After a 10-year career as a municipal police officer in New Hampshire and Vermont, Buerger earned a doctorate in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. He was the on-site director for the Crime Control Institute’s NIJ-funded research project on Repeat Call Policing (RECAP) in Minneapolis, MN. He was also the on-site director for the Hot Spots of Crime Experiment that followed, revisiting the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment’s findings about the effectiveness of preventive patrol. In the 1990s, he served as Research Director for the Jersey City (NJ) Police Department under an NIJ Locally-Initiated Research grant. He is a charter member of the Futures Working Group, a collaboration of the FBI and the Police Futurists Society that anticipates and analyzes future trends that will affect the police.