New Perspectives in Policing 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

m a r c h 2 0 1 1 

National Institute of Justice 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing 


Christopher Stone and Jeremy Travis 

Executive Session on Policing and 


Public Safety
 

This is one in a series of papers that will be published as a result of the Executive Session on 

Policing and Public Safety. 

Harvard’s Executive Sessions are a convening 

of individuals of independent standing who take 

joint responsibility for rethinking and improving 

society’s responses to an issue. Members are 

selected based on their experiences, their reputation for thoughtfulness and their potential for 

helping to disseminate the work of the Session. 

In the early 1980s, an Executive Session on Policing 

helped resolve many law enforcement issues of 

the day. It produced a number of papers and 

concepts that revolutionized policing. Thirty years 

later, law enforcement has changed and NIJ and 

Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government are 

again collaborating to help resolve law enforcement issues of the day. 

Learn more about the Executive Session on 

Policing and Public Safety at: 

NIJ’s website: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/ 

law-enforcement/executive-sessions/welcome.htm 

Harvard’s website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/ 

criminaljustice/executive_sessions/policing.htm 

Introduction 

Across the United States, police organizations 

are striving for a new professionalism. Their 

leaders are committing themselves to stricter 

accountability for both their effectiveness and 

their conduct while they seek to increase their 

legitimacy in the eyes of those they police and 

to encourage continuous innovation in police 

practices. The traffic in these ideas, policies and 

practices is now so vigorous across the nation 

that it suggests a fourth element of this new professionalism: its national coherence. These four 

principles — accountability, legitimacy, innovation and coherence — are not new in themselves, 

but together they provide an account of developments in policing during the last 20 years that 

distinguishes the policing of the present era from 

that of 30, 50 or 100 years ago. 

Many U.S. police organizations have realized 

important aspects of the new professionalism 

and many more have adopted its underlying 

values. The ambitions for accountability, legitimacy and innovation unite police organizations 

in disparate contexts: urban, suburban and 

rural, municipal, county, state and federal. With 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 | New Perspectives in Policing 

approximately 20,000 public police organizations in 

the United States, national coherence in American 

policing would be a signal achievement.1 We do 

not see this new professionalism fully realized in 

any single department. We know how difficult it 

can be to narrow the gap between these ambitions 

and many deeply ingrained routines and practices. Much policing in the United States remains, 

in these terms, unprofessional, but professional 

ambition is itself a powerful force and it is at work 

almost everywhere. 

We hear similar ambitions for accountability, legitimacy, innovation and coherence in other countries, 

from the state police organizations in Brazil and 

India to the South African Police Service, the 

French Gendarmerie and the Chilean Carabineros. 

A global police culture with these same four elements increasingly defines the ambitions of police 

leaders in most countries. In this paper, however, 

we focus on the trend in the United States. 

To describe and illustrate the elements of this new 

professionalism, we draw on our own experiences 

working in and studying police organizations and 

on the deliberations of two Executive Sessions on 

Policing, both convened by the National Institute 

of Justice and Harvard University’s Kennedy School 

of Government: the first from 1985 to 1992 and the 

second commencing in 2008 and continuing today. 

Why a New Professionalism? 

We offer the “New Professionalism” as a conceptual framework that can help chiefs, frontline police 

officers and members of the public alike understand and shape the work of police departments 

today and in the years ahead. Even as it remains a 

work in progress, the New Professionalism can help 

police chiefs and commissioners keep their organizations focused on why they are doing what they 

do, what doing it better might look like, and how 

they can prioritize the many competing demands 

for their time and resources. On the front lines, the 

New Professionalism can help police officers work 

together effectively, connect their daily work to the 

larger project of building a better society, and share 

their successes and frustrations with the communities they serve. In communities everywhere, the 

New Professionalism can help citizens understand 

individual police actions as part of larger strategies, 

and assess the demands and requests that police 

make for more public money, more legal authority 

and more public engagement in keeping communities safe. From all of these vantage points, the New 

Professionalism helps all of us see what is happening in policing, how we got here and where we 

are going. 

Each of the four elements of the New Professionalism 

—	 accountability, legitimacy, innovation and 

national coherence — has something to offer police 

and the communities in which they work. 

By a commitment to accountability we mean an 

acceptance of an obligation to account for police 

actions not only up the chain of command within 

police departments but also to civilian review 

boards, city councils and county commissioners, 

state legislatures, inspectors general, government 

auditors and courts. The obligation extends beyond 

these government entities to citizens directly: to 

journalists and editorial boards, resident associations, chambers of commerce — the whole range of 

community-based organizations. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 3 

By a commitment to legitimacy we mean a determination to police with the consent, cooperation 

and support of the people and communities being 

policed. Police receive their authority from the 

state and the law, but they also earn it from the 

public in each and every interaction. Although it is 

important to derive legitimacy from every part of 

the public, those citizens and groups most disaffected by past harms or present conditions have the 

greatest claims to attention on this score because 

their trust and confidence in the police is often 

weakest. Fortunately, research we discuss later in 

this paper suggests that police departments can 

strengthen their legitimacy among people of color 

in the United States and among young people of all 

races and ethnicities without compromising their 

effectiveness.2 Indeed, effectiveness and legitimacy 

can be advanced together. 

By a commitment to innovation we mean active 

investment of personnel and resources both in 

adapting policies and practices proven effective 

in other departments and in experimenting with 

new ideas in cooperation with a department’s local 

partners. Empirical evidence is important here. 

Departments with a commitment to innovation 

look for evidence showing that practices developed 

elsewhere work, just as they embrace evaluation of 

the yet unproven practices they are testing. 

By national coherence we mean that the departments exemplifying the New Professionalism are 

participating in national conversations about professional policing. They are training their officers, 

supervisors and leaders in practices and theories 

applicable in jurisdictions across the country. Not 

long ago, it was common to hear police officers 

insist that they could police effectively in their city, 

county or state only if they had come up through the 

ranks there: good policing was inherently parochial. 

Such a belief belies a true professionalism. Inherent 

in the idea of the New Professionalism in policing 

is that police officers, supervisors and executives 

share a set of skills and follow a common set of protocols that have been accepted by the profession 

because they have been proven to be effective or 

legally required. That is not to say that local knowledge and understanding are unimportant — they 

are vital. But they are not everything. There is vital 

knowledge, understanding and practice common 

to good policing everywhere, and this common skill 

set defines police professionalism. 

There are many definitions of professionalism and 

some debate about what it means for policing to 

be a profession. We take these up at the end of this 

paper, after putting the New Professionalism in historical context. For now, suffice it to say that for any 

profession to be worthy of that name, its members 

must not only develop transportable skills but also 

commit themselves both to a set of ethical precepts 

and to a discipline of continuous learning. A look 

back in history reveals how this meaning of “professional” contrasts with another use of the word 

employed in the early debates over community 

policing. The New Professionalism embraces and 

extends the best of community policing, whereas 

the “old professionalism” said to characterize policing in the 1960s and 1970s was seen as antithetical 

to community policing. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 | New Perspectives in Policing 

Community Policing and the New 

Professionalism 

Twenty-five years ago, when the elements of the 

New Professionalism began to emerge in urban 

American police departments, “community policing” was the organizing framework advanced to 

describe the new approach and new priorities. To 

most Americans who heard of the idea, community 

policing summoned up images of police walking 

the beat, riding on bicycles, or talking to groups of 

senior citizens and to young children in classrooms. 

These images adorn countless posters and brochures produced by individual police departments 

to explain community policing to local residents. 

They picture community policing as a specialized 

program: a few carefully selected officers taking 

pains to interact with “good” citizens while the rest 

of the police department does something else. 

Inside police departments, however, and at the first 

Executive Session on Policing, community policing was being described as far more than the next 

new program. It was promoted as the organizing 

framework around which police departments were 

going to change everything they did. Community 

policing might look like a specialized program 

when a police department first adopts it, but that is 

“Phase One,” as Lee Brown, who led police departments in Atlanta, Houston and New York City before 

becoming mayor of Houston, wrote in a 1989 paper 

for the first Executive Session. Brown explained that 

“Phase Two”: 

... involves more sweeping and more 

comprehensive changes ... . It is the 

department’s style that is being revamped 

... . Although it is an operating style, community policing also is a philosophy of 

policing ... (emphasis in original).3 

Brown went on to explain how, in Phase Two, community policing requires changes to every part 

of policing, including its supervision and management, training, investigations, performance 

evaluation, accountability and even its values. 

True community policing, Brown wrote, requires 

a focus on results rather than process; it forces 

decentralization, power sharing with community 

residents, the redesign of police beats, and giving a lower priority to calls for service. Malcolm 

Sparrow, a former Detective Chief Inspector in the 

English police service on the faculty of the Harvard 

Kennedy School, made the same point in even more 

dramatic language: 

Implementing community policing is not a 

simple policy change that can be effected 

by issuing a directive through the normal 

channels. It is not a mere restructuring of 

the force to provide the same service more 

efficiently. Nor is it a cosmetic decoration 

designed to impress the public and promote greater cooperation. 

For the police it is an entirely different way 

of life. It is a new way for police officers to 

see themselves and to understand their 

role in society. The task facing the police 

chief is nothing less than to change the 

fundamental culture of the organization.4 

In this grand vision, the advent of community policing marked an epochal shift, replacing an earlier 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 5 

organizing framework: professional crime-fighting. 

And this, finally, is why the field today needs a 

“new” professionalism, for the original professionalism was — as an organizing framework at 

least — discarded in favor of community policing. 

In their promotion of community policing and 

a focus on problem solving, the proponents of 

reform roundly criticized what they saw as the 

professional crime-fighting model, or simply the 

“professional model” of policing.5 They saw the 

professional model as hidebound: too hierarchical in its management, too narrow in its response 

to crime and too much at odds with what police 

did. Led during the first Executive Session 

on Policing by the scholarship of three academics 

— Professors Mark Moore of the Harvard Kennedy 

School, George Kelling of Northeastern University 

and Robert Trojanowicz of Michigan State 

University — the champions of community policing contrasted their principles and methods to 

this “traditional,” “classical,” “reform” or, most 

commonly, “professional” style of policing.6 

The criticisms made by Moore, Kelling and 

Trojanowicz of the then-dominant form of policing in U.S. cities were right on the mark, but 

by labeling this dominant form “professional” 

crime-fighting, they needlessly tarnished the 

concept of professionalism itself.7 Looking back 

on these debates, it is easy to see that this socalled professional model of policing was at best 

a quasi-professionalism and at worst an entirely 

false professionalism. At the time, however, the 

critique from Moore, Kelling, Trojanowicz and 

others succeeded in giving professional policing a 

bad name, so much so that reformers in countries 

where policing was still entirely a matter of political patronage and a blunt instrument of political 

power began to ask if they could skip the professional stage of police evolution and proceed 

directly to community policing.8 

Community policing was an important improvement on the style of policing it challenged in 

American cities, but it is time to correct two distortions inherited from that earlier debate. First, 

what community policing challenged in the 1980s 

was not a truly professional model of policing, but 

rather a technocratic, rigid, often cynical model 

of policing. Moreover, it reinforced pernicious 

biases deeply entrenched in the wider society. 

Both good and bad police work was performed 

in that mode, but it was hardly professional. 

Second, community policing was only part of 

the new model of policing emerging in the 1980s, 

with contemporaneous innovations occurring 

in technology, investigation and the disruption 

of organized crime. By reinterpreting the rise of 

community policing as part of a larger shift to a 

New Professionalism, we hope simultaneously to 

rescue the idea of professional policing from its 

frequently distorted form in the mid-20th century and to show how the elements of this New 

Professionalism might anchor a safer and more 

just society in the decades ahead. 

The So-Called Professionalism of 

Mid-20th-Century Policing 

Proponents of community policing in the 1980s 

labeled its mid-century predecessor as “professional crime-fighting,” but what sort of 

policing were they describing? What were the 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6 | New Perspectives in Policing 

characteristics of the mid-century policing they 

hoped to replace? 

First, in its relationship to citizens, the previous 

mode of policing was deliberately removed from 

communities, insisting that police understood 

better than local residents how their communities 

should be policed. As George Kelling described it in 

the first paper in the Perspectives on Policing series, 

the police had long been seen as “a community’s 

professional defense against crime and disorder: 

Citizens should leave control of crime and maintenance of order to police (emphasis added).”9 Or, 

as a separate paper explained, “The proper role of 

citizens in crime control was to be relatively passive 

recipients of professional crime control services.”10 

In contrast, explained Kelling, under community 

policing, “the police are to stimulate and buttress 

a community’s ability to produce attractive neighborhoods and protect them against predators.”11 

Second, in terms of tactics, the previous mode of 

policing relied on a limited set of routine activities. As another 1988 paper in the series explained, 

“Professional crime-fighting now relies predominantly on three tactics: (1) motorized patrol; 

(2) rapid response to calls for service; and (3) retrospective investigation of crimes.”12 

Third, the management structure of professional 

crime-fighting was centralized and top-down. Its 

management technique was command and control, 

aiming principally to keep police officers in line 

and out of trouble. As one paper described it, “the 

more traditional perspective of professional crimefighting policing ... emphasizes the maintenance of 

internal organizational controls.”13 And as another 

paper explained in more detail: 

In many respects, police organizations 

have typified the classical command-andcontrol organization that emphasized 

top-level decisionmaking: flow of orders 

from top-level executives down to line 

personnel, flow of information up from line 

personnel to executives, layers of dense 

supervision, unity of command, elaborate 

rules and regulations, elimination of discretion, and simplification of work tasks.14 

This mid-century model of policing can be criticized as technocratic and rigid, but it was not all 

bad. The elevation of technical policing skills, the 

introduction of hiring standards, and the stricter 

supervision and discipline of police officers 

improved some police services and helped some 

police chiefs put distance between themselves and 

political ward bosses, corrupt mayors and local 

elites demanding special attention. Prioritizing 

911 calls at least allocated police services to anyone 

with access to a telephone rather than only to those 

with political connections or in favor with the local 

police. But these were incremental gains, and policing remained (and remains) closely tied to politics.15 

Moreover, each of the three elements of so-called 

professional policing described here — its claim to 

technical expertise, its tactics and its management 

strategy — failed to produce adequate public safety. 

Rising crime and disorder in the 1960s and 1970s 

belied the technical expertise of the police, as did 

the repressive response to the civil rights and peace 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 7 

movements and the persistence of brutality on 

the street and during interrogations. A growing 

body of research evidence demonstrated the ineffectiveness of random patrol, the irrelevance of 

shortened response times to the vast majority of 

calls for service, and the inability of retrospective investigation to solve most crimes. As for 

command-and-control management, the work 

of frontline police officers, operating outside of 

line-of-sight supervision, proved ill-suited to this 

form of supervision. 

Ironically, the command-and-control management techniques identified with “professional 

crime-fighting” were the antithesis of the practices generally used to manage professionals. 

Instead of depending on continuous training, 

ethical standards and professional pride to 

guide behavior, command-and-control structures treated frontline police officers like soldiers 

or factory workers, yet most of the time the job 

of policing looked nothing like soldiering or 

assembly-line production. 

Even then, the advocates for community policing 

recognized that mid-century policing was hardly 

professional in its treatment of the officers on the 

street. They minced no words here, explaining 

that by the 1960s and 1970s, line officers were still 

managed in ways that were antithetical 

to professionalization ... patrol officers 

continued to have low status; their work 

was treated as if it were routinized and 

standardized; and petty rules governed 

issues such as hair length and off-duty 

behavior. 

... the classical theory [of command-andcontrol management] ... denies too much 

of the real nature of police work, promulgates unsustainable myths about the 

nature and quality of police supervision, 

and creates too much cynicism in officers 

attempting to do creative problem solving. Its assumptions about workers are 

simply wrong.16 

Of all the problems created by terming midcentury policing “professional,” none was more 

glaring than its dissonance with the experience 

of African-Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities. Former New York City Police 

Commissioner Patrick Murphy and former 

Newark (NJ) Police Director Hubert Williams 

coauthored a 1990 essay in which they argued 

that for black Americans, the so-called professional model was infused with the racism that 

had biased policing since the organization of the 

police during slavery: 

The fact that the legal order not only 

countenanced but sustained slavery, segregation, and discrimination for most of 

our Nation’s history — and the fact that 

the police were bound to uphold that 

order — set a pattern for police behavior 

and attitudes toward minority communities that has persisted until the present 

day. That pattern includes the idea that 

minorities have fewer civil rights, that 

the task of the police is to keep them 

under control, and that the police have 

little responsibility for protecting them 

from crime within their communities.17 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8 | New Perspectives in Policing 

Indeed, as Williams and Murphy pointed out, 

blacks were largely excluded from urban police 

departments in the same years that “professional” 

policing was taking hold, and those AfricanAmericans who were hired as police officers were 

often given lesser powers than white officers. In 

New Orleans, the police department included 177 

black officers in 1870, but this number fell to 27 by 

1880, further fell to five by 1900, and to zero by 1910. 

New Orleans did not hire another black officer until 

1950. Even by 1961, a third of U.S. police departments surveyed still limited the authority of black 

police officers to make felony arrests. By the end 

of that decade, anger at racial injustice had fueled 

riots in more than a dozen cities, and a Presidential 

commission had concluded that many of these riots, 

as Williams and Murphy underscored, “had been 

precipitated by police actions, often cases of insensitivity, sometimes incidents of outright brutality.”18 

Today it is clear that the rise of community policing did not mark the end of professional policing, 

but rather its beginning. Little about policing in the 

mid-20th century was “professional.” Its expertise 

was flawed, its techniques crude, its management 

techniques more military than professional, and 

it reinforced rather than challenged the racism of 

the wider society. Community policing, with its 

emphases on quality of service, decentralization 

of authority and community partnership, was more 

professional than the style of policing it attempted 

to displace. 

The phrase “community policing” does not, however, 

adequately describe what replaced mid-century law 

enforcement and what continues to propel the most 

promising developments in policing today. What 

began to emerge in the 1980s was a new, truer, 

more robust professionalism of which community 

policing was and remains a part. The proponents of 

the term “community policing” were, in the 1980s, 

already aware of this problem with their language. 

They knew their “community policing” framework 

was merely a partial replacement for mid-century 

policing. Yet they resisted the broader labels suggested by their colleagues, clinging to their banner 

of community policing. Why? 

The Attorney General and the Professors 

Among the participants in the first Executive 

Session on Policing was Edwin Meese, thenAttorney General of the United States. Two years 

into the session, during the discussion of a paper 

by Professors Moore and Kelling tracing the evolution of policing strategies over the previous 100 

years, an exchange between the Attorney General 

and Professor Moore captured not only the state of 

the debate in the policing field, but the reason that 

Moore and his academic colleagues adopted the 

phrase “community policing” to describe the broad 

changes they were both charting and championing. 

Emphasizing the historical significance of these 

changes, Kelling and Moore had argued in their 

paper that American policing since the 1840s had 

begun in a “political” era in which policing and 

local politics had been intimately connected and 

in which police carried out a wide range of social 

and political functions, only some of which related 

to law enforcement. Policing had then passed 

through a “reform” era, reaching its zenith in the 

1950s, in which professional crime-fighting became 

the dominant organizational strategy. Then, just as 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 9 

the many failures of professional crime-fighting 

became apparent in the 1960s and 1970s, police 

departments, according to Kelling and Moore, 

were achieving new successes with the reintroduction of foot patrol and with experiments 

in “problem solving.” Foot patrol proved both 

effective at reducing fear of crime and politically popular with residents, merchants and 

politicians, so much so that voters were willing to increase taxes to pay for it. At the same 

time, problem solving appeared to capture the 

imagination and enthusiasm of patrol officers, 

who liked working more holistically in partnership with residents to resolve neighborhood 

concerns. This led Kelling and Moore to the principal claim in their historical account: foot patrol, 

fear reduction, problem solving and partnerships with local residents were “not merely new 

police tactics.” Instead, they constituted “a new 

organizational approach, properly called a community strategy.”19 Although some departments 

were introducing foot patrol or problem solving 

as mere add-ons to professional crime-fighting, 

their implications were far broader: 

We are arguing that policing is in a period 

of transition from a reform strategy to 

what we call a community strategy. The 

change involves more than making tactical or organizational adjustments and 

accommodations. Just as policing went 

through a basic change when it moved 

from the political to the reform strategy, it 

is going through a similar change now.20 

Attorney General Meese was sympathetic but 

skeptical. “I think the paper is good, but perhaps a 

shade grandiose,” he told its authors. “Suggesting 

that we have ‘a whole new era’ to be compared 

with the reform era is too grand an approach.” 

Community policing, the Attorney General 

insisted, is “only one component of the whole picture.”21 The then-director of the National Institute 

of Justice, James K. “Chips” Stewart, suggested 

a different term, “problem-oriented” policing, 

because police were taking many initiatives, not 

merely creating community partnerships, to 

affirmatively identify and solve problems rather 

than waiting to respond to reports of crime.22 

Attorney General Meese suggested “strategic 

policing” because the term embraced not only 

the work in communities but also the support 

that community work was going to require (especially the intelligence, surveillance and analysis 

functions) and the “specialist services that are 

going to focus on homicide, citywide burglary 

rings, car theft rings, and organized crime and 

terrorism.” The Attorney General said that his 

concerns would disappear if the professors talked 

about community policing as a part of a new era 

of policing, rather than defining the era itself. If 

they did that, he concluded: 

Everybody would realize that this [community policing] is a very important 

contribution which, along with other 

things happening in the police field, 

marks a new era of strategic policing in 

which people are thinking about what 

they are doing.23 

Not only did the professors continue to insist on 

using “community policing” to define the new era 

and its strategy, but they soon persuaded the field 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 | New Perspectives in Policing 

to do the same. Community policing became the 

slogan around which reformers rallied, eventually 

including President Bill Clinton, who put “community policing” at the heart of his national strategy 

to deal with crime and to provide unprecedented 

federal assistance to local police. 

In response to Attorney General Meese’s suggestion 

that the professors substitute the term “strategic 

policing,” Professor Moore responded with a fourpart argument. First, he agreed that the many 

elements of strategic policing and problem solving 

were an important part of the new era. Second, he 

predicted that most of these new strategies would 

take hold even without encouragement from leaders in the field or academics. Third, he predicted 

that police would find most uncomfortable the 

building of true partnerships with communities. 

He concluded, therefore, that labeling the entire 

package of innovations as community policing 

would give special prominence to the very aspect 

that would be most difficult for the police to adopt. 

In short, the name was a dare. As Moore said to the 

Attorney General: 

Let me say why we keep talking about this 

phrase “community policing.” Let us imagine ... that there are two different fronts on 

which new investments in policing are 

likely to be made. One lies in the direction 

of more thoughtful, more informationguided, more active attacks on particular 

crime problems. Some are local crime 

problems like robbery and burglary, and 

some turn out to be much bigger ... [including] organized crime, terrorism, and 

sophisticated frauds. That is one frontier. 

In many respects it is a continuation of an 

increasingly thoughtful, professionalized, 

forensic, tactical-minded police department. The other front is ... how to strike 

up a relationship with the community so 

that we can enlist their aid, focus on the 

problems that turn out to be important, and 

figure out a way to be accountable ... . The 

first strand is captured by notions of strategic and problem-solving policing. The 

second strand is captured by the concept 

of community policing. ... My judgment is 

that the problem solving, strategic thing 

will take care of itself because it is much 

more of a natural development in policing. 

If you are going to make a difference, you 

ought to describe a strategy that challenges 

the police in the areas in which they are 

least likely to make investments in repositioning themselves. That is this far more 

problematic area of fashioning a relationship with the community.24 

The dare worked. Not everywhere, and not completely, but many American police departments 

took up the banner of community policing and 

found it possible to varying degrees to create partnerships with the communities they policed.25 The 

successful marketing of community policing was 

solidified in the first presidential campaign and 

then the presidency of Bill Clinton, whose signature 

policing initiative — federal funding to add 100,000 

cops to U.S. police departments — was managed by 

the newly created Office of Community Oriented 

Policing Services (COPS Office). With those funds, 

local police departments pursued hundreds of 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 11 

varieties of community partnerships, and the 

public came to understand that modern policing 

was community policing. 

But At tor ney Genera l Meese was r ig ht. 

Community policing was only one part of the 

new era in American policing, and police departments did not, indeed could not, transform their 

entire organizations in service of local community priorities. There were too many things to do 

that did not fit neatly within that frame. Instead, 

departments began to change on many fronts at 

once: incorporating new forensic science technology and new surveillance capabilities, building 

new information systems that allowed chiefs 

to hold local commanders accountable almost 

in real time for levels of crime in their districts, 

expanding the use of stop-and-search tactics, 

responding to criticisms of racial profiling, and 

managing heightened concern about terrorism. 

And every one of these innovations raised problems, at least in some departments, beyond the 

guidance that community policing principles 

provided. 

As federal funding for community policing 

diminished after 2001, police leaders found 

themselves without a single organizing framework that could allow them to make sense of 

all of these developments. Soon the labels were 

proliferating: intelligence-led policing, evidencebased policing, pulling levers, hot-spot policing 

and predictive policing.26 Some still argued that 

community policing, rightly understood, was a 

vessel capacious enough to contain all of these 

developments, but others believed that many of 

these tactics and strategies had become divorced 

from community engagement and participation. 

Community policing, in short, lost its power as 

a comprehensive, organizing concept and again 

became a single element in the complex and contentious field of policing. 

Moreover, even in the Clinton years, community policing succeeded as a political slogan and 

provided a framework for important changes in 

police practice, but did not serve as the transformative paradigm that Moore and others thought 

was needed. Police leaders remain uncertain even 

to this day what they should ask of their communities. Despite books, trainings, conferences and 

countless new community policing initiatives, 

police departments became only marginally 

better at building broad, trusting, active partnerships with community residents, especially in 

high-crime neighborhoods. By the time of Barack 

Obama’s election in 2008, community policing 

had not only lost most of the federal funding and 

priority it had enjoyed in the 1990s, but the power 

of the slogan to focus police attention, catalyze 

public support for police reform, and serve as an 

overarching philosophy was exhausted as well. 

The New Professionalism can restore to the field 

an overarching, organizing framework. It brings 

together the strategic, problem-oriented, community partnership strands from the 1980s and 

1990s, and incorporates many additional developments in policing in the new century. Still, the 

exchange between Attorney General Meese and 

Professor Moore is worth recalling, for it reminds 

us that some elements of reform are easier than 

others for police to integrate into their traditionbound organizations. As the New Professionalism 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12 | New Perspectives in Policing 

advances, reformers inside and outside police 

departments should focus on those aspects that will 

be most difficult for those departments to embrace. 

The New Professionalism in the 

21st Century 

All four elements of the New Professionalism are 

already apparent in the values espoused by many 

police leaders in the United States and in the operations of several of their departments: accountability, 

legitimacy, innovation and national coherence. 

Indeed, the fourth is why the first three define a 

true professionalism: a collection of expertise, principles and practices that members of the profession 

recognize and honor. 

Increased Accountability 

Police departments used to resist accountability; 

today, the best of them embrace it. Twenty years ago, 

the term “police accountability” generally referred 

to accountability for misconduct. To speak of police 

accountability was to ask who investigated civilian complaints, how chiefs disciplined officers for 

using excessive force, and so on — sensitive topics in policing. Police chiefs did not generally feel 

accountable for levels of crime.27 The change today 

is dramatic, with increasing numbers of police 

chiefs feeling strong political pressure to reduce 

crime even as they contain costs. The best chiefs 

speak confidently about “the three C’s”: crime, 

cost and conduct. Police departments today are 

accountable for all three. 

Consider accountability for crime. Originating 

in the New York Police Department (NYPD), the 

CompStat accountability process, in which chiefs 

in headquarters hold precinct and other area 

commanders accountable for continuing reductions in crime and achievement of other goals, is 

now a staple of police management in most large 

departments. The CompStat process focuses most 

intensely on “index crimes”: homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and 

motor vehicle theft. At the same time, neighborhood residents in local community meetings 

question police commanders most commonly 

about other problems, such as open-air drug markets, disorderly youth, vehicle traffic and noise. In 

still other forums with more specialized advocates, 

police executives are expected to account for their 

responses to domestic violence complaints and 

hate crimes. In these and other ways, police agencies are now routinely accountable for their ability 

— or inability — to reduce the volume of crime. 

Accountability for cost is hardly new, but the costs 

of policing are receiving intense scrutiny across the 

United States as state and local governments cut 

their budgets. Although some police departments 

are resorting to familiar cost-cutting strategies — 

reducing civilian staff, slowing officer recruitment, 

limiting opportunities for officers to earn overtime and eliminating special programs — others 

are urging a more fundamental re-examination of 

how police departments are staffed and what work 

they do.28 In Los Angeles, Chief of Police Charles 

Beck eliminated an entire citywide unit of 130 officers known as Crime Reduction and Enforcement 

of Warrants (CREW), used for tactical crime suppression. This allowed the department to maintain 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 13 

patrol officer levels in local police districts during 

a time of budget cuts, even though it deprived his 

executive team of a flexible resource for responding quickly to new crime hot spots. More than 

cost cutting, this is a serious bet on the value 

of district-level leadership, entailing a public 

accounting of how the department is managing 

costs in a tight fiscal environment.29 

Finally, police leaders are taking responsibility for 

the conduct of their personnel: not only apologizing promptly for clear cases of misconduct, but 

also taking the initiative to explain controversial 

conduct that they consider legal and appropriate. For example, when the Los Angeles Police 

Department employed excessive force on a large 

scale at an immigrants-rights rally in MacArthur 

Park in May 2007, then-Police Chief William 

Bratton publicly confessed error within days, and 

followed up with strict discipline and reassignment of the top commander at the scene, who 

later resigned.30 Perhaps a less obvious example is the NYPD’s annual report on all firearms 

discharges, in which the department reports 

the facts and patterns in every discharge of a 

firearm by any of its officers. In the 2008 report, 

for example, the NYPD reported on 105 firearm 

discharges, the fewest in at least a decade. These 

included 49 discharges in “adversarial conflict” in 

which 12 subjects were killed and 18 injured. The 

report takes pains to put these police shootings 

in context, providing accounts of the incidents, 

information on the backgrounds of the officers 

and the subjects shot, and comparisons with 

earlier years.31 

The embrace and expansion of accountability is likely to continue as part of the New 

Professionalism in policing, as it is in most professions. On crime, for example, we expect to 

see more police agencies conducting their own 

routine public surveys, as many do now, holding 

themselves accountable not only for reducing 

reported crime, but also for reducing fear and 

the perception that crime is a problem in particular neighborhoods or for especially vulnerable 

residents. The police department in Nashville has 

engaged a research firm to conduct surveys of 

residents and businesses every six months since 

2005, tracking victimization as well as the percentage of respondents who consider crime their 

most serious problem, and sharing the results 

publicly.32 

To decrease costs, police departments will likely 

accelerate the shifting of work to nonsworn, and 

therefore less expensive, specialist personnel, 

especially in crime investigation units that are 

currently staffed mostly with detectives. A range 

of new specialists, including civilian crime scene 

technicians, data analysts and victim liaisons, 

might well replace one-half or more of today’s 

detectives. A wide range of new civilian roles 

could emerge, boosting the prominence of civilian police careers in much the same way that 

nurses and technicians have taken on many of 

the roles traditionally played by doctors within 

the medical profession. This move is already 

under way, but it proceeds haltingly and with frequent reversals because of the politics of police 

budgets in periods of fiscal constraint, when 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

14 | New Perspectives in Policing 

retaining sworn officers becomes an especially high 

priority for elected officials. 

On issues of conduct, the New Professionalism 

may bring substantial reductions in the use of 

force — already apparent in several jurisdictions 

— as police departments become more proficient 

in analyzing the tactical precursors to use-of-force 

incidents. Already, some departments are reviewing uses of force not only to determine if the officers 

were justified in the moment that they pulled their 

triggers or struck a blow, but also to discern earlier tactical missteps that may have unnecessarily 

escalated a situation to the point where force was 

legitimately used. By moving beyond a focus on 

culpability and discipline to smarter policing that 

relies less on physical force, more departments 

can demonstrate their professionalism and better 

account for the force that they deploy. 

Finally, we see a growing appreciation among police 

executives for their own accountability to frontline 

officers and other members of the organization. 

This is the least developed form of accountability, 

with too many police managers still speaking about 

doing battle with their unions and too many unions 

bragging about their control over chiefs. This familiar, bruising fight between labor and management 

obscures the beginnings of a more professional, 

constructive engagement between police unions 

and police executives, where leaders at every level 

are committed to disciplinary systems that are 

fair and perceived as fair, the development of rules 

with robust participation of frontline officers and 

staff, and codes of ethics and statements of values 

that speak to the aspirations of men and women 

throughout policing and are grounded in a participatory process. 

Legitimacy 

Every public-sector department makes some 

claim to legitimacy, and policing is no exception. 

In their account of professional crime-fighting of 

the mid-20th century, Professors Kelling and Moore 

identified the sources of legitimacy for policing as 

“the law” and the “professionalism” of the police. 

They contrasted these sources of legitimacy with 

early sources of legitimacy in urban politics. To 

free themselves from the corruptions of political 

manipulation, the police of mid-century America, 

the professors explained, claimed their legitimacy 

from enforcing the law in ways that were properly entrusted to their professional expertise. By 

contrast, community policing emphasized the 

legitimacy that could be derived from community 

approval and engagement. 

The legitimacy of policing under the New 

Professionalism embraces all of these, recognizing that legitimacy is both conferred by law and 

democratic politics and earned by adhering to 

professional standards and winning the trust 

and confidence of the people policed. The New 

Professionalism, however, puts a special emphasis 

on the sources of earned legitimacy: professional 

integrity and public trust. The last of these — public 

legitimacy — extends a long-established principle 

of democratic policing and a tenet of community 

policing: policing by consent of the governed. 

In recent decades, police have had only the weakest means to measure erosion of public legitimacy, 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 15 

mostly derived from the numbers of civilian complaints against the police. As every police officer 

and police scholar can agree, counting formal 

civilian complaints produces highly problematic statistics. Relatively few people who feel 

aggrieved in their encounters with the police 

make a formal complaint, so the complaints 

received are unlikely to be representative of 

wider patterns. Moreover, the police discount 

complaints from at least two categories of civilians: persistent offenders who use the complaint 

process to deter police from stopping them, and 

persistent complainers who file literally dozens 

of complaints annually. These complainants may 

be relatively few, but the stories about them circulate so widely among police officers that they 

undermine the ability of police commanders or 

outside oversight bodies to use numbers of civilian complaints as a credible measure of public 

dissatisfaction. Finally, adjudicating civilian 

complaints is so difficult that most complaints 

remain formally unsubstantiated, further undermining the process. 

The problem is with the use of civilian complaints 

as the leading measure of public legitimacy, not 

with the goal of public legitimacy itself. Research 

conducted by New York University Professor 

Tom Tyler and others over the last two decades 

demonstrates that rigorous surveys can reliably measure legitimacy, and that doing so 

allows police departments to identify practices 

that can increase their legitimacy among those 

most disaffected: young people and members 

of ethnic and racial minority groups. Tyler and 

others demonstrate that police can employ even 

forceful tactics such as stop-and-frisk in ways that 

leave those subject to these tactics feeling that 

the police acted fairly and appropriately.33 It is 

through the pursuit of public legitimacy, guided 

by repeated surveys that disaggregate results for 

specific racial, ethnic and age groups, that the 

New Professionalism can directly address the 

persistent distrust between ethnic and racial 

minorities and the police in the United States. 

As the New Professionalism develops further, 

police departments will be able to use better surveys than are common today to measure public 

legitimacy, allowing them to make more appropriate and modest use of civilian complaints 

statistics. In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama 

underscored the importance of this pillar of the 

New Professionalism when he promised that, as 

President, he would work for a criminal justice 

system that enjoyed the trust and confidence 

of citizens of every race, ethnicity and age.34 

Public surveys that capture the satisfaction of 

people in these discrete groups in their encounters with police and in their broader confidence 

in the police can help measure progress toward 

that goal.35 

Continuous Innovation 

One complaint about the old professionalism of 

mid-century policing is that it stifled innovation 

at the front lines of policing. Police managers 

were so concerned about the dangers of corruption and a loss of discipline that they suppressed 

the creative impulses of frontline officers who 

wanted to try new ways of solving crime problems 

and eliminating other conditions that caused 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16 | New Perspectives in Policing 

people grief. Conversely, a complaint about community policing in the 1990s was that it left problem 

solving to the variable skills of frontline officers, 

with only rare examples of senior management 

investing in departmentwide problem solving or 

developing responses beyond the “generic” solutions of “patrolling, investigating, arresting, and 

prosecuting ... without benefit of rigorously derived 

knowledge about the effectiveness of what they 

do.”36 

Today, innovation at every level is essential for 

police agencies charged with preventing crimes 

and solving problems from terrorism to youth 

violence, vandalism, mortgage fraud, Internet 

gambling, drug dealing, extortion, drunk driving, intimate partner violence and so on. The last 

decade has seen innovation in the strategies, tactics 

and technologies that police employ against all of 

these, and in ways that police develop relationships 

within departments and with the public. Films and 

television series popularize innovations in forensic sciences, but equally dramatic are innovations 

in less-lethal weaponry, the use of “verbal judo” to 

control unruly people without physical force, direct 

engagement with neighborhood gangs and drug 

dealers to reduce crime, and recruiting techniques 

that can rapidly diversify the pool of applicants for 

police jobs. Other innovations boost attention to 

customer service at police stations, help supervisors identify officers at greater risk of engaging in 

misconduct, improve the outcomes of confrontations with mentally disturbed individuals, and 

provide more effective service to victims of persistent domestic violence and spousal abuse. It is 

a dizzying array. 

The challenge of the New Professionalism is to 

encourage innovation within the bounds not only 

of the law but also of ethical values. The use of value 

statements to guide police behavior in place of the 

strict enforcement of detailed regulations continues to gain acceptance in the field, driven first 

by community policing and problem solving and 

more recently by reforms to disciplinary processes 

and closer collaborations between union leadership and police executives. As police departments 

reward innovators with recognition, resources and 

promotion, that trend will continue. 

As part of the New Professionalism, departments 

can expand the range of incentives for innovation 

and build structures that encourage innovation as 

part of the routine work of police officers and senior 

management teams. These might include community partnerships that go beyond the neighborhood 

activities of community policing, and joint ventures 

with other government departments, national and 

international nonprofit organizations, and privatesector companies. Such partnerships encourage 

police to see crime and crime problems in new 

forms and new places, well beyond the narrow confines of those reported to the police and recorded 

in the Uniform Crime Reports. 

But innovation alone will not prove valuable 

without a way to learn from the process. All professions are distinguished from mere trades by 

their commitment to continuous learning through 

innovation, whether it is experimentation in medicine, the development of the common law, or the 

application of engineering breakthroughs in architecture. As Herman Goldstein wrote a few years ago 

in urging the importance of developing knowledge 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 17 

as part of police reform, “The building of a body 

of knowledge, on which good practice is based 

and with which practitioners are expected to be 

familiar, may be the most important element for 

acquiring truly professional status.”37 

Knowledge — its creation, dissemination and 

practical application — is essential to genuine 

professionalism. Police organizations need not 

only to encourage innovation but also to measure their outcomes, and reward and sustain 

innovations that succeed. They should encourage independent evaluations of their policies and 

tactics. Working with researchers, they should 

design experiments that rigorously test new ideas. 

Police organizations must then communicate the 

reasons for their successes widely and quickly 

throughout the profession. Formal partnerships 

with universities and nonprofit think tanks can 

help, and many departments have already built 

such partnerships. 

All this suggests a new way of learning within 

policing. The pace of innovation and knowledge 

development today is simply too fast for police 

organizations to rely on recruit training and 

occasional specialized courses. Rather, police 

departments need to become learning organizations of professionals. For example, analysts in 

police agencies should not only be studying crime 

patterns but also analyzing what the police are 

doing about them and to what effect, informing 

the development of tailor-made strategies to deal 

with the underlying problems, and then sharing 

their analyses widely within the department in 

forms that busy frontline officers and supervisors can easily digest, retain and apply. Another 

example: frontline officers and rising managers 

should be rewarded for the professional habits of 

reading, learning and actively contributing to the 

expansion of knowledge in the field.38 

National Coherence 

Achieving accountability for crime, cost and 

conduct; public legitimacy across social divisions; and continuous innovation and learning 

at every rank would mark a watershed in policing. These first three elements build on efforts 

begun with community policing, elevating 

them to a New Professionalism that infuses all 

of what police organizations do. To make that 

New Professionalism worthy of the name, however, requires one more step: achieving national 

coherence in this radically decentralized business. This element has not yet developed as far as 

the first three, but it has begun to grow. 

Policing in the United States is notoriously 

parochial, entrusted to something close to 

20,000 police departments — the precise number changes so quickly that there is no reliable 

count. Yet in the last three decades, policing has 

begun to develop features of a coherent field of 

professional work. The Police Foundation and 

Police Executive Research Forum have helped 

by nurturing national conversations among 

practitioners and researchers. These conversations took on greater intensity in the first 

Executive Session on Policing, and they became 

far more public when Bill Clinton, campaigning for the presidency in 1992, argued for using 

federal resources to spread community policing 

to every state. Since then, national discussions 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

18 | New Perspectives in Policing 

and debates about police practices and strategies have become commonplace, thanks in large 

part to the efforts of the COPS Office, the Office on 

Violence Against Women and the Office of Justice 

Programs — all within the Department of Justice 

— and the conversations hosted by the Major Cities 

Chiefs Association and other professional associations.39 Many of the best-known brands in policing 

practices — “CompStat Meetings,” “Fusion Centers” 

and even older brands like “Weed and Seed” programs — are national in name only, with each 

manifestation so different from the others that 

they contribute little to national coherence. Still, 

even these widely differing practices can create 

an appetite for more truly coherent practices in an 

extremely decentralized field. 

Most other countries achieve at least some national 

coherence through a national police agency or a 

limited number of state police services. England, 

with only 43 local police services, has recently created the National Police Improvement Agency to 

assume a variety of shared functions and bring a 

greater degree of national coherence to policing. 

Canada uses a mixed model, in which municipalities and provinces contract with the Royal 

Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to provide local 

or provincial police services according to local 

specifications aiming to achieve locally negotiated 

goals. Large jurisdictions, such as the provinces 

of Ontario and Quebec and the cities of Toronto, 

Montreal and Vancouver, still choose to field their 

own police services, but the other provinces and 

many smaller cities contract with the RCMP. 

Local control over local policing is deeply ingrained 

in American political culture, and we do not expect 

that to change. Some consolidation among the 80 

percent of police agencies with fewer than 25 police 

officers could help residents of those communities 

receive more professional police services, but such 

consolidation will not do much for national coherence. Indeed, further progress toward national 

coherence through the New Professionalism may 

be necessary for this consolidation to be attractive. 

Greater mobility among police departments for 

officers and professional staff could do more than 

consolidation to advance national coherence. True 

professionals are mobile across jurisdictions, even 

across national boundaries. Engineers, doctors and 

even lawyers can practice their professions and 

apply their skills and training almost anywhere. 

Many professions have local testing and licensing 

requirements, but reciprocity arrangements recognize that the training and skills of these licensed 

professionals are portable, and both individuals 

and organizations take advantage of this portability. 

Local experience has value in every profession, but 

local expertise can be balanced with wider knowledge and experience. 

Only in the last few decades has it become common 

for big-city police chiefs to be recruited from outside of their departments and states, though even 

today most chiefs have spent their entire careers 

in the departments they lead. That trend needs to 

deepen, and the profession needs to find ways to 

encourage greater movement from place to place 

and across state lines at every stage of police careers. 

The obstacles are substantial. Police pension rules 

can create powerful disincentives for officers to 

move. In some states, such as California, the pension system does not block movement within the 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 19 

state, but creates disincentives for wider moves. 

In Massachusetts, state laws and contracts make 

it difficult for veteran officers and supervisors to 

move even within the state without loss in rank. 

If the values of policing are really professional, 

not local, then departments need not worry that 

a workforce enjoying geographic mobility will 

become unskilled or undisciplined. Officers who 

have worked in the same community for a decade 

or more and who know the local people and their 

customs will be invaluable members of any police 

service, but that is true in many professions. 

What is needed is a genuine national coherence 

in the skills, training and accreditation of police 

professionals.40 

At stake here is much more than the ability for 

some police officers to move from one department to another. Citizens should be entitled to 

professional performance from U.S. police officers wherever they find them. Not only should the 

definition of professional performance be constantly evolving, but the public — itself mobile 

across the country — should expect police officers 

everywhere to keep up with these developments. 

This kind of coherence implies the development 

of national norms of how the police respond to 

situations, particularly to criminal activity, public disorder, political dissent or even a traffic 

infraction. Consider, for example, a routine traffic stop. This can be a tense moment for a police 

officer who does not know if the car’s occupants 

were merely speeding or escaping the scene of a 

crime, just as it is an anxious moment for most 

drivers. A common protocol for how the police 

approach the vehicle, what they require of the 

driver, and how they respond as the encounter 

proceeds could not only save the lives of officers, 

but could help motorists as they drive from state 

to state avoid inadvertently alarming any officers who stop them. Such protocols have already 

begun to spread, but they could usefully be developed for a much wider range of situations. 

The concept of a “protocol,” familiar in the medical field, could prove useful in professional 

policing. Some may become standard because 

of research findings, others because of judicial 

decisions, still others because of advances in 

forensic science. As in medicine, the danger is 

that protocols will, in the hands of busy police 

professionals, replace nuanced diagnosis and a 

plan to address the problems at hand. Careful 

analysis of local problems and the custom crafting of solutions continue to be necessary. Still, 

once a tool becomes part of that solution, its use 

according to standard protocols can save lives, 

improve effectiveness, reduce costs and let everyone benefit from the accumulation of professional 

knowledge. Just as systematic evaluation and rigorous research can discipline innovation, they 

can strengthen national protocols.41 

Increased mobility and stronger protocols are 

only two ways in which national coherence can 

advance. The attraction of the new professionalism is likely to feed a flowering of specialist 

professional associations, bachelor’s and master’s 

degree programs, professional journals and other 

features of professional infrastructure. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

20 | New Perspectives in Policing 

Is the New Professionalism Really New? 

We return, finally, to the definitional question: What 

is professionalism? When an earlier generation of 

reformers described the police strategy of the mid20th century as professional crime-fighting, they 

may have been using the term “professional” merely 

as the opposite of “amateur.” Perhaps they thought 

of professional police much as people think of professional athletes or professional actors. Through 

more rigorous selection, better training and tighter 

command, they had left the ranks of mere amateurs. 

It is also likely that this earlier generation wanted 

to put distance between the police and partisan 

elected officials. Police departments live with a 

constant tension between serving the government 

leaders of the day, whether mayor, county executive 

or governor, and remaining independent of partisan politics. In the mid-20th century, reformers 

deployed the language of professionalism to help 

manage that tension, hoping to hold the local political machine at arm’s length. That aim was laudable, 

but the claim was false. These departments were 

not professional. 

We describe today’s genuine police professionalism 

as “new” to distinguish it from the earlier rhetoric that mistakenly equated professionalism with 

an overreliance on technology, centralization of 

authority and insulation from the public. These features, found in much policing in the second half of 

the 20th century, do not define true professionalism. 

Consider the parallel with the practice of medicine 

as a profession. In the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. doctors 

were often criticized as overly reliant on technology 

and distant from the patients whom they treated. A 

wave of reformers in medicine developed new specialties in family practice and championed medical 

education that trained doctors to communicate 

with patients respectfully, engaging patients more 

meaningfully in their own treatment. New roles 

for nurse practitioners and other health workers made the practice of medicine more humane. 

Family practice and other reforms aimed to build 

good relationships between medical practitioners 

and patients, just as community policing aimed 

to build good relationships between police and 

the people they served. But no one seriously suggests that doctors and nurses should abandon their 

identity as professionals. Instead, professionalism 

in medicine has come to embrace the respect for 

patients, accountability and innovations that are 

improving practice. Medicine has discovered its 

own new professionalism. So, too, has legal practice, in part through law school clinics that teach 

the importance of respectful client relationships 

alongside legal doctrine. 

Si m i la rly, i n law en forcement, t he New 

Professionalism embraces the respectful engagement of citizens and communities that lies at the 

core of community policing. Those who continue 

to champion the aspirations of community policing should understand the New Professionalism 

as aligned with their ambitions.42 Moreover, the 

New Professionalism is clear about its expectations, whereas community policing has become 

so vague a term that it has lost its operational 

meaning. As Moore advised two decades ago, the 

New Professionalism focuses police attention on 

the very things that are most difficult to achieve: 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 21 

accountability, legitimacy, innovation and 

national coherence. Community engagement 

is essential at least to the first two of those and 

perhaps all four. 

Much can be gained from a truer police professionalism. For the public, policing promises 

to become more effective, more responsive to 

the opinions of residents and less forceful, less 

brusque. For members of the police profession 

themselves, the work promises to become more 

stimulating with a greater emphasis on learning, 

innovation, ethics and professional mobility. 

But the greatest gains are for democratic societies generally and the American experiment in 

democracy more specifically. 

A certain amount of force will always be a part of 

police work; a degree of coercion is necessary to 

keep order and enforce the law. What matters is 

whether policing — when it forcefully asserts its 

authority — makes democratic progress possible 

or impedes it. Professional policing enhances 

democratic progress when it accounts for what 

it does, achieves public support, learns through 

innovation and transcends parochialism. That is 

the promise of the New Professionalism. 

Endnotes 

1. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 

as of September 2004, 17,876 state and local law 

enforcement agencies with the equivalent of at 

least one full-time officer were operating in the 

United States. Reaves, Brian A., Census of Law 

Enforcement Agencies, 2004 (Washington, D.C.: 

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice 

Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2007), p. 1. 

2. See the discussion on pp. 14-15 and note 33 and 

the sources referenced therein. 

3. Brown, Lee P., Community Policing: A Practical 

Guide for Police Officials, Perspectives on Policing, 

no. 12 (Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass.: 

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice 

Programs, National Institute of Justice, and 

Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of 

Government, Program in Criminal Justice Policy 

and Management, September 1989). Hereinafter, 

publications in this series are identified by their 

number in the series, Perspectives on Policing. The 

entire set is available at: www.hks.harvard.edu/ 

criminaljustice/executive_sessions/policing.htm. 

4. Spa r row, Ma lcol m K., Implement ing 

Community Policing, Perspectives on Policing, 

no. 9 (Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass.: 

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice 

Programs, National Institute of Justice, and 

Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of 

Government, Program in Criminal Justice Policy 

and Management, November 1988), p. 2. 

5. See, for example, Kelling, George L., and 

Mark H. Moore, The Evolving Strategy of Policing, 

Perspectives on Policing, no. 4 (Washington, D.C., 

and Cambridge, Mass.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of 

Justice, and Harvard University, John F. Kennedy 

School of Government, Program in Criminal 

Justice Policy and Management, November 1988), 

p. 6 (where the authors write specifically of “the 

professional model”). 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

22 | New Perspectives in Policing 

6. The first Executive Session on Policing convened 

31 officials and scholars, but its 16 published papers 

were authored by only 13 participants. Mark Moore 

and George Kelling were authors or co-authors on 

six papers each; Robert Trojanowicz was co-author 

on three; Malcolm Sparrow, Robert Wasserman and 

Hubert Williams were authors or co-authors on two 

each. No one else appeared on more than one. Of 

the first six papers issued, all were authored or coauthored by Moore, Kelling and Trojanowicz, with 

no other co-authors; and through the end of 1992, 

the Executive Session published only three papers 

that were not authored or co-authored by Moore, 

Kelling or Trojanowicz. Other scholars played at 

least as great a role in the formulation of community policing during these years, including Herman 

Goldstein (who was a member of the first Executive 

Session) and David Bayley (who is a member of the 

second Executive Session), but neither wrote for the 

first Executive Session on Policing. 

7. More recently, the Committee to Review 

Research on Police Policy and Practices convened 

by the National Research Council of the National 

Academies recounted the story in the same way, 

although choosing in its own analysis to refer to 

the professional model of policing as the “standard” model. See National Research Council, 

Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence, 

Committee to Review Research on Police Policy 

and Practices, Wesley Skogan and Kathleen Frydl, 

editors, Committee on Law and Justice, Division 

of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education 

(Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 

2004), p. 85. (Community policing “is characterized as something that transforms the ‘professional’ 

model of policing, dominant since the end of World 

War II ... .”) 

8. Police officials in Kenya, eager to implement a version of community policing, put this question to one 

of the authors of this paper in 2000, as did a leader in 

the military police of Rio de Janeiro in 2001. 

9. Kelling, George L., Police and Communities: The 

Quiet Revolution, Perspectives on Policing, no. 1 

(Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass.: U.S. 

Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 

National Institute of Justice, and Harvard University, 

John F. Kennedy School of Government, Program 

in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, June 

1988), pp. 2-3. 

10. Kelling and Moore, The Evolving Strategy of 

Policing (note 5). 

11. Kelling, Police and Communities: The Quiet 

Revolution (note 9), pp. 2-3. 

12. Moore, Mark H., Robert C. Trojanowicz and 

George L. Kelling, Crime and Policing, Perspectives 

on Policing, no. 2 (Washington, D.C., and 

Cambridge, Mass.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of 

Justice, and Harvard University, John F. Kennedy 

School of Government, Program in Criminal Justice 

Policy and Management, June 1988). 

13. Wasserman, Robert, and Mark H. Moore, 

Values in Policing, Perspectives on Policing, no. 8 

(Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass.: U.S. 

Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 

National Institute of Justice, and Harvard University, 

John F. Kennedy School of Government, Program 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 23 

in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, 

November 1988), p. 5. 

14. Kelling, George L., Robert Wasserman and 

Hubert Williams, Police Accountability and 

Community Policing, Perspectives on Policing, 

no. 7 (Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass.: 

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice 

Programs, National Institute of Justice, and 

Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of 

Government, Program in Criminal Justice Policy 

and Management, November 1988), p. 2. 

15. Daryl Gates, then-Police Chief in Los Angeles, 

explained more fully: “Chiefs today are unfortunately deeply tied to politics and politicians. It’s 

a very sad commentary on local policing. How do 

chiefs refer to their mayor? ‘My mayor.’ ‘Is your 

mayor going to win this election?’ ... And if they do 

not, that is the last time we see that commissioner 

or chief. Gone, because of political whim, not his 

or her performance as a chief. So, if you do not 

think politics are tied into policing today, you are 

being very, very foolish.” See Hartmann, Francis 

X. ed., Debating the Evolution of American Policing, 

Perspectives on Policing, no. 5 (Washington, D.C., 

and Cambridge, Mass.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of 

Justice, and Harvard University, John F. Kennedy 

School of Government, Program in Criminal Justice 

Policy and Management, November 1988), p. 6. 

16. Kelling and Moore, The Evolving Strategy of 

Policing (note 5), pp. 9, 14. 

17. Williams, Hubert, and Patrick V. Murphy, The 

Evolving Strategy of Policing: A Minority View, 

Perspectives on Policing, no. 13 (Washington, D.C., 

and Cambridge, Mass.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of 

Justice, and Harvard University, John F. Kennedy 

School of Government, Program in Criminal 

Justice Policy and Management, January 1990), p. 

2. The significance of this particular publication is 

especially great as Murphy had served as president 

of the Police Foundation from 1973 to 1985, succeeded by Hubert Williams, who continues in that 

position today. 

18. Ibid., pp. 9, 11. 

19. Kelling and Moore, The Evolving Strategy of 

Policing (note 5), p. 13. 

20. Ibid., p. 14. 

21. Quoted in Hartmann, Debating the Evolution 

of American Policing (note 15), p. 3. 

22. Problem solving was discussed frequently at 

the Executive Session, often as a component of 

community policing, but its importance as an 

independent thrust in police reform has been 

more widely recognized since then. Herman 

Goldstein, who coined the term “problemoriented policing,” was careful to write at the 

time of the Executive Session that it “connects 

with the current move to redefine relationships 

between the police and community.” Goldstein, 

Herman, Problem-Oriented Policing (New York: 

McGraw Hill, 1990), p. 3. Looking back on these 

discussions in 2003, Goldstein explained that in 

the years of the Executive Session, “the community policing movement grew rapidly in policing. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

24 | New Perspectives in Policing 

One element of that movement supported the 

police becoming less legalistically-oriented: that 

police should redefine their role in ways that sought 

to achieve broader outcomes for those, especially 

victims, who turned to the police for help. Beatlevel ‘problem solving’ was seen as supporting 

these efforts and therefore often incorporated 

into the community policing movement. As community policing and problem-oriented policing 

evolved alongside each other, the two concepts 

were intermingled. I contributed to some of the 

resulting confusion.” Goldstein, Herman, “On 

Further Developing Problem-Oriented Policing: 

The Most Critical Need, The Major Impediments, 

and a Proposal,” Crime Prevention Studies 15 (2003): 

13-47, at p. 45, note 2 (citat ion omit ted), 

available at http://www.popcenter.org/library/ 

crimeprevention/volume_15/01Goldstein.pdf. 

23. Quoted in Hartmann, Debating the Evolution of 

American Policing (note 15), p. 3. 

24. Ibid., p. 5. In a later paper, Moore suggested, 

likely in jest, that one could term the new strategy 

“professional, strategic, community, problemsolving policing.” Moore, Mark H., and Robert 

C. Trojanowicz, Corporate Strategies for Policing, 

Perspectives on Policing, no. 6 (Washington, D.C., 

and Cambridge, Mass.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of 

Justice, and Harvard University, John F. Kennedy 

School of Government, Program in Criminal Justice 

Policy and Management, November 1988), p. 14. 

25. See, for example, Skogan, Wesley G., Police and 

Community in Chicago: A Tale of Three Cities (New 

York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 

26. See, for example, Weisburd, David L., and 

Anthony A. Braga, eds., Police Innovation: 

Contrasting Perspectives (New York: Cambridge 

University Press, 2006). 

27. See Kelling, Wasserman, and Williams, Police 

Accountability and Community Policing (note 14), 

p. 1. (“Rising crime or fear of crime may be problematic for police administrators, but rarely does 

either threaten their survival.”) 

28. See Gascón, George, and Todd Foglesong, 

Making Policing More Affordable: Managing Costs 

and Measuring Value in Policing (Washington, D.C., 

and Cambridge, Mass.: U.S. Department of Justice, 

Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, 

and Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of 

Government, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and 

Management, December 2010), NCJ 231096. 

29. Beck disbanded the Crime Reduction and 

Enforcement of Warrants task force (CREW), 

weathering criticism that this vital unit “comprised quick-strike troops that former Chief 

William Bratton used to focus on problem gangs 

and neighborhoods.” Beck also reduced the size of 

other specialized, central units focused on gangs 

and drugs by 170 officers to maintain patrol levels 

in the districts. See Romero, Dennis, “LAPD’s Beck 

Shuffles Cops To Deal With Budget Crisis: No New 

Cars, No Unused Vacation Pay Possible,” LA Weekly, 

February 17, 2010, available at: http://blogs.laweekly. 

com/ladaily/city-news/lapd-metro-transfers. 

30. See Los Angeles Police Department, “An 

Examination of May Day 2007,” Report to the Board 

of Police Commissioners, October 7, 2007. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a New Professionalism in Policing | 25 

31. Three police officers were injured by subject 

gunfire, and none were killed in those incidents. 

See New York Police Department, “2008 Annual 

Firearms Discharge Report,” 2009. 

32. Personal communication from then-Police 

Chief Ronald Serpas, November 2009. A copy 

of the June 2009 survey report is on file with 

the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and 

Management at the Harvard Kennedy School. 

33. See, for example, Tyler, Tom R., “Enhancing 

Police Legitimacy,” Annals of the American 

Academy of Political and Social Science 593 

(10) (2004): 84-99. See also Tyler, Tom R., ed., 

Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: International 

Perspectives (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 

2007). 

34. See Obama, Barack, Remarks at Howard 

Un iversit y Convocat ion, September 28, 

2007, available at http://www.barackobama. 

com/2007/09/28/remarks_of_senator_barack_ 

obam_26.php. Accessed October 14, 2010. 

35. At a national level, the Sourcebook of Criminal 

Justice Statistics annually reports levels of “confidence” in the police as an institution by age, 

income, racial and ethnic group, and political 

affiliation. The results in 2009 showed that 63 percent of white adults had “a great deal” or “quite 

a lot” of confidence in the police, in contrast to 

38 percent of black adults. If individual departments track the exact language of these national 

surveys, they can compare themselves with these 

national benchmarks. See Pastore, Ann L., and 

Kathleen Maguire, eds., Sourcebook of Criminal 

Justice Statistics, Table 2.12.2009 [Online], available at http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/ 

t2122009.pdf. Accessed August 2, 2010. 

36. Goldstein, “On Further Developing ProblemOriented Policing” (note 22), p. 21. 

37. Ibid., p. 46, note 3. Goldstein here describes 

it as “especially troubling” that the 20th century 

“professionalization” of policing had not included 

this element. 

38. The idea of a “learning organization” goes well 

beyond what we expect of all professional organizations. For more about learning organizations, 

see Garvin, David A., Learning in Action: Putting 

the Learning Organization to Work (Cambridge, 

Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2000). 

39. The Major Cities Chiefs Association comprises 

the chiefs of the 63 largest police departments in 

the United States and Canada (56 of the departments are in the United States; seven more are 

in Canada). Members include the chief executive officers of law enforcement agencies in U.S. 

cities with populations greater than 500,000, the 

chief executive officer of the largest law enforcement agency in each U.S. Standard Metropolitan 

Statistical Area with a population greater than 1.5 

million, and the chiefs of police in the seven largest Canadian cities. For more information about 

the association, see the association’s website, 

http://www.majorcitieschiefs.org. 

40. The issues of national coherence and professionalism can raise questions about minimum 

standards for police, especially educational 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

26 | New Perspectives in Policing 

standards. Should police officers be required to 

have a college degree? Should there be educational 

qualifications for promotion? In light of racial and 

ethnic differences in formal educational attainment, standards might be more appropriately 

focused on knowledge rather than years of schooling or formal degrees. Many professions allow 

apprenticeships to substitute for formal classroom 

education. The issues also raise questions of pension portability for line officers, which some states 

are beginning to address with the support of police 

unions. In general, we have been impressed that 

many police unions share the ambitions of the New 

Professionalism. 

41. The recently created National Network for 

Safe Communities, which links more than 50 

jurisdictions that are implementing a gang violence reduction strategy piloted in Boston and a 

drug market reduction strategy piloted in High 

Point, N.C., represents one such effort to move 

police practice from experimentation to application and adaptation of common, national 

protocols. See http://www.nnscommunities.org. 

A similar national effort, the Policing Research 

Platform Project, is collecting comprehensive 

data from new recruits, supervisors and entire 

police agencies to expand understanding of 

the career paths of police professionals and of 

quality policing. See http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/ 

t op ic s/ l a w- e n f or c e me nt /ad m i n i s t r a t ion / 

policing-platform/welcome.htm. 

42. See, for example, Sklansky, David, The Persistent 

Pull of Police Professionalism, to be published in 

this series. Sklansky continues to identify “professionalism” in policing with the desire to centralize 

police authority, make use of the latest technology, and keep the public at a distance. He decries 

such professionalism and longs to engage police in 

questions of genuine partnership with communities. We agree with his ambition but disagree that 

he needs to strip police of their professional identity 

to achieve it. We believe the New Professionalism 

is a more accurate and more attractive banner for 

this effort than his “advanced community policing.” 

About the Authors 

Christopher Stone is Daniel and Florence 

Guggen heim Professor of t he Pract ice of 

Criminal Justice at the John F. Kennedy School of 

Government, Harvard University. Jeremy Travis is 

President of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 

City University of New York. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

U.S. Department of Justice 

Office of Justice Programs presorted standard

National Institute of Justice postage & fees paid 

Washington, DC 20531 *NCJ~232359* doJ/niJ 

permit no. g –91 Official Business 

Penalty for Private Use $300 

NCJ 232359 

Members of the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety 

Chief George Gascón, San Francisco 

Police Department 

Mr. Gil Kerlikowske, Director, Office of 

National Drug Control Policy 

Chief Cathy Lanier, Washington, D.C. 

Metropolitan Police Department 

Dr. John H. Laub, Director, National 

Institute of Justice 

Ms. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Visiting 

Scholar, New York University 

Professor Tracey Meares, Walton Hale 

Hamilton Professor of Law, Yale Law School 

Chief Constable Peter Neyroud, Chief 

Executive, National Policing Improvement 

Agency (U.K.) 

Ms. Christine Nixon, Chair, Victorian 

Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery 

Authority (Australia) 

Chief Richard Pennington, Atlanta Police 

Department 

Mayor Jerry Sanders, City of San Diego 

Professor David Sklansky, Professor of 

Law, Faculty Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center 

for Criminal Justice, University of California, 

Berkeley, School of Law 

Mr. Sean Smoot, Director and Chief Legal 

Counsel, Police Benevolent and Protective 

Association of Illinois 

Professor Malcolm Sparrow, Professor of 

Practice of Public Management, Kennedy 

School of Government, Harvard University 

Chief Darrel Stephens, CharlotteMecklenburg Police Department (retired) 

Professor Christopher Stone, Guggenheim 

Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice, 

Kennedy School of Government, Harvard 

University 

Mr. Jeremy Travis, President, John Jay 

College of Criminal Justice 

Mr. Rick VanHouten, President, Fort Worth 

Police Association 

Professor David Weisburd, Walter E. Meyer 

Professor of Law and Criminal Justice; 

Director, Institute of Criminology, Faculty 

of Law, The Hebrew University; and 

Distinguished Professor, Department of 

Criminology, Law and Society, George 

Mason University 

Dr. Chuck Wexler, Executive Director, 

Police Executive Research Forum 

Chief Anthony Batts, Oakland Police 

Department 

Professor David Bayley, Distinguished 

Professor, School of Criminal Justice, 

State University of New York at Albany 

Dr. Anthony Braga, Senior Research 

Associate, Lecturer in Public Policy, 

Program in Criminal Justice Policy and 

Management, Kennedy School of 

Government, Harvard University 

Chief William J. Bratton, Los Angeles 

Police Department 

Chief Ella Bully-Cummings, Detroit Police 

Department (retired) 

Ms. Christine Cole (Facilitator), Executive 

Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy 

and Management, Kennedy School of 

Government, Harvard University 

Commissioner Edward Davis, Boston 

Police Department 

Chief Ronald Davis, East Palo Alto 

Police Department 

Chief Edward Flynn, Milwaukee 

Police Department 

Colonel Rick Fuentes, Superintendent, 

New Jersey State Police 

Learn more about the Executive Session at: 

NIJ’s website: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/law-enforcement/executive-sessions/welcome.htm 

Harvard’s website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/criminaljustice/executive_sessions/policing.htm