Problem oriented policing is a strategy that asks police to stop cycling through individual 911 calls and instead dig into the recurring conditions that generate those calls in the first place. Introduced by criminologist Herman Goldstein in 1979, the approach treats crime and disorder as problems to be analyzed and solved rather than incidents to be dispatched and forgotten. An updated systematic review and meta-analysis covering 34 evaluations found that problem oriented policing is associated with roughly a 34 percent reduction in crime and disorder in treatment areas compared to controls, making it one of the better-evidenced strategies in modern law enforcement.
Why Goldstein Thought Policing Needed an Overhaul
Goldstein’s original argument was blunt: police departments had become obsessed with their own internal machinery and had lost sight of the actual outcomes they were supposed to produce. He called this the “means over ends” syndrome, noting that agencies poured energy into management reforms, new technology, and faster response times without asking whether any of it made communities safer. His 1979 paper argued that if policing was ever going to mature as a profession, it had to “concern itself more directly with the end product of its efforts.”1Crime & Delinquency. Improving Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach The concept that grew from this critique asks officers and agencies to look past the surface-level incident and identify the underlying conditions that keep producing it. A string of burglaries at a strip mall, for instance, is not just a series of individual crimes to investigate after the fact. It is a problem with identifiable features, like poor lighting, absent ownership, or a known fence operating nearby, and addressing those features can prevent future incidents entirely.
The scope was intentionally broad. Problem oriented policing was never limited to serious violent crime. Goldstein envisioned police tackling the full range of issues that threaten community safety, including nuisance complaints, disorder, traffic hazards, and quality-of-life concerns that rarely make the evening news but consume enormous patrol time.2NCJRS Virtual Library. Problem-Oriented Policing: Reflections on the First 20 Years That breadth is part of what sets it apart from traditional enforcement-heavy approaches. A noise complaint at a bar, an uptick in shoplifting at a particular intersection, a park that keeps attracting drug dealing: all of these are “problems” in the Goldstein sense, and all are candidates for the same structured method of analysis and response.
The SARA Process and the Problem Triangle
The most widely used framework for carrying out problem oriented policing is known by the acronym SARA, which stands for Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment.3PubMed Central. Updated protocol: The effects of problem-oriented policing on crime and disorder: An updated systematic review In practice, scanning means identifying a recurring problem rather than treating each incident as isolated. Analysis means collecting data, talking to stakeholders, and figuring out what conditions are enabling the problem. Response means designing a tailored intervention, which might or might not involve traditional enforcement. Assessment means going back afterward to see whether the response actually worked.
Underpinning SARA is a conceptual tool sometimes called the problem analysis triangle. It breaks any crime or disorder problem down into three elements: the offender, the target or victim, and the location or environment where the two come together. The logic is straightforward: if you can remove or alter any one of these three legs, the problem loses the conditions it needs to persist.4SAGE Knowledge. Encyclopedia of Community Policing and Problem Solving: Problem Analysis Triangle A parking lot that keeps getting broken into might have a victim problem (cars with valuables in plain sight), an offender problem (a nearby halfway house with inadequate supervision), a location problem (no cameras, no foot traffic, poor sightlines), or some combination. The triangle gives officers and analysts a structured way to figure out which leg is most vulnerable to intervention.
This may sound simple on paper, and in some ways it is. But the shift it demands is significant. Traditional policing rewards rapid response and case clearance. SARA asks officers to slow down, gather information, think analytically about root causes, and then design something creative, often in partnership with people outside the department. That is a fundamentally different kind of work, and as we will see, it is the source of both the strategy’s power and its implementation difficulties.
What the Evidence Actually Shows
The strongest evidence comes from an updated Campbell Collaboration systematic review that synthesized findings from 34 studies. Across all models, the review found a statistically significant reduction in crime and disorder: roughly 34 percent in treatment areas relative to controls. That is a meaningful effect. Importantly, 31 of the 34 studies showed effects favoring the treatment group, so the finding is not driven by a handful of outliers.5PubMed Central. Problem‐oriented policing for reducing crime and disorder: An updated systematic review and meta‐analysis
One common worry about place-based crime strategies is displacement: you clean up one block, and the problem just moves to the next one. The review found no evidence of significant displacement. In fact, it found some evidence of the opposite, a “diffusion of crime control benefits,” meaning areas near the targeted zones also saw improvements.6PubMed Central. Problem‐oriented policing for reducing crime and disorder: An updated systematic review and meta‐analysis That finding matters for city planners and police commanders who worry that problem oriented policing just shuffles crime around. The data suggests it does not.
There is also evidence that the approach is cost-effective, though the review noted that few studies have rigorously measured cost savings. The logic tracks intuitively: if you spend resources once to fix a condition that was generating repeated calls for service, you save every future response that would have been required. But the formal economic evaluations remain sparse.
Where the Effect Falls Short
The crime reduction numbers are encouraging, but they do not tell the full story. The same systematic review found that problem oriented policing has limited impacts on outcomes beyond crime counts. Specifically, it showed little effect on residents’ fear of crime, on public perceptions of police legitimacy, and on collective efficacy, which is the sense within a neighborhood that people look out for each other and can influence what happens on their streets.7PubMed Central. Problem‐oriented policing for reducing crime and disorder: An updated systematic review and meta‐analysis
This is a real limitation and one that sometimes gets overlooked in discussions about “what works” in policing. You can reduce burglaries by 40 percent in a neighborhood, but if residents still feel unsafe, still distrust officers, and still do not believe they have any collective power to shape their community, the intervention has solved a statistical problem without solving the human one. Critics of problem oriented policing sometimes point to this gap as evidence that the strategy is too narrowly focused on quantifiable crime outcomes and too removed from the relational work that builds trust between police and communities.
Whether that is a fair criticism depends on what you think policing is supposed to accomplish. Goldstein’s original vision was explicitly about outcomes beyond arrest numbers: he wanted police to measure their success by whether community problems actually got solved. But in practice, the evaluations have overwhelmingly measured crime counts, because those are easiest to track. The gap between Goldstein’s vision and how the strategy gets evaluated is itself a persistent problem in the field.
When Problem Oriented Policing Works Best
Not every implementation produces the same results. A study that systematically examined the variation in effect sizes across evaluations found that the overall 34 percent reduction is real but masks significant differences depending on how well the strategy was executed and what type of problem it targeted.8Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. When is problem-oriented policing most effective? A systematic examination of heterogeneity in effect sizes for reducing crime and disorder
Projects that follow the SARA model more faithfully tend to produce larger effects. That sounds obvious, but it matters because many real-world implementations skip steps, especially the analysis and assessment phases. An agency that scans for a problem and jumps straight to a response without doing serious analysis is not really doing problem oriented policing; it is doing traditional policing with extra paperwork. Similarly, agencies that never go back to assess whether their intervention worked miss the feedback loop that makes the whole process self-correcting.
A related strategy called “focused deterrence” or “pulling levers” offers a useful comparison. Focused deterrence targets specific high-risk individuals or groups with a clear message: stop the violence, and we will connect you with services, but continue, and we will use every legal tool available. A Campbell systematic review of 10 focused deterrence programs, all based in the United States, found a medium-sized crime reduction effect, with nine out of ten studies reporting statistically significant positive results. Gang and group intervention programs showed the largest effects, followed by drug market interventions, with programs targeting high-risk individuals showing the smallest (but still significant) effect.9Campbell Systematic Reviews: Better Evidence for a Better World. The Effects of “Pulling Levers” Focused Deterrence Strategies on Crime Focused deterrence is not identical to problem oriented policing, but it shares the same DNA: identify a specific problem, analyze who and what is driving it, and design a targeted response rather than relying on blanket enforcement.
Why Departments Struggle to Adopt It
If the evidence is this strong, why has problem oriented policing not become the default way of doing business? The answer lies in organizational culture, and it is a stubborn one. A case study of its diffusion through police agencies in England and Wales found that departments have generally not adopted it, and even when they try, it is often rejected over time. The study identified several factors behind this pattern, most notably the incompatibility of problem oriented policing with prevailing norms and values inside police organizations, along with its inherent complexity and the difficulty of observing its results in real time.10International Journal of Police Science & Management. The diffusion of police innovation: A case study of problem-oriented policing in England and Wales
Police culture generally rewards action, speed, and visible enforcement. An officer who makes a lot of arrests looks productive. An officer who spends two months analyzing data on a recurring shoplifting problem and then coordinates with a property manager to redesign a store entrance does not look productive by traditional metrics, even if the second approach eliminates the problem entirely. Problem oriented policing asks officers to do slow, unglamorous, analytical work in a profession that has historically valued fast, visible, enforcement-heavy work. That cultural clash is not a minor obstacle. It goes to the core of how officers understand their role and how supervisors evaluate performance.
Complexity compounds the problem. SARA is a simple framework in theory, but doing it well requires skills that most officers are not trained in: data analysis, stakeholder engagement, creative problem design, and rigorous follow-up assessment. An analysis of 153 finalist and winning projects from the Herman Goldstein Problem-Oriented Policing Awards between 1993 and 2017 found wide variation in how thoroughly agencies executed each step of the SARA model. The assessment phase was consistently the weakest: agencies designed and implemented responses but rarely went back to measure whether those responses actually worked.11Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. Analysis of Herman Goldstein Problem-Oriented Policing Awards from 1993-2017 Without that final step, the process loses its self-correcting power and drifts back toward intuition-based responses.
The Training Gap
One reason officers struggle with analytical work is that their training never prepared them for it. Police academy curricula have historically focused on legal authority, defensive tactics, firearms proficiency, and report writing. A review of academy training practices found that curricula had changed very little over the preceding two decades, even as the profession’s expectations shifted dramatically toward community engagement and problem solving. The authors recommended that academies move beyond traditional task-based instruction and devote substantially more time to developing problem-solving, interpersonal, and decision-making skills.12Police Quarterly. Police Academy Training: Why Hasn’t It Kept Up With Practice?
That gap between what the profession expects and what academies teach has real consequences. An officer who graduates from a 20-week academy heavy on use-of-force scenarios and light on analytical thinking is not going to spontaneously start conducting environmental scans and building partnership responses to disorder problems. In-service training can help, and some agencies have created dedicated problem-solving units staffed by officers with analytical aptitude. But as long as the baseline academy experience does not equip new officers with the foundational skills, problem oriented policing will remain something that departments dabble in rather than practice systematically.
Collaboration Is Harder Than It Sounds
Problem oriented policing almost always requires working with outside partners: city code enforcement, social service agencies, property owners, neighborhood groups, schools, public health departments. Goldstein envisioned police as conveners who would pull in whatever resources a problem demanded, regardless of whether those resources sat inside or outside the department. In practice, this is where many projects run into trouble.
A study of a multiagency collaborative targeting family violence in a southwestern metropolitan area found that even in an era when everyone agreed collaboration was important, the reality was difficult. The participating organizations had different priorities, different organizational cultures, and different levels of willingness to share information and coordinate responses. What emerged was “a less effective process of negotiation rather than collaboration,” with formidable barriers to genuine partnership persisting throughout the project.13Police Quarterly. Community Policing and Family Violence Against Women: Lessons Learned from a Multiagency Collaborative
This is not unique to that one project. Cross-agency collaboration is hard in almost every domain of government, and policing is no exception. Social service agencies may distrust police motives. Code enforcement offices may not have the staffing to respond to police requests. Property owners may resist changes that cost money. Problem oriented policing projects that look elegant on paper can stall when they depend on the active cooperation of organizations that have no obligation, and sometimes no incentive, to participate. The most successful projects tend to be ones where a dedicated officer or unit builds personal relationships with key partners over time, rather than trying to summon collaboration on demand for each new problem.
How It Differs from Community Policing
People frequently confuse problem oriented policing with community policing, and the two are related but distinct. Community policing is a broad philosophy that emphasizes building trust between officers and residents, typically through foot patrols, neighborhood meetings, citizen advisory boards, and visible presence. Its primary currency is relationships and legitimacy. Problem oriented policing is a method: it is about identifying a specific problem, analyzing it systematically, and designing a tailored response. You can do community policing without ever doing serious problem analysis, and you can do rigorous problem oriented policing without ever attending a neighborhood meeting.
In the best cases, the two reinforce each other. Community relationships give officers the local knowledge they need to identify and understand problems, while effective problem solving demonstrates to residents that police engagement leads to tangible improvements. But agencies sometimes adopt the language of both without truly doing either, holding occasional community forums (community policing) and conducting surface-level problem analyses (problem oriented policing) without the depth or commitment that either approach requires to produce results.
What the Goldstein Awards Reveal About Real-World Practice
The Herman Goldstein Award for Excellence in Problem-Oriented Policing has been given annually since 1993 and provides one of the best windows into how agencies actually practice the approach. The analysis of 153 finalist and winning projects over a 25-year span revealed some encouraging trends alongside persistent weaknesses.14Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. Analysis of Herman Goldstein Problem-Oriented Policing Awards from 1993-2017 Over time, projects showed increasing use of technology and growing involvement of collaborative partners like crime analysts, academic researchers, and community stakeholders. The range of problems addressed was broad, spanning everything from serious violent crime to noise complaints and traffic safety.
But even among award finalists, the quality of the assessment phase lagged behind the other SARA steps. Projects were generally strong on scanning (identifying the problem) and response (doing something about it), decent on analysis, and weak on assessment. This pattern echoes the broader implementation challenge: the part of the process that makes problem oriented policing genuinely evidence-based, going back to check whether the intervention worked, is the part that agencies most frequently skip or execute poorly. Without it, problem solving becomes a one-shot intuition exercise rather than a learning cycle.
Ethical and Practical Concerns
Problem oriented policing is sometimes described as a philosophy rather than a set of specific tactics, and that flexibility is both a strength and a risk. Because the approach encourages creative, non-traditional responses, it can lead police into areas that raise civil liberties questions. If the “response” to a problem involves pressuring a landlord to evict tenants, lobbying for a zoning change, or conducting intensive surveillance of a small geographic area, those actions carry consequences for the people who live and work there. The analytical framework provides no built-in check on whether a proposed response is proportionate, fair, or respectful of individual rights.
There is also a selection bias in which problems get the problem oriented treatment. Agencies with limited analytical capacity tend to apply the approach to visible, politically salient problems: open-air drug markets, downtown disorder, chronic nuisance properties. Problems that disproportionately affect marginalized communities but do not generate political pressure, like wage theft, slumlord negligence, or environmental hazards, rarely make it to the scanning phase. The method itself is neutral on what gets analyzed, but organizational incentives are not.
The family violence collaborative study illustrates another dimension of this concern. Even when agencies commit to tackling a problem that affects vulnerable populations, the barriers to genuine collaboration can leave victims underserved.15Police Quarterly. Community Policing and Family Violence Against Women: Lessons Learned from a Multiagency Collaborative A problem oriented project that begins with good intentions but stalls in the negotiation phase can create the appearance of action without delivering results, which may actually be worse than doing nothing if it absorbs resources and attention that could have been directed elsewhere.
The Technology Question
Modern data tools have made the analysis phase of SARA far more accessible than it was in 1979. Geographic information systems, predictive analytics platforms, and electronic records management give even mid-sized agencies the ability to map crime patterns, identify hot spots, and track the results of interventions in near-real time. The Goldstein Award analysis noted increasing use of technology in projects over the 25-year study period, suggesting that agencies are gradually building the analytical infrastructure that problem oriented policing demands.16Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. Analysis of Herman Goldstein Problem-Oriented Policing Awards from 1993-2017
But technology is a double-edged tool here. Predictive policing software, for example, can identify where problems are likely to occur, but it cannot tell you why they occur or what to do about them. Agencies that rely heavily on algorithmic predictions without coupling them with the kind of deep, contextual analysis that SARA requires risk reverting to a high-tech version of reactive policing: deploying more officers to predicted hot spots rather than investigating and addressing the underlying conditions. The analytical step that Goldstein considered essential, asking why a problem exists and what non-enforcement responses might fix it, still requires human judgment, local knowledge, and creative thinking. No software package delivers that.
There is also the question of who gets surveilled. Data-intensive problem analysis can concentrate police attention on communities that are already over-policed, reinforcing feedback loops in which historically disadvantaged neighborhoods generate more data, attract more analytical attention, and receive more intervention, whether or not those interventions are enforcement-based. Agencies that take the analytical dimension of problem oriented policing seriously need to be conscious of these dynamics and deliberate about applying the approach equitably across their jurisdictions.