Problem-Oriented Policing

Herman Goldstein is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at the Law School, University of Wisconsin in Madison. His first experiences in working with the police were in Philadelphia as a graduate student in governmental administration at the University of Pennsylvania and subsequently as an assistant to the city manager of Portland, Maine. He spent two years observing the on-the-street operations of the police in Wisconsin and Michigan as a researcher with the American Bar Foundation’s Survey of the Administration of Criminal Justice, and then participated in the analysis phase of that landmark project. From 1960 to 1964, he was executive assistant to O.W. Wilson, the widely recognized architect of the professional model of policing, when Wilson undertook, as superintendent, to reform the Chicago Police Department. With a grant from the Ford Foundation to support research and teaching relating to the police, Professor Goldstein joined the Wisconsin faculty in 1964. He has published widely on such topics as the police function, police discretion, the political accountability of the police, and the control of police conduct. In 1967, he was among the major contributors to the work of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. He also served as a consultant to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the Police Foundation, New York City’s Knapp Commission, and numerous other national, state and local groups. He coauthored the American Bar Association’s The Urban Police Function in 1973. And in 1977, he published Policing a Free Society -- now among the most frequently cited works on the police. In 1979, Professor Goldstein published an article urging that greater attention be given, in efforts to improve police operations, to the analysis of the problems police are called upon to handle and to devising more effective ways in which to deal with them. He developed the concept, described as problem-oriented policing, by studying the police response to several specific substantive problems, including the drinking driver, repeat sexual offenders, the public inebriate, and spousal abuse. Building on this work, and through collaboration with the Police Executive Research Forum and a number of police agencies that have experimented with the concept, he has formulated a radically new framework for improving police operations that has gained international attention. It is this framework that is the subject of this book.