This article examines the policing experience in New York City during the 1990s, then shifts to a National Academies of Sciences study of over 1,000 police studies in 2017, and concludes with an updated literature review on proactive policing in 2020.
See Research Will Shape the Future of Proactive Policing from the National Institute of Justice.
Analysis
I’ve written extensively about proactive policing. The question is whether we want to do it. Proactive policing is what the name suggests: initiative-driven traffic and pedestrian stops by police officers instead of just responding to 911 calls or routine patrols.
Every encounter with a member of the public brings a chance for things to go south. Every stop carries considerable risk.
As a new police officer, I was told that sooner or later, proactive stops would have troublesome outcomes. “Whatever you do,” I was told, “have good reasons for the traffic or pedestrian stop. If it blows up, the first question investigators are going to ask is why. If you stop someone for a vehicle tag light out, and he runs and hits someone, investigators are going to respond critically. If you stop a known felon carrying a gun, well, that’s a different story.”
The lesson I took from this encounter was to make good, solid stops. That meant that there were times when I could have stopped someone but didn’t because it didn’t fit a vague definition of a “good stop.”
I learned that policing is filled with judgment calls and quick decisions that have real consequences for your career, and how others view your ability to figure out what’s a good stop, and what will get you on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
Is there any wonder why we lost 25,000 police personnel, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Is there any confusion as to why our city police departments are so understaffed?
Is it because what we ask of police officers and agencies might be absurdly unrealistic?
Report From the National Academies of Sciences- Proactive Policing Works-2017
Extensive literature reviews from impartial, prestigious research organizations on crime and justice operations are rare. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reviewed more than 1,000 published studies on proactive policing and based its conclusions on the strongest available evidence.
It may be one of the most significant studies of law enforcement tactics in America. It was financed by the U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.
The focus is proactive policing versus traditional law enforcement (i.e., responding to calls and routine patrol).
In the 1970s, we were promised a golden age of criminal justice research where we would find the right approach and ingredients to reduce crime. The resulting decades have posed more questions than answers.
The principal finding of the report is that research is not robust enough to draw firm, long-term conclusions for many efforts. The collective data indicate that most proactive police efforts work in the short run, with larger and longer effects in question.
However, there is little research of sufficient quality for the great majority of crime control studies (on a variety of topics). The fact that proactive policing strategies did indicate reductions in crime is a remarkable achievement, especially when readers consider the 1,000 reports used, and researchers only examined the ones with sufficient methodological structure.
As I write this in 2026, I am unaware of a crime control study close in terms of the massive number of studies considered, coupled with the prestige of the National Academy of Sciences.
There is a newer study on problem-oriented policing from 2020.
Problem-oriented policing (POP) was developed to focus police on more proactively addressing chronic problems, rather than using traditional reactive efforts. POP has been utilized to target a wide range of problems and has become commonly used in agencies across the United States and the world, although implementation is often uneven.
The review also examined the impacts of POP on crime displacement, police financial costs, and noncrime outcomes.
Data Collection and Analysis
Researchers identified 39 new (published between 2006 and 2018) studies that met eligibility criteria for an evaluation of POP. Twenty-four of these studies had sufficient data available to calculate an effect size. Along with the 10 studies from the initial systematic review of POP, these 34 studies are included in the meta-analytic review of POP. Nine of these studies were randomized experiments, and 25 were quasi-experiments.
Results
The meta-analyses suggest statistically significant impacts of POP. The relative incident risk ratio analysis of mean effects suggests a 33.8% reduction in crime/disorder in the POP treatment areas/groups relative to the controls.
Researchers found no evidence of significant crime displacement as a result of POP and some evidence for a greater likelihood of a diffusion of crime control benefits. Few studies assessed non-crime outcomes, but the narrative review suggests POP is cost-effective but has limited impacts on fear of crime, legitimacy, and collective efficacy.
Their review provides strong and consistent evidence that POP is an effective strategy for reducing crime and disorder. Thirty-one out of 34 studies (91.2%) have effect sizes in favor of a treatment effect, and the overall mean effect is positive and significant.
Conclusions
What would happen if crime were cut by a third in Memphis, Baltimore, Chicago, or any other large city with crime and fear of crime issues? Would it allow cities to prosper?
Regardless of the positive outcomes, I suggest that most jurisdictions want proactive policing strategies to be used cautiously. Many of the police use-of-force cases that resulted in massive negative publicity were proactive in nature.
This resulted in well-documented and self-imposed restraints on the part of police officers. Their point was that the cases generating negative publicity involved a small number of officers out of well over one million police personnel. To cops, if you are going to judge over a million people based on acts committed by a few, then you are capable of any form of prejudice.
But it’s a well-established criminological finding that crime and fear of crime greatly hamper economies, jobs, and student test scores, and contribute to massive physical and psychological harm, especially to children.
Yet city managers will ask, “Why take the risk?” Some police chiefs will say the same. Individual police officers and agency heads will be at risk for every decision that creates controversy.
The police strategies discussed above meet unusually high scientific standards for social science endeavors. Most crime-control research does not. That does not mean agencies should stop experimenting with new approaches. It means those approaches should be independently evaluated using rigorous methods and replicated in multiple jurisdictions before broad conclusions are drawn.
Yet when high-quality evidence indicates that a policing strategy can substantially reduce crime, many jurisdictions remain reluctant to employ it because of the legal, political, and reputational risks involved. That tension deserves far more discussion than it receives.
I’m unaware of any other aspect of social science where we presume to know that a strategy works and has considerable benefits for society, but we are reluctant to use it.
If police officers are worried about the consequences of their actions with every legal and well-intended stop, then cities suffer.
There is no excuse for cops who do not follow the rules and make stops based on anything other than impartial, objective evidence. No one condones police misuse of power.
But if I were currently in policing, I would be cautious of anything beyond very obvious probable cause involving a serious misdemeanor or felony. Without clear directions from city and police management, many choose to limit their proactive policing.
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