PROBLEM-ORIENTED POLICING AND CRIME PREVENTION by

Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book maybe reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Justice. His research focuses on developing problem-oriented policing strategies to control violent crime hot spots, disrupt drug markets, and reduce firearms violence. He has served as a consultant on these issues New York City Police Department, and other state and local criminal justice agencies. He was a core member of the Boston Gun Pro-ject/Operation Ceasefire working group that was responsible for designing and implementing a problem-oriented policing strategy that reduced youth homicide in Boston by two-thirds during the mid-to late 1990s. Operation Ceasefire has received many prestigious national awards, including the Webber-Seavey Award of the International Association of Chiefs of Police for quality programs in law enforcement, the Herman Goldstein Award of the Police Executive Research Forum for excellence in problem-oriented policing, and the Innovations in Ameri-can Government Award from the Ford Foundation. He received the M.P.A. degree from Harvard University and the Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University. FOREWORD From among the many developments in the past two decades relating to the improvement of policing and, more broadly, the prevention of crime and disorder, two clusters of activity hold special promise. One is the movement within policing to analyze the specific behavioral problems that the police are called on to handle in the community, and to use the results of these analyses as a basis for developing more effective responses to those problems. The other is the progress made by researchers , almost all of whom are located outside police agencies, in gaining new insights into the nature of crime and disorder and in producing findings about the effectiveness of different preventive strategies. The two developments are obviously interrelated. They are, in many respects, interdependent. But in practice, they are not sufficiently connected. The major contribution of this book is in the effort the author makes to strengthen that connection; to build bridges between the initiatives of the police and the work of the researchers. Much of the effort within policing has been accomplished under the umbrella of problem-oriented policing. That concept calls for the police to examine, anew and in-depth, groups of similar incidents to which they most likely have responded in a generic, routine manner in the past; to explore alternatives for responding to these …