What Works in American Policing: A Strategy-by-Strategy Assessment: Part 1

Series Introduction

This is the first 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.

Evidence-based policing. Hot spots policing. Precision policing. Intelligence-led policing. Problem-oriented policing. Community-oriented policing. Predictive policing. American law enforcement has more strategic frameworks at its disposal than at any point in history, yet agencies across the country still struggle to solve crimes, maintain adequate staffing, and sustain the public trust required to keep communities safe.

Too often, these strategies are adopted as political talking points or buzzwords rather than rigorously evaluated operational tools. This series will examine each major policing strategy through an evidence-driven, scholarly, practitioner-informed lens to determine which approaches deserve investment, which need rethinking, and which should be approached with caution.

Why This Matters Right Now

American law enforcement is operating under a convergence of pressures that make strategic clarity urgent:

• Crime-clearance crisis. The national homicide clearance rate, which exceeded 90 percent in the mid-1960s, had fallen to approximately 61 percent as of 2024. Other violent crime categories tell an even worse story: Rape clearance rates have dropped from 49 percent in 1980 to roughly 27 percent, while property crime clearance sits below 14 percent and motor vehicle theft clearance remains in the single digits. Each unsolved case represents a victim without justice and an offender who remains free. Research on deterrence has consistently shown that it is the certainty of consequences (rather than their severity) that most effectively prevents crime. However, when clearance rates collapse, so too does the perceived certainty of accountability—and the ripple effects, from retaliatory violence to witness reluctance, compound the problem.
  
• Workforce emergency. The most recent available survey results indicate that 70 percent of agencies across the United States report greater difficulty hiring than five years ago, with departments operating at roughly 91 percent of authorized strength on average. Sixty-five percent have had to reduce services or eliminate specialized units because of staffing shortages, up from just 25 percent in 2019. Even as hiring ticked up slightly in 2024, sworn numbers remained 5.2 percent below 2020 levels heading into 2025. Cities like New Orleans and Minneapolis have lost 40 percent of their officers over the past decade, and departments nationwide are contending with longer response times, shuttered units, and officers stretched beyond sustainable limits.
  
• Fragile public confidence. After rebounding to 51 percent in 2024 from a record low of 43 percent in 2023, public confidence in the police has dipped back down near that low point—driven in part by sharp partisan shifts under the new administration. The racial gap remains the largest for any institution measured: Just 24 percent of Black adults (only marginally above the 19 percent recorded in 2020) express confidence in the police, compared to 52 percent of white adults. Fifty-eight percent of Americans believe reducing crime should be a top priority for the president and for Congress—a figure that grew steadily across both parties between 2021 and 2024. The public is paying attention, and it expects results.

These pressures compound one another to expose a harder truth about what law enforcement can realistically accomplish with the personnel, resources, and community support it currently has. Understaffed agencies cannot sustain the community engagement necessary to build trust. Low trust erodes the witness cooperation investigators depend on to clear cases. Low clearance rates further erode confidence that the system can deliver justice. Officers working mandatory overtime to cover vacancies have little bandwidth for the proactive, analytical work the most effective strategies demand. Departments that cannot retain experienced detectives lose the institutional knowledge that drives case solvability. And communities that have lost faith in their police are less likely to report crimes, come forward as witnesses, or participate in the partnerships that every strategy in this series ultimately depends on.

Any honest evaluation of policing strategies must account for these operational realities. A framework that looks promising in a well-resourced pilot may fall apart in a department that cannot fill its patrol shifts, let alone support a dedicated analytical unit. Strategy without capacity is just theory. In addition to choosing the right approaches, breaking the cycle demands investments in the personnel, training, technology, and community relationships required to execute them.

What This Series Will Cover

The most effective agencies combine elements from multiple policing strategies rather than relying on any one framework. This series will evaluate the seven major approaches individually before making the case for how they fit together.

• Evidence-based policing comes first as the foundational decision-making philosophy. Its intellectual roots go back to the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (1974) and the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (1984)—landmark studies that challenged long-held assumptions and demonstrated that policing strategies could and should be subjected to rigorous evaluation.

• Hot spots policing and precision policing carry some of the strongest evidence in criminology. Crime concentrates in a small number of locations, and directing resources to those locations produces measurable reductions—often without simply displacing crime elsewhere. However, the evolution toward precision approaches raises important questions about civil liberties and constitutional boundaries that policymakers cannot afford to ignore.
  
• Problem-oriented policing and intelligence-led policing both reject purely reactive, call-driven models in favor of analytical, problem-solving approaches. One draws on foundational work diagnosing the underlying conditions that produce crime, while the other brings data fusion and threat assessment to operational decision-making. Both require investing in the civilian analytical capacity, training infrastructure, and data systems too many departments still lack.

• Community-oriented policing may be the most widely claimed and least consistently practiced strategy in the field. The gap between the philosophy and the reality—typically quota-driven enforcement dressed up with neighborhood events—remains vast. Yet the evidence on procedural justice makes clear that trust is not a soft alternative to enforcement; rather, it is a precondition for the witness cooperation and community partnership that effective enforcement requires.
  
• Predictive policing creates tension between the promise of artificial intelligence (AI)-integrated police technology and serious concerns about bias, surveillance, and the limits of government power. The question is not whether these tools should exist, but whether they are deployed with sufficient transparency, accountability, and constitutional guardrails.

How Each Strategy Will Be Evaluated

Each approach in this series will be assessed against the same criteria that should guide any serious public safety investment:

• Is there credible evidence available to support the strategy?
• Does the strategy produce measurable outcomes in crime reduction, use-of-force trends, and community satisfaction?
• Is the strategy operationally realistic given current staffing and funding constraints?
• Does the strategy respect constitutional boundaries?
• Above all, is it a responsible use of taxpayer dollars backed by genuine data transparency and outcome measurement?

The policing profession does not need another wave of untested initiatives driven by political cycles. It needs honest answers regarding what works, what does not, and where the evidence is still catching up. Legislators weighing public safety agendas need to know which investments will produce returns and which will not. Agency leaders navigating historic staffing shortages need to deploy limited resources where the evidence points, not where tradition or politics dictate. And the communities that law enforcement serves—including the officers themselves—deserve strategies that are accountable to the public and built to work in the real world.

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Next in this series: Part 2—Evidence-Based Policing: Letting Data Lead