeCommission produced anestimate identical to that found inPOPN thirty years later. Policeshowed disrespect to nine percentof suspects in both studies,disrespect being defined asmaking belittling remarks,ignoring questions, a loud orinterrupting voice (exceptemergencies), or obscenegestures. By far the mostpowerful predictor of policedisrespect was a citizen beingdisrespectful first. But even takingthat and many other features ofthe participants and the situationinto account, police weresubstantially more likely todisrespect low-income citizensthan higher-income ones. Thedisadvantaged appear to receive adisproportionate share of policedisrespect.

I have argued that police canbe responsive even when theydeny a request: they can explainwhy they declined to fulfill it.POPN data show that citizensinitiated a variety of requests,such as arresting or controllinganother citizen, personalassistance, and the filing of anofficial report. More often thannot, the police fulfilled theserequests (Parks et al. 1997;1998), but what is interesting iswhat happened when the policedenied them. In about one ofevery four denials, the policeignored the request entirely orrefused to explain why theydenied it. This kind ofunresponsiveness undercuts thelegitimacy of the police, making

it all the more difficult toestablish the “partnerships” withthe community that are thehallmark of community policing.

A final example turns toattentiveness. A crude measure ofattentiveness is the amount oftime officers spend with citizens.The more time spent, the moreattentive they can be to thatsituation. In one of thedepartments studied by POPN, Iexamined police contacts withcitizens who were in conflict withanother. The disputants were at astage of at least agitated verbaldisagreement. The amount oftime spent with each of thesecitizens ranged from 2 minutes to3.5 hours. The median was 23minutes.

Consider one of thosesituations that took only ahandful of minutes. Two officerswere dispatched to a domesticconflict. They arrived at thehome and found a man and awoman engaged in a brawl. Theofficers told them to stop, whichthey did temporarily. The officersdid not ask what the fight wasabout; they merely told the man

and woman that they should notfight. Then the two adversariesblamed each other for startingthe fight and recommenced thedonnybrook. The two officerslooked at each other, shrugged,and left the scene while the manand woman were still screamingand hitting each other. By anyreasonable standard, this is anexample of bad police work:police declined to maintain order,protect individuals, and enforcethe law. There were manydisputes that were much lessextreme, where there was onlysome unknown potential forfuture danger and disorder, wherethere was no basis for an arrest.Sometimes police just definedthese situations as unworthy ofany further attention. Moreoften, a cursory warning or casualreferral is all the disputantsreceived. But people summonpolice to these situations preciselybecause they want help with theirproblems. They want to avoidhaving to call the police after thesituation has become bad enoughto warrant an arrest. They wantthe police to do more than ask a

A crude measure ofattentiveness is the amount oftime officers spend withcitizens.

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few questions or give a casualwarning. They want officers tospend time with them. This is not“babysitting”; it is service.

I do not propose establishinga one-size-fits-all standard for theamount of time that officersshould spend with citizens. Butpolice and police researchers needto inquire further into just howmuch time officers spend onvarious problems, what they dowith that time, and what theoutcome is. If nothing else, doingso will help us examine theimplications of our priorities.Does it make sense for officers tospend hours completing trafficaccident reports while spendingonly minutes quelling minordomestic disturbances?

An Agenda for ReformHow might we advance

policing for people? There aremany things that federal agenciesand professional associationscould do at the national level, butI will concentrate on localinitiatives. Unlike the problems ofreducing crime and disorder, thebiggest obstacles to improvingpolicing for people are nottechnical ones. We do not needlots of new research to determinehow to be more attentive,reliable, responsive, competent,well-mannered, and fair. To besure, we could use more inquiryon these topics, but the challengeis less how to do these thingsthan to figure out how to getpolice to do them more often.

The principal challenge facingpolicing for people isorganizational, not technical.

Some of the favorite nostrumsfor improving policing do nothave good prospects forpromoting policing for people.When a police force undergoes acrisis of confidence about abuseof force or unfair treatment, ausual first step is to bring thecommunity into deliberationsabout what to do. Occasionallythis results in someinstitutionalized form ofcommunity involvement, such asadvisory councils or civilianreview boards. These aremeasures that may be essential forrepairing the legitimacy of thepolice. But they have limited orunknown value for changing theirpractices (Walker and Kreisel1996, 68) because the mostdaunting challenges come fromwithin the police departments.

Internal accountability is akey element in promotingpolicing for people, but many ofthe popular measures tostrengthen it are of dubiousvalue. A fashionable response isto create or revamp theorganization’s mission statement.There may be no harm in this,except that it drains energy frommore meaningful reforms.Changing the department’smission statement is like changingthe name of items on a diner’smenu. One can assign Frenchnames to blue-plate specials, butif the same cooks are slinging thesame hash, it is still just a diner.

Another approach is to createnew rules requiring that officersbe kinder, gentler, more attentive,and so on. In some cases, makingor revising rules can be a usefulway to come to grips with thechallenges of defining, measuring,and promoting policing forpeople. Far too often, however,rules are better at minimizingcivil liability than producingbetter policing. Mostdepartments already have plentyof rules on the books. LosAngeles had rules forbiddingverbal abuse of citizens, but theChristopher Commissiondocumented that those rules didnot prevent frequent racial andethnic slurs.

What about training? Thattoo is a popular but overworkedcure for just about anything thatails the police in America.Training can be very useful whentrying to give officers new skills,but it is decidedly ineffective inchanging officers’ attitudes andmotivations. Much of what passesfor training today is really anattempt at imparting a new beliefsystem or a new faith, whatMichael Buerger has recentlytermed a “Pentecost” (1998).Much of the content of trainingon cultural sensitivity, handlingdomestic violence, andcommunity policing fits thisdescription. A few days ofindoctrination in the new valuesespoused in these types of courseswill not alter fundamental beliefsthat have been percolating over alifetime and beliefs annealed in

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the work environment of thepolice.

Training officers to police forpeople is not a waste of time, butwe should be careful about whatkind of training we provide.Officers are far more receptive totraining that tells them what todo than to training that tellsthem what to believe.Departments must still persuadeofficers to use and develop theskills imparted by the training,but that is best done by showingthem how it will accomplishthings they already care about.Trainees are more likely to givenew methods a try if trainers candemonstrate that their job will beeasier—such as less resistance anda lower likelihood of a repeat callto this address. Police officers arerightfully skeptical of newmethods, so it pays to havetechniques that have actuallybeen tested and shown to work.

Training will also be morecredible if highly respectedofficers try the new techniquesand are given an opportunity totestify and show their colleaguesthat they work.

The most promising ways toimprove internal accountabilitythat would promote policing forpeople were proposed by AlbertReiss nearly three decades ago(1971, 201). They have not beenwidely implemented, but theydeserve a try. One system ofaccountability to which Reiss paidattention is the department’srecord-keeping system. He notedthat because most department

records rely upon the officer’saccount of what happened, theofficer’s reports are likely to avoidinformation that discredits him orher. This, of course, is theproblem with any self-reportsystem used to evaluate theperformance of the reporter.

We might push a bit furtherhere and recognize thatself-report records can also serveas guides and reminders thatactually reinforce theorganization’s objectives aboutpolicing for people. In a recentbook, Richard Ericson and KevinHaggerty (1997) show howreport forms “walk” officersthrough such incidents as takinga theft or burglary report. Thesereports structure what officerslook for in these investigations,and they structure what they do.

Unfortunately, Americanpolice organizations remainvirtually blind about what theirpolice do in response to incidentsthat are not classified as a crimeor a traffic accident. At best, thedepartment learns from itscomputer-aided-dispatch recordssomething about the time,location, and nature of thecomplaint or problem. What theofficer did remains a cipher unlessan arrest was made, a citation wasissued, or a crime report wasfiled. An officer who quells anoise disturbance or a domesticdispute without a citation orarrest merely calls in “all-clear” or“warning given.” This is like ahospital that documents onlysurgery and drug prescriptions.

There are many other aspects totreatment that need to berecorded.

Suppose instead that thepolice department had a moreextensive checklist of activitiesrelevant to a given type ofincident. This would not getaround the problem of officerssometimes misrepresenting whathappened, but it would serve as aconstant guide and reminder ofdecision options about policingfor people that the organizationwants the officer to consider.And, whatever the officer reports,it provides a much strongerrecord to hold the officeraccountable for decisions made.Thus the kind of “medical chart”that Lawrence Sherman (1998)proposed for tracking thetreatment of crime victims in his“evidence-based policing” modelcould be extended to the muchbroader array of citizens whocome into contact with thepolice.

This checklist informationcould be incorporated into aform of documentation thatfacilitates both internal andexternal oversight of the police.Reiss (1971, 204) suggested thatpolice routinely provide citizensan official “receipt” to documentvirtually all substantive contactswith the public. Such a receiptcould include key particulars ofthe contact: the citizen’s name,date, location, reason for thecontact, and actions taken by thepolice. The receipt would alsoprovide the citizen with the

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control number the departmentwill use to track this informationand whom to contact withquestions or concerns about it. Inmost departments, citizens areroutinely provided suchinformation only if they areissued a traffic citation or areinvolved in a traffic accident. Thereceipt makes the officer readilyaccountable to the citizen, sincethe citizen may disputeimmediately any information thatseems incorrect. It also providesthe department with a means totrack such contacts, much asdepartments use prenumberedtraffic citations.

Even if police agenciesimprove their own systems ofrecord keeping and datagathering, policing for peoplealso requires meaningful externaloversight. To overcome thelimitations of collecting data ontheir own performance, privatesector corporations are requiredto use external auditors to certifythe accuracy of their performanceclaims. Police agencies should dothe same when it comes topolicing for people. Mostdepartments publish statistics oncomplaints filed against officers.The information on complaintand investigation records hasobvious relevance for manyaspects of policing for people, butinevitably the complaint reviewand processing system is suspectunless there is continuous,unbiased, and independentoversight of this information(Walker 1998). Sherman (1998,

12) recently noted the need forroutine, independent auditing ofpolice departments’ crime data.Many years ago, Reiss (1971,195) suggested that an auditingbureau independent of the policeagency could help both the policeand the community obtain anaccurate, comprehensive pictureof how the police treat thepublic. It would supplement, notsupplant, the police department’sown information-gathering aboutpolicing for people, and it wouldserve as a check on thecomprehensiveness and accuracyof police data.

Extending this idea, anindependent auditor would alsobe a good way to learn moreabout how the public treats thepolice. The most powerfuldeterminant of how the policebehave toward citizens is how thecitizens themselves treat thepolice. Citizens are more inclinedto disrespect the police than vice

versa (Parks et al. 1998, 2–41),so one way to produce a morecivil police is to get citizens notto disrespect them. Police couldcontribute by learning moreabout what makes citizens behavein ways that invite policebehaviors that are ill-mannered,inattentive, and unresponsive.

Auditing agencies should notbe creatures of government.They, like business auditing firms,should be autonomous, staffedwith professionals whose sole taskis to provide information andmake disinterested judgmentsabout the quality of police data,and to provide independent dataon how well departments arepolicing for people. These couldbe both profit and not-for-profitcorporations, staffed with socialscientists expert in the field.Auditing firms should be certifiedby an appropriate nationalprofessional association.

Services that auditing firmscould perform for police agenciesinclude random checks ofdepartment records aboutpolice-citizen contacts to makesure that receipts for citizencontacts were being entered.Auditors could draw a sample ofreceipts from department archivesand also conduct “backwardrecords checks” from a sample ofcitizens who reported havingcontact with the police. Inaddition to checking the accuracyof these records, the auditorscould obtain additionalinformation from the citizensabout their perspective on the

. . . policingfor peoplealso requiresmeaningfulexternaloversight.

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quality of service they received. Itwould also be beneficial todebrief officers about a sample oftheir contacts with the public.Doing so would enable theauditors to provide the policewith valuable information aboutemerging patterns of potentialproblems in and opportunities forpolice-citizen interactions.

Auditors might also targetcertain groups of citizens forspecial attention. One such groupis arrestees, whose legal statusplaces special responsibilities onthe police for the protection oftheir person and rights. Arrestsare, of course, among the mostrisky situations for police injury.Auditors should learn as much aspossible about what happened,even from the citizen’sperspective (Garner et al. 1996).The National Institute of Justice’sADAM system for drug usemonitoring debriefs arrestees atthe booking facility. It is a cleardemonstration of the feasibility ofthis approach to learn about

more than just drug use.Juveniles and “street people” alsoconstitute groups that may insome jurisdictions be specialtargets of police attention. Aswell, auditors may help thecommunity learn a great dealabout the policing of these specialpopulations by sampling them.

The auditing firm shouldguarantee confidentiality to all ofthe people it interviews.Information on individuals shouldnot be available to anyone butthe auditing firm. The firm mustbe able to maintain itsconfidentiality guarantee even inthe face of management’srequests and the courts’ desire forinside information in a given case.There are already formalmechanisms available to obtainthat information for disciplinaryand legal purposes in individualcases. There is no point in theauditor merely replicating thatprocess. The confidentialityguarantee increases the accuracyof the information by reducing

the inherent incentive of policeand citizens to misrepresent theirrecollections. Besides, thepurpose of these audits ought notto be rooting out individualwrongdoing and ineptness, butrather identifying overall patternsin performance (Reiss 1971,195). The goal is to improvepolicy and thereby improveperformance generally.

Auditing agencies shouldperiodically issue reports thatprovide the police and the publicwith a variety of readings on thedepartment’s performance on thevarious dimensions of policing forpeople. The reports should alsoilluminate the challenges andopportunities presented by thepublic to the officers who mustpolice them. Just as when crimestatistics are periodically reportedin the press, the publication ofthe auditor’s report would be theoccasion for public discussion ofhow the police—and the public—are doing in quest of policing forpeople.

Conclusion

I have suggested that we arein a time when aspirations aboutwhat the police might becomeare running high. I have arguedthat we should take advantage ofthese times to promote a style ofpolicing that gives the peoplewhat they want. Adlai Stevensononce noted, “Your public servantsserve you right.” If we want ourpolice to serve us right, then weare obliged to illuminate,

If we want our police to serveus right, then we are obligedto illuminate, articulate, andcontinuously reinforce what itmeans to police for people.

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articulate, and continuouslyreinforce what it means to policefor people. In an earlier era,Jimmy Walker, mayor of NewYork, defined a reformer as “aguy who rides through the sewerin a glass-bottomed boat.”Contemporary skeptics may alsoconstrue policing for people asnaive, far removed from theneeds of crime-plagued Americancommunities. They may arguethat, more than anything, thepublic wants safe streets andhomes, not kinder, gentler, moreservice-oriented officers. “Lawand order” and “crime control”have been at the top of the policereform mandate for the last thirtyyears, but during that time veryfew police chiefs have lost theirjobs because crime rose. Chiefsare far more likely to lose theirjobs, and police agencies morelikely to damage theirreputations, when they fail topolice for people. That is a verypractical reason for topadministrators around the nationto lead the way to improve theiragencies’ capacity to police forpeople.

Bertrand Russell said, “Allmovements go too far.” Thecurrent menu of popular policereforms does not go far enough.The reforms I have supportedhere are not new ideas. Theyhave been around for decadesand have great merit, but theyremain untested by police. Nowis the time to try them.

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www.policefoundation.org

ABOUT THE POLICE FOUNDATION

The Police Foundation is a private, independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to supportinginnovation and improvement in policing through its research, technical assistance, and communi-cations programs. Established in 1970, the foundation has conducted seminal research in policebehavior, policy, and procedure, and works to transfer to local agencies the best new informationabout practices for dealing effectively with a range of important police operational and admin-istrative concerns. Motivating all of the foundation’s efforts is the goal of efficient, humane policingthat operates within the framework of democratic principles and the highest ideals of the nation.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ChairmanWilliam G. Milliken

President

Hubert Williams

Freda Adler

Lee P. Brown

William H. Hudnut III

W. Walter Menninger

Victor H. Palmieri

Henry Ruth

Stanley K. Sheinbaum

Alfred A. Slocum

Sally Suchil

Kathryn J. Whitmire

POLICEFOUNDATION

OFFICE OF RESEARCH

David Weisburd, PhDSenior Research Scientist

Rosann Greenspan, PhDResearch Director

Brooke H. Bedrick, MADeputy Research Director

Patrick R. Gartin, PhDSenior Research Associate

Edwin E. Hamilton, MASenior Research Analyst

Gordon Ainsworth, BSResearch Associate

Michael Clifton, MAResearch Associate

Erin A. Lane, MPMResearch Associate

Ann Marie McNally, MAResearch Associate

Jennifer C. Nickisch, BSResearch Associate

Justin Ready, MAResearch Associate

Louise Warner, MScProgrammer-Analyst

Emily PowellResearch Assistant

Wendolyn A. McKoySenior Administrative Assistant

Heather SparksAdministrative Assistant