Are Police Agencies Mostly Incident-Driven or Problem-Driven - Essay Example

Because of the frustrations and dissatisfaction brought about by incident-driven policing, an alternative was introduced in 1979 by Herman Goldstein, a well-known and respected law professor from Wisconsin. Goldstein introduced a strategy called a “problem-oriented approach”. He argued that the police should not only be like phone operators answering calls but they should also search for actions to recurring problems that produce identical calls.

Most police agencies are problem-oriented since they find ways to not only solve recurring crimes but looking for solutions to stop the recurrence of such crimes. For example, instead of preventing the crimes by altering comprehensive community conditions such as poverty and discrimination, agencies advocate changes in the local environment thus decreasing the opportunity to commit a crime.

In our community, police agencies follow the problem-oriented type of policing. In which, they follow the philosophy stated in the SARA model which was conceived by researchers, a group of officers selected from the various ranks of Newport News Police Department, during the Police Executive Research Forum ( Braga, 2008, p.15). The stages that the officers follow are, scanning, where they identify the issue and determine if it is a problem, analysis, this is where the data collection is done to determine the nature, scope and causes, response, this is when the information is used to analyze and know the right action and design that will be used. This may involve agencies from outside of the policy arena, and then, assessment or the evaluation of the effects of the response on the target problem. This can be used to review the problem which will be ground on whether to change the response to maintain the positive condition.