Goldstein is the world’s most influential scholar in the field of modern police strategy. Due to his research on, and analysis of POP, police today are focused more on achieving concrete results and less on traditional routine tasks. Goldstein’s starting premise was that policing was not sufficiently focused on achieving specific objectives associated with specific patterns of problems, being diverted by one case at a time.

Identifying crime patterns

His research findings, first published in 1979, resulted in the development of new policing strategies focused on identifying patterns of criminal activity. That enables the police to work more on aggregate problems rather than managing each incident as an isolated case.

Goldstein’s work has also had a major impact on police research, as it encourages collaboration between police and researchers in evaluating the impact of policing.

Goldstein was also awarded the prize for a lifetime of outstanding work on broader issues regarding the role of the police in society – e.g., police powers, social responsibility, police corruption, and the role of police in the legal system.

Preventing gang violence

Some of the most relevant strategies in the problem-oriented approach deal with chronic, serious violence. In the late 1990s, for example, the Boston Police and Harvard researchers applied a POP strategy to reduce gang violence. The tactic involved persuading violent offenders to accept the community’s help in refraining from violence. If they refused this offer, they could expect negative consequences (including swift arrests). This strategy resulted in a dramatic drop in Boston’s juvenile murder rate.

This approach has since been successfully applied in many areas with high levels of gang violence, in the United States and around the world, for example in Sweden. Now known as ‘focused deterrence’, this method has also been applied with great success to problems such as domestic violence and in particularly crime-ridden areas.