By Adrian Leigh, Tim Read and Nick Tilley
Much police work is incident-driven and officers frequently find themselves returning to deal with similar or related incidents they or their colleagues have faced in the past. The concept of Problem-Oriented Policing (POP) is about examining patterns of incident clusters to identify and tackle underlying problems within the community. The active involvement of the community and external agencies is often vital to the identification of problems and the development of strategies to solve them. The originator of the concept, Herman Goldstein, believes that the whole of the police service needs to be oriented to problems. The perceived benefits of POP include:
a better-served public whose concerns are attended to at source;
officers with enhanced job satisfaction from bringing the public real benefits; and,
more manageable demands on the police because underlying problems are solved, reducing repeat calls.
Since POP was first proposed in 1979, it has been widely adopted in the United States. There have also been a number of efforts to implement it in England and Wales. Despite overlooking some elements of POP proposed by Goldstein, past initiatives have been labelled Problem-Oriented Policing because they have taken on board his most important tenet: that officers should tackle the root cause of related incidents, rather than repeatedly returning to them. Whilst forces have adopted a variety of approaches, most initiatives have been relatively small-scale and have affected only a small number of dedicated officers. All have recorded mixed success, although none has established a formal means by which to assess outcomes. In particular, none of the past POP initiatives in England and Wales has adopted a formal and systematic model linking incident identification and analysis with the construction of responses and subsequent assessment of the actions taken. At the time of writing, both Surrey and Thames Valley were intending to introduce POP on a much wider scale and in a form closer to that originally proposed by Goldstein.
London Home Office. Crime Detection and Prevention Series Paper 75. 1996. 72p.
