For more information on the model programs discussed, see Links , and contact Paul Shepard, Director for Communications at 202-234-8104.

To stabilize the poor communities -- and so to promote community-based development corporations and banking -- new forms of policing have evolved over the last 20 years. They include the interrelated notions of problem-oriented policing, community-based policing, and community equity policing. See the Citations at the end of this section. For more information see the Police Executive Research Forum and the Police Foundation. Under Publications, see Youth Investment and Police Mentoring.

Problem-Oriented and Community-Based Policing
In problem-oriented policing, the concept is not to react to crime after it occurs, which is what most American police do, but to prevent crime before it occurs by dealing with some of the problems that cause crime.

For example, in a comparison group demonstration evaluated by the Police Executive Research Forum in Newport News, Virginia, the burglary rate in high-crime public housing was reduced by 35 percent during a 2 year period. This was done not through making more arrests after crimes had occurred, but rather by improving maintenance of public-housing properties, among other preventive strategies.

A much looser concept than problem-oriented policing is community-based policing. According to Herman Goldstein at the University of Wisconsin, the term community policing today is used "to encompass practically all innovations in policing, from the ambitious to the mundane, from the most carefully thought through to the most casual."

In one of the first-used definitions, community-based policing meant getting officers out of cars and onto foot patrols. On foot, police can interact better with neighborhood residents, become their friends, report suspicious events, and sometimes build on friendships to pursue problem-oriented policing. However, there is little scientific evaluation evidence that community-based policing in the form of foot patrols reduces crime per se. Evaluations by the Police Foundation and others in Flint, Michigan; Kansas City, Missouri; Newark, New Jersey; Houston, Texas; and New York City all point to this conclusion. Some findings indicate a reduction in residents’ fear of crime as a result of police foot patrols. This fear reduction occurs mostly in middle-class urban neighborhoods, not inner-city locations.

Community Equity Policing
Community equity policing links problem-oriented, community-based policing to youth development.

As developed by the Eisenhower Foundation in inner-city locations, community equity policing is grounded in a physical structure -- a safe haven for youth that is run by civilians, combined with a police ministation that shares the same space. Typically, the safe haven-ministations are most active from about 3:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., weekdays. The safe haven-ministations also are designed as magnets to attract other programs at or near the same locations.

Paid civilian and police staff at each safe haven-ministation give priority to advocating for, near-peering counseling and mentoring high-risk youth. Staff work with these youth throughout the replication. Paid staff concentrate on helping youth with their homework, tutoring, learning through computers, providing social support and discipline to youth in their school activities and personal lives, providing positive role models, solving problems at home by sitting down with both parents and youth, developing youth at school through weekly liaison with teachers and other school staff, providing recreational opportunities, undertaking pre-employment and employment training, locating summer job opportunities, and teaching life skills (like how to save money and start a bank account or how to peacefully resolve conflicts with others). The goal is to develop youth, keep youth in school, improve their grades, keep them

Conventionally, in such partnerships police have control and civilians assist. Police are well-funded (including substantial federal support). Most nonprofit youth development organizations are chronically underfunded, at federal, state and local levels. Most national funding, from federal agencies and private foundations, was channeled by the Eisenhower Foundation to the nonprofit youth organizations, which had the organizational lead -- while police agreed to assign officers as local match. Based on the positive Index crime reduction and youth development outcomes from such institutional and financial relationships, we believe that replication of our concepts across the nation to a scale equal to the dimensions of the problems is one cost-effective venue for better funding and developing the institutional capacity of nonprofit organizations -- while at the same time crediting police with success. Wise replication policy can create win-win outcomes, when it comes to youth development nonprofits and police.

Such community equity policing already has been replicated in 2 generations of replications in the 1990s. (Third and fourth generation work now is underway.) For all first and second generation sites, FBI Index crime was reduced. For example, in the first generation, in 4 cities -- San Juan, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago -- a quasi-experimental evaluation design showed serious crime to decline by at least 22 percent and by as much as 27 percent over a minimum of 3 years. Across the 4 cities, the decline in the 4 target neighborhoods where the police-community partnerships were replicated was significantly greater statistically than for either the surrounding precincts or cities as a whole.

In addition, in all first and second generation community equity policing sites, race and community relations improved with community equity policing. In Memphis, community equity policing succeeded where a Weed and Seed program did not. By contrast, get tough "zero tolerance" policing, which is fashionable but unevaluated for the most part, often has reduced crime at the expense of good race and community relations -- as is the case in New York City.

In addition, zero tolerance policing has been poorly evaluated. For example, in New York and other cities, zero tolerance never have been evaluated in a quasi-experimental design -- with, for example, some precincts experiencing it and some not. New York City did experience a crime drop during the time when its zero tolerance policy was put into effect. However, as Richard Moran at Mount Holyoke College has concluded, the New York City decline began 3 years before the zero tolerance policy began. This suggests that the main reason for the decline may have been something other than zero tolerance. The most important explanation, concludes Moran, may have been the decline of the murderous crack turf wars among dealers in New York and other big cities.

Nationally, some cities which have implemented a zero tolerance policy have experienced crime declines and some have not. For example, from 1991 to 1996, murder declined more rapidly in East St. Louis than in New York City -- even though East St. Louis did not introduce zero tolerance. The sharp murder drop in East St. Louis occurred at a time when the police were so deeply in debt that police layoffs were common. Many police cars did not have functioning radios, and many cars were idle because there was no money for gas.

Additional Examples: