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Community policing and problem-oriented policing have a prominent place in the community problem-solving era of policing. Community policing represents many different things to many different people, but the core idea is that the police institute policies and practices that involve citizens in policing. The intent of community policing is to foster coproduction. With coproduction, the idea is that police and the community coproduce crime prevention. As such, community policing is about creating cooperative relationships with citizens; having officers be in direct, day-to-day contact with citizens as much as possible; and having officers be in a position to listen to citizens and address their concerns. In areas where community policing is practiced, community meetings, community surveys, neighborhood watches, and means of patrol other than automobile (e.g., foot, horse, bicycle, and in some places even rollerblades and skateboards) have become popular.

coproduction: A concept in which the police and the community work together to prevent crime.

Photo 2.6 The community problem-solving style of policing focuses on building relationships with citizens and citizens and police working together to prevent crime.

@Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images

Photo 2.7 Police work today requires officers to use many different technologies and tools.

@AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

Closely related to community policing is problem-oriented policing. With problem-oriented policing, the police become more concerned with identifying and addressing community crime problems and do so with the input and assistance of citizens. Herman Goldstein introduced the concept of problem-oriented policing when he argued that the police had succumbed to the means over ends syndrome, meaning that the police were more concerned with how things were done than with the goals they were supposed to achieve. He argued that the police should become more problem oriented and less incident driven.⁴⁵

means over ends syndrome: When police are more concerned with how things are done than with the goals they are supposed to achieve.

The community problem-solving era has been a time in which an extraordinary amount of research on police, crime, and criminal justice issues has been conducted. Prior to the 1970s, the number of major studies on the police could be counted on one hand. With funding from the federal government in the early 1970s to provide scholarships to individuals interested in studying police science and criminal justice, such programs began to appear in colleges, universities, and technical schools across the country. Scholars also began to receive federal funding to study police issues. Knowledge of policing has increased dramatically as a result, although gaps in knowledge still remain.