Policing Communities: What Works?

Communities vary widely in the ways in which police exercise discretion; in their resources; in their mixtures of public police, private police, and voluntary citizen policing; in the nature and severity of problems requiring policing; and in the physical geography that shapes options for policing. Yet communities vary relatively little in basic police strategy. Residential neighborhoods in American metropolitan areas are policed primarily by officers driving around in unfocused patrol, largely waiting for calls for service. Public police should probably supplement the single-complaint strategy in most communities with a variety of mixed-strategy models. The specific strategies employed in any particular community should be based on the community's unique characteristics. Recent research suggests some conclusions about the relative effectiveness of various policing strategies in general, but it says little about interaction effects between strategies and neighborhoods. Informal experimentation may provide guidance for fitting strategies to the characteristics and problems of specific communities.