What Works in American Policing Part 5—Community-Oriented Policing: Building the Trust That Effective Policing Depends On

This is the fifth in a seven-part series examining the policing strategies that shape public safety in America, including what the evidence supports, what has fallen short, and what policymakers and practitioners should prioritize going forward.

Part 4 of this series discussed how intelligence-led policing (ILP) approaches provide the most value when paired with strong community trust. Community-oriented policing (COP) is the strategy that takes that trust as its starting point. Where every other approach in this series asks how police should deploy their resources, COP asks a different question first: What kind of relationship between police and the public makes any of those deployments work?

COP is less a tactic than a philosophy. In practice, it means assigning officers to specific neighborhoods for long stretches, getting them out of their cars to know residents and business owners by name, attending community meetings, and working alongside the public to identify and solve local problems rather than only responding to calls. The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) defines it as resting on three principles: community partnerships, problem solving, and organizational transformation—changes inside the department to make engagement part of the job rather than a side project. Since Part 4 already covered the problem-solving aspect, this installment focuses on the partnership and transformation work that surrounds it.

From Foot Patrol to Federal Priority

COP’s roots stretch back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when researchers began questioning the model of policing that had dominated American departments for decades—rapid response, motorized patrol, and reactive investigation. That model was efficient, but it had pulled officers out of the neighborhoods they served. The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment, conducted by the Police Foundation in the late 1970s, found that while putting officers on foot did not reduce crime, it did make residents feel safer and improved their views of police. The Flint, Michigan foot patrol study, led by Robert Trojanowicz, reached similar conclusions. If face-to-face contact between officers and residents produced its own benefits, the profession had been paying a real cost by minimizing it.

Herman Goldstein’s 1987 essay, “Toward Community-Oriented Policing,” argued that community engagement and his earlier work on problem-oriented policing belonged together: solving recurring problems required local knowledge only residents could supply. Trojanowicz and Bonnie Bucqueroux later distilled the approach into ten core principles emphasizing permanent beat assignments, decentralized decision-making, and judging officers on community outcomes rather than activity counts.

The federal commitment came in 1994. Title I of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, known as the Public Safety Partnership and Community Policing Act, established the COPS Office and authorized funding to add 100,000 community policing officers to American streets. Since then, the COPS Office has appropriated more than $20 billion and has funded the hiring or redeployment of roughly 141,000 officers across more than 13,000 state, local, territorial, and Tribal agencies—making COP the most heavily funded policing reform in American history.

Two decades later, the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, convened after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York, organized 156 recommendations into six pillars: building trust and legitimacy; policy and oversight; technology and social media; community policing and crime reduction; training and education; and officer wellness and safety. Building trust and legitimacy came first, described as the foundation on which everything else rests.

The Evidence Base: Strong on Trust, Mixed on Crime

The most rigorous look at COP research came out in a 2014 systematic review and meta-analysis that pulled together 65 separate tests of community policing. The headline finding was mixed. COP had only a small, statistically insignificant effect on crime, but it produced a moderate and significant improvement in how residents felt about their police, along with promising effects on perceptions of disorder and police legitimacy. Notably, the review found no evidence that COP reduces fear of crime, a result that surprised many practitioners. Earlier studies of foot patrol specifically, including the Newark and Flint experiments discussed above, did find that putting officers on the street made residents feel safer, suggesting the effect may depend on how a department actually implements engagement. The 2018 National Academies report on proactive policing and the Congressional Research Service’s review of the COPS program reached the same conclusion: the evidence on crime prevention is mixed, but the effects on satisfaction and legitimacy are well established.

A 2024 study complicates the picture. It argues that prior reviews may underestimate COP’s crime-prevention effects because stronger police-community relationships tend to make people more willing to report crimes they previously kept quiet about. This can inflate the crime numbers in treated areas even as actual victimization falls. The argument is credible, though it remains contested.

Whatever the direct effect on crime, trust matters in its own right. Decades of research on procedural justice has shown that when people see officers as fair, respectful, and accountable, they are more likely to obey the law and to help police when it counts by reporting crimes, serving as witnesses, and sharing the information that closes cases. That matters directly for the collapsing case clearance rates flagged in the series introduction as cases get solved when people are willing to talk. A large-scale 2020 study of procedural justice training found that training more than 8,000 officers in respect, neutrality, and transparency was associated with reductions in both complaints and use of force. Targeted training in COP principles, in other words, may also shift officer behavior and not just civilian attitudes.

The Organizational Transformation Pillar

The pillar that separates genuine COP from the slogan version is the one agencies most often shortchange. Research has found that even in departments with an organizational commitment to COP, shrinking budgets and longstanding hiring and retention challenges pose significant barriers to actually putting the philosophy into practice. Organizational transformation is what closes that gap. It means building community engagement into hiring, training, supervision, performance reviews, and assignment decisions, rather than adding a specialized unit and calling it a day. A national survey of police leaders cited in a 2017 Campbell systematic review found that more than half described it as “very or extremely challenging” to secure resources to implement COP well, and nearly half reported difficulty getting officer buy-in.

Two cases show what serious transformation looks like, and where it falls apart. The Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS), launched in 1993, was for a time the most ambitious municipal experiment in community policing in the country. Beat officers spent most of their time working specific neighborhoods, attending monthly community meetings, and training in problem-solving alongside residents. Early evaluations indicated reductions in victimization, gang activity, drug-market activity, and visible signs of neighborhood decay in some districts, but CAPS lost steam over time as budget pressures, leadership changes, and competing priorities chipped away at the support structure that kept it running.

Camden, New Jersey offers a more recent and contested example. In 2013, the city dissolved its police department and rebuilt it as the Camden County Police Department, requiring officers to reapply and modify agency performance metrics to reward community engagement instead of arrest counts. Violent crime in the city has fallen roughly 50 percent since the new department took over, with homicides dropping from 67 in 2012 to 23 by 2017. But the early years also drew legitimate civil liberties criticism, including a sharp rise in summonses for minor offenses that the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey (ACLU) and local advocates pushed back against. High-volume enforcement for low-level offenses tends to erode trust in the same communities COP is meant to engage, and the pattern is not unique to Camden. Similar tensions have surfaced in jurisdictions like New Orleans and Baltimore, where community-policing initiatives paired with broken-windows style enforcement undermined the very trust the engagement was meant to build. Ongoing oversight, such as public reporting of stop and summons data and review of enforcement patterns, may help catch these drifts before they become unintended consequences.

The post-2020 environment has made organizational transformation even harder. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted in-person community engagement at exactly the moment when the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed strained police-community relations across the country. A 2022 randomized controlled trial of a community-infused problem-oriented policing intervention is a useful illustration. The study found no effect on property or violent crime, with the authors pointing to implementation challenges during those years as a major reason. Even well-designed efforts struggle when the broader environment is working against them.

The Problem of Selective EngagementThe civil liberties concerns surrounding COP cut in two directions. The Camden example illustrates what happens when community engagement is paired with aggressive low-level enforcement: residents who were supposed to be partners become targets. The opposite failure is just as real. Where ILP poses the risk of over-surveillance, COP’s risks lie in under-engagement and inconsistent application, meaning community policing happens in some neighborhoods while others continue to receive primarily enforcement-driven policing.

The 2018 National Academies report flagged exactly this pattern. When COP is rolled out in lower-crime, higher-income areas while other neighborhoods get a different kind of policing, the residents who would benefit most from engagement often receive the least of it. The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing addressed this directly, recommending that agencies build trust with communities that have had strained relationships with police before expecting them to participate in joint problem-solving. Partnership only works when residents have reason to believe their input will be heard.

There is also a risk that community partnerships become public-relations venues rather than exercising real influence. When advisory boards exist to deliver messages to residents rather than shape decisions, the philosophy collapses into branding. The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP)’s evidence assessment of the Task Force recommendations emphasized that legitimacy is built through transparency, civilian oversight, and accountability for outcomes, not through outreach alone.

Closing the Gap Between Rhetoric and Practice

The other strategies in this series can be set up through a specialized unit, a deployment plan, a training module, or a software platform. COP cannot. Its core mechanism—steady and repeated in-person contact between officers and residents—depends on a culture that treats relationships as core police work, which is harder to mandate from above.

The federal track record bears this out. The billions of dollars in appropriations and additional officers funded over three decades represent significant investment, but the lasting on-the-street impact has fallen short of those headline numbers.  A 2005 Government Accountability Office study found that COPS Office funding never reached its original 1994 promise of putting 100,000 new officers on the street by the early 2000s. A more recent analysis of hiring grants awarded between 2009 and 2016 found that each grant-funded position translated to only 0.3 to 0.5 actual increases in sworn force size, as agencies used federal dollars to backfill cuts they would otherwise have had to make. Sustained community engagement requires local commitment that federal grants cannot replace.

That said, for agencies serious about closing the gap, useful resources exist. The COPS Office maintains training curricula, grant programs, and implementation guides, the 21st Century Policing Implementation Guide lays out specific action steps for agencies and municipalities, and university-based partners offer technical assistance grounded in the research. Smaller agencies can lean on regional partnerships and existing community organizations rather than building infrastructure from scratch.

Assessment

The evidence on COP is consistent and clear. The strategy reliably improves resident satisfaction, perceptions of legitimacy, and willingness to cooperate. Its direct effects on crime are smaller and less consistent than those documented in earlier installments, though recent work suggests they may be larger than past reviews have indicated.

That should not be read as a reason to discount the strategy. Trust and cooperation are not soft outcomes. They determine whether victims come forward, whether witnesses testify, and whether residents share the information that closes cases. Community-oriented policing is a distinct strategy, but it is also the one the others rely on: the targeting, deployment, analytical, and problem-solving approaches covered earlier in this series all depend on a level of public cooperation that COP is uniquely positioned to build.

What limits COP is the gap, in practice, between the three principles that define the strategy itself: community partnerships, problem solving, and organizational transformation. Most agencies will fund community partnerships and some problem-solving. The harder work, such as changing hiring criteria, training, supervision, and the metrics by which officers are judged, remains the exception rather than the rule. Until that principle catches up to the others, the strategy will keep producing legitimacy gains without the deeper changes that would let it do more. Agencies willing to invest in all three pillars, and to extend genuine partnership to the neighborhoods that need it most rather than the ones easiest to reach, will build the public safety foundation that every other strategy in this series ultimately rests on.

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Next in this series: Part 6—Predictive Policing: Promise, Pitfalls, and the Limits of Algorithmic Forecasting