Policing within the United States has to date been viewed
widely as having evolved through three eras: political, reform,
and community. The Political Era, so named because
of the close ties of the police with politics, dated from the
introduction of policing in large municipalities during the
1840s through the early 1900s. The Reform Era, developed
in reaction to the shortcomings of the Political Era, took hold
during the 1930s and began to erode during the late 1970s.
The Reform Era gave way to the Community Era, so named
because of its emphasis on a police-community partnership
in solving crime problems . By the end of the 20th Century,
the hallmark of the Community Era, i.e., "community policing,"
had become an ingrained policing strategy (or, more
correctly, a policing philosophy) across the nation, and its
namesake ("Community Era") continues to be the umbrella
descriptor in the literature, even for the array of information-
based practices characteristic of evolved contemporary strategies. What has been paid scant attention in the literature
is formalization of a fourth era of policing. Formation
of a fourth era, which could be named the Information Era,
has occurred through the confluence of phenomena occurring
during the late 20th Century and early 21st Century.
These phenomena are (1) increased accountability (both
within agencies and by governmental oversight authorities),
(2) "informatization" (extent to which society has become
information-based), (3) and the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001. Predominant law enforcement strategies
that have arisen in the era include evidence-based policing,
intelligence-led policing, and predictive policing. Moreover,
advances in forensic science and a proactive orientation have
enabled solving crimes heretofore classified as "cold cases."
Creation of a single organizing framework, i.e., a fourth era,
for the strategies that have ensued beyond community policing
provides for a macro perspective and common categorization
for discussion and analysis of operative strategies. In
turn, it is anticipated this will help the policing profession
examine what the past and present portend for the future.
During the Political Era, police departments were integrally connected to the social and political milieu of the
local "ward," the smallest subdivision of a municipality.
The political nature of appointments to police positions resulted
in inefficiencies and disorganization as well as corruption
in the form of supporting the political interests of
elected officials. Control over police by local politicians, conflict
between urban reformers and local ward leaders over the
enforcement of laws regulating the morality of urban immigrants
without regard to ethnic values, and corruption produced
an ongoing struggle for controlling the police. While
many states in the wake of the passage of the Pendleton Act
of 1883 enacted legislation to protect government employees
from political interference, at the same time satisfaction
of the requirements of civil service law made dismissing
incompetent employees a formidable undertaking .
Chief August Vollmer of the Berkeley, California, Police
Department was the visionary who first rallied police
executives around the idea of reform during the 1920s. Reformers
such as Vollmer rejected politics as the basis of police
legitimacy. Police reformers therefore allied themselves with
Progressives. Law and professionalism were established as the
bases of police legitimacy . The 1930s became a pivotal period
as the American police gained increasing legitimacy in
society. The 1931 National Commission on Law Observance
and Law Enforcement presented a number of reforms for the
police. Central to the Commission's recommendations were
provisions for civil service classification for police throughout
the country and enhanced support for education and training
. The 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets
Act included extensive funding for law enforcement research
and education to improve and strengthen law enforcement
. Using the focus on criminal law as the source of legitimacy,
police in the Reform Era became agencies of "law enforcement."
The goal was to control crime, and officers were to
be impartial law enforcers, with limited discretion, who were
impersonal and oriented toward crime solving. The role of
citizens in the context of the Reform Era was to be relatively
passive recipients of professional crime control services. Thus,
20th Century reform measures, originating from both internal
and external forces, shaped policing well into the 1970s .
Numerous societal events occurring during the 1960s
and 1970s stymied policing effectiveness. Some of the more
significant changes included the civil rights movement, the Vietnam
War, episodes of civil unrest within major urban areas,
the changing age of the population (more youths and teenagers),
and increased oversight of police actions by the courts.
The police found themselves distanced from the community
and ill-equipped to handle the bombardment of challenges.
Fortunately, the funding that had been channeled into policing
research had begun to yield dividends at just the time when
needed the most. The findings of research revealed that if information
about crimes and criminals could be obtained from citizens
by police, investigative and other units could significantly
increase their effect on crime. Too, research into foot patrol
suggested that it contributed to quality of life in cities, reduced
fear of crime, increased citizen satisfaction with police, and increased
the morale and job satisfaction of police . Thus, the
tenets that dominated police thinking for a generation were nolonger applicable, and the stage was set for the introduction
of community policing and the shift to the Community Era.
Although it is not clear when the community policing
movement began, the roots of community policing date back to
the work of scholars such as Professor Herman Goldstein who
in the late 1970s advocated that police needed to address the
underlying dynamics contributing to crime . Soon thereafter
Professor Robert Trojanowicz added to Goldstein's problem-
oriented policing a framework, termed "community policing,"
featuring a pronounced police-citizen partnership toward
problem identification, prioritization, and resolution. Both
problem-oriented policing and community policing employ
the SARA methodology: "Scanning" for patterns of crime, performing
an "Analysis" of the factors contributing to the crime
problem, crafting a "Response" to the situation, and "Assessing"
the effectiveness of the response over time . In addition
to incorporation of the SARA technique, community policing
embraces the "broken windows" concept, which stresses maintenance
of the outward appearance of a community as vital
for sending a message to potential perpetrators of crimes that
community members do care about the quality of life within
their neighborhood and are vigilant to that end. Conversely,
the concept holds that conditions of disrepair, e.g., broken windows,
accumulations of trash, and abandoned cars, signal to
criminals that no one cares about their neighborhood, and the
lack of guardianship effectively invites crime commission .
This essay presents an interpretation of police history that
may assist police executives in understanding how past policing
strategies were affected by dominant political, social,
and economic factors. Additionally, through identifying the
complexion of the core attribute in common, i.e., information,
among the collective of prevailing and emergent strategies,
we may evaluate the current direction policing is taking and
effect any necessary course corrections in a timely manner.
An initial action has been to affirm that in fact there
has been a failure (or a reluctance) to formally recognize that
policing has entered a fourth era. Content analysis of the principal
policing textbooks readily confirms that the history of
American policing continues to be documented as comprised
of three eras, with the Community Era commencing in 1970
and continuing through the present time. Moreover, an authoritative
synopsis of policing's eras and related policing styles
recently compiled by Grossmont College further confirms acknowledgement
of only the traditional three policing eras .
Through examination of the core elements of the
prevailing and emergent policing strategies comprising the
fourth era, there may be able to be discerned aspects that if
unchecked can be detrimental to the spirit of public policing
within a democratic society. Such was the case when in 1988
the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
convened a blue ribbon committee of practitioners and scholars
to study what the evolving face of policing meant for the
welfare of citizens and the fulfillment of the police mission.
In fact, the committee found that there was a pronounced need to refocus police partnerships with the community .
Results and Discussion
Comparison of the predominant three contemporary policing
strategies reveals the three have in common the fact they are
decidedly data-intensive. This is not to say that problem-oriented
policing and community policing, the face of the Community
Era, are not dependent on the collection of information
related to a criminal event. The difference is the point at which
data is routinely introduced and the degree to which data influences
a course of action. This significant reliance on data
may be readily observed through review of the salient aspects
of the three prominent emergent strategies. (evidence-based
policing, intelligence-led policing, and predictive policing).
The concept of evidence-based policing gained prominence
upon the Police Foundation's publication of Professor
Lawrence Sherman's paper on the subject in 1998. Professor
Sherman, referring to the medical model as a prime example,
suggested that doing research is not enough and that proactive
efforts were required to push accumulated research evidence
into practice. Professor Sherman postulated that evidencebased
policing entailed two very different kinds of research:
(1) basic research on what works best when implemented under
controlled conditions and (2) ongoing outcomes research
about the results each unit is actually achieving through applying
basic research premises. Furthermore, he asserted that
community policing is not clearly linked to evidence about
effectiveness in preventing crime; it is much more about how
to do police work than it is about desired outcomes .
Skeptics may assert that there is nothing new about
evidence-based policing, and that other strategies are inclusive
of its principles. However, evidence-based policing "is
a systematic effort to parse out and codify unsystematic 'experience'
as the basis for police work, refining it by ongoing
systematic testing of hypotheses. The policing of domestic
violence offers a clear illustration of what is new about the
evidence-based paradigm. The National Institute of Justice
and the Police Foundation have provided law enforcement
agencies with extensive information on what works
to prevent repeated domestic violence ." Agencies opting
to follow the practices benefit not only by not having to
respond to repeat calls, but also benefit from the goodwill
engendered by a far more often satisfied, than not, victim.
Intelligence-led policing has become a significant
movement in policing in the 21st Century. It began in the
United Kingdom in the 1990s as an operational tactic to reduce
crime through proactive policing targeted by criminal
intelligence and focused on active, prolific offenders. Intelligence-
led policing may be viewed as a managerial model
in which criminal intelligence and data analysis are pivotal
to an objective, decision making framework that enables
crime reduction. In essence, objective analysis of crime data
is the central component of this top-down policing strategy
. The terrorist attack of 2001 added impetus to reliance
on intelligence and its analysis. In the wake of the terrorist
attack, authorities formed regional intelligence hubs known as fusion centers to facilitate collection of disparate
pieces of information that when connected could provide
key intelligence for thwarting future terrorist incidents .
Predictive policing builds on intelligence-led policing
through exploiting technologies that allow the police to
ostensibly forecast where crime may be most likely to occur
. It employs algorithms that are considerate of a
widened body of potential crime correlates. For example, a
data base of dog licenses might be queried to ascertain locations
where dogs may be located, and these locations may
be determined to be less likely to become targets of burglaries.
Similarly, additional inquiry could reveal the number
and ages of the occupants of households where dogs were
not shown to be present, which could reveal a potential for
a lack of guardianship on premises during peak hours of
burglaries. Thus, predictive policing may be defined as a
strategy that develops and uses information and advanced
analysis to inform forward-thinking crime prevention .
Formal, widespread recognition of a fourth era of policing,
termed the Information Era, can encapsulate the array of information-
based policing strategies prevalent at the beginning
of the 21st Century: evidence-based, intelligence, and predictive.
This era designation is wholly in line with the distinctive
character and events shared by the three strategies. Beyond the
specific strategies, tools that have attained prominence during
the era are crime analysis and CompStat; both are markedly
data-driven. Indeed, crime analysis has evolved to be both a
profession as well a set of techniques. The professionals who
perform crime analysis, and the techniques used, are dedicated
to helping a police department become more effective through
better information . CompStat, introduced in New York
City in 1994 as a data-driven management model, has been
credited with effecting pronounced decreases in crime as well
as increasing quality of life. Accurate and timely intelligence
has been, and continues to be, the lifeblood of CompStat .
Acknowledgement in the literature of a fourth era of policing,
which incorporates the strategies of evidence-based, intelligence-
led, and predictive policing strategies, as well as the predominant
analytic tools, provides for a macro perspective. In
turn, this categorization enables ongoing analysis and refinement,
as well as insight into the complexion of future iterations.