Every citizen has a stake in the success of American policing. The police are the crucial link in the nation’s system of crime control and the local agency of government on duty 24 hours a day to protect lives, homes, and property. Everywhere in the nation, police can be the catalyst for community crime prevention efforts.

The purpose of the Police Foundation is to help the police be more effective in doing their job, whether it be deterring robberies, intervening in potentially injurious family disputes, or working to improve relationships between the police and the communities they serve. To accomplish our mission, we work closely with police officers and police agencies across the country, and it is in their hard work and contributions that our accomplishments are rooted.

.....The Beginning

.....What We Do

.....Forty Years as a Catalyst For Change

.....Collaboration

.....Sources of Support

THE BEGINNING

On July 22, 1970, Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy held a press conference in New York City to announce the establishment of a Police Development Fund to foster improvement and innovation in American policing. Bundy outlined the reasons for this effort:

The 1965 Presidential Commission report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, recommended far-reaching improvements, and later reports from the Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) and the Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (the Eisenhower Commission) added significant observations on the need for more effective policing. In establishing the Police Development Fund, which was immediately renamed the Police Foundation, the Ford Foundation observed:

Independent, nonpartisan, and nonprofit, the Police Foundation works to improve American policing and enhance the capacity of the criminal justice system to function effectively. Motivating all of the foundation’s efforts is the goal of efficient, humane policing that operates within the framework of democratic principles and the highest ideals of the nation.

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WHAT WE DO

Research & Evaluation

The Ford Foundation was not alone in 1970 in raising questions about the role of the police. Policy makers, academics, the public, and, most importantly, the police themselves, wanted to know: what are we doing? why are we doing it? can we do it better? what works? how do we experiment and measure?

Social experiments are the hardest kind because they deal with people. When the Police Foundation began its work, social experimentation was not a well-established discipline, but rather a developing art. The foundation has established and refined the capacity to define, design, conduct, and evaluate controlled experiments testing ways to improve the delivery of police services. The development of this method, its execution in the real world, and the dissemination of what it has learned constitute a unique contribution to policing and is a central reason for the foundation’s existence.

It was the foundation that first brought researchers into a lasting, constructive partnership with law enforcement. It was the foundation, in cooperation with police departments all across the country, that engendered a questioning of the traditional model of professional law enforcement and the testing of new approaches to policing.

Since it is the spirit of experimentation rather than a specific set of tactics that the foundation seeks to encourage, there can never be an end to the process. What works in one city may not work in another. Policing constantly faces new challenges, so there is an endless process of discovery and testing, trying new ideas in changing circumstances, and testing them by the most rigorous and objective standards in real-world experiments.

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Professional Services

Over the Police Foundation’s history, its leadership has insisted that the organization’s work have a practical impact on policing, that the knowledge gained through empirical investigation be such that it could be applied outside the "laboratory," with the end result being improvement in the way that police do their work.

In addition to defining, designing, conducting, and evaluating controlled experiments, the foundation offers a range of professional services, including training, technical assistance, and technology. Training programs are custom designed to meet the needs of the individual law enforcement agency.

The Police Foundation’s Crime Mapping and Problem Analysis Laboratory provides training, technical assistance, and consulting services to law enforcement agencies, promotes the substantive application of problem analysis, crime analysis, and crime mapping, and works to develop the physical and theoretical infrastructure necessary for further innovations in police and criminological theory.

Its comprehensive research on police use of force led the foundation to launch a multi-year research and development effort to create technologies to help police agencies monitor officers whose behavior places departments at risk, erodes public confidence, increases liability, and undermines effectiveness. More than an early-warning system, The RAMS™ (Risk Analysis Management System) offers a comprehensive approach to ensuring proper training, accountability, quality service, and community satisfaction with police services.

As a partner in the Community Policing Consortium, along with four other leading national law enforcement organizations, the foundation played a principal role in the development of community policing research, training, and technical assistance. Since 1993, the foundation has provided community policing education, training, and technical assistance to more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies and communities.

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Communications

Unconstrained by partisan imperatives, the Police Foundation speaks with a unique and objective voice. Its focus and perspective is the whole of American policing, rather than any single facet.

A guiding tenet of the foundation is that to advance, policing–like other public services–deserves the best of thorough, objective study, and the impetus of new ideas that have the widest possible dissemination.

Since its inception in 1970, the foundation has stressed the importance of helping to create a new body of knowledge about policing. The quality and quantity of its research reports have helped make the Police Foundation a catalyst for change in American policing.

By disseminating as widely as possible the publications that result from its work, the foundation seeks to ensure that the knowledge it has gained reaches the broader criminal justice community, including law enforcement practitioners, policy makers, and scholars.

The president of the foundation speaks out on issues important to policing and serves as a source of advice and information to police officers and executives, public officials responsible for the quality of policing, and to members of the news media who cover criminal justice.

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FORTY YEARS AS A CATALYST FOR CHANGE

In the past 40 years, policing has changed more fundamentally and dramatically than at any time in its history.

At the beginning of the 1960s, many police departments were closed to the outside: their personnel were drawn largely from particular groups. Little public debate took place over police practices or procedures. The courts frequently deferred to the police department in complaints about or lawsuits over police misconduct. Police departments were frequently well-funded by municipal governments. Police departments engaged in little experimentation and virtually no innovation.

During the same period in the 1960s, other forces were at work. The nation experienced the agony of riots in most of its large cities and many of its smaller ones. Women began to assert their rights and to bring to public attention the prevalence of domestic violence. Stories of corruption in police departments surfaced in the media. The conduct of police toward civil rights and antiwar demonstrators was displayed on television for all the nation–and the world–to witness.

Determined to address the challenges of change in an ever-changing world, the Police Foundation did much of the research that led to a questioning of the traditional model of professional law enforcement and toward a new view of policing–one emphasizing a community orientation–that is widely embraced today. Seminal foundation research on issues such as police patrol practices, women in policing, use of force by police, and the police response to domestic violence has transformed policing in profound ways.

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Research Highlights

The first foundation study to impact police operational practices was the landmark Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment, which showed that increasing or decreasing the level of routine preventive patrol–the backbone of police work–had no appreciable effect on crime, fear of crime, or citizen satisfaction with police services.

In 1971, the Kansas City, MO, Police Department, led by Chief Clarence M. Kelley, sought the Police Foundation’s assistance in exploring deployment of resources. Kelley, who left Kansas City in 1973 to head the FBI, later explained his readiness to experiment:

Joseph McNamara, Kansas City’s police chief when the study was completed and later chief in San Jose, California, said the experiment repudiated "a tradition prevailing in police work for almost 150 years." Patrick V. Murphy, foundation president at the time, observed that "this project ranks among the very few major social experiments ever to be completed..."

Believing that police service is only as good as the people who manage and execute it, the foundation has researched various police personnel practices, and has historically been committed to helping police recruit and retain top-quality officers. In 1972, a foundation survey found that little objective information was available on the performance of policewomen. The foundation’s evaluation, Policewomen on Patrol, was conducted in cooperation with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, and concluded that women perform patrol work as well as men and that gender is not a valid reason to bar women from such work.

On the Move: The Status of Women in Policing, published in 1990, was a follow-on study to earlier foundation research on the role and status of women police officers. This research revealed that women have made major inroads into policing, but also suggests that much more progress needs to be made in recruiting, promoting, and retaining women in policing.

The 1970s witnessed a country besieged by criminal activity related to the burgeoning illegal drug trade. Police departments across the country were confronted with the difficult challenge of how to do more with less. While budget cutbacks affected police departments across the country, crime rates and citizen demands for service continued to increase.

One service frequently demanded by citizens was foot patrol. But for years, departments rejected foot patrol as antiquated, expensive, and irrelevant to contemporary policing. It carried low status among officers, was often regarded as "public relations", and was frequently used to punish poor performance. In 1973, at the invitation of the Governor of New Jersey, the foundation evaluated foot patrol in Newark. The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment–which found that foot patrol reduces citizen fear of crime and increases overall satisfaction with police services–was seminal to the evolution of community policing.

An evaluation done in cooperation with the San Diego Police Department in the mid-1970s concluded that one officer is as effective and safe as two officers in a patrol car and, of course, markedly less expensive. The findings of Patrol Staffing in San Diego contradicted a long-held belief in many large American cities, and led to an examination of patrol practices in departments across the country.

One of the most potentially dangerous calls for service that the police receive are domestic disputes. Prior to 1981, the most common police response had been to intervene as little as possible in domestic disputes. Foundation research in Detroit and Kansas City in 1977 showed the importance of threats as predictors of domestic violence. In the first scientifically controlled test of the effects of arrest for any crime, the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment found that arrest was the most effective way to prevent further violence.

While crime is a major problem in many cities, citizen fear of crime often exceeds the actual risk of being victimized. This fear makes citizens suspicious of one another and erodes the sense of community upon which neighborhood life depends. Ultimately, it can result in urban decay and flight from our cities. In 1982, with funding from the National Institute of Justice, and in cooperation with the Houston and Newark Police Departments, the Police Foundation launched the first empirical study of strategies to reduce citizen fear of crime. The Houston and Newark fear reduction experiments found that police-citizen interaction was an effective strategy. As Lee Brown and Hubert Williams–the leaders of these two departments during the project–wrote in the summary report on the study:

Two facts are central to the debate on controlling street crime. First, a relatively small number of career criminals commit a disproportionate amount of crime. Second, most prisons are overcrowded. The combination of the two has spurred interest in focusing police resources on catching the most active and dangerous chronic offenders. Beginning in 1983, the foundation began an evaluation of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department’s Repeat Offender Project (ROP), that employed a variety of investigative and undercover tactics to apprehend chronic offenders. The findings, published in Catching Career Criminals, strongly indicate that the ROP strategy is an important crime control tool, with those arrested by the ROP unit being more likely to be prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned on felony charges.

The search for improved police effectiveness led the foundation, in 1986, to create the Big Six Project, a cooperative venture with the nation’s largest police departments–New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and Detroit. The project was designed to help these departments transcend their own boundaries, enable a mutually beneficial exchange of information, and develop a repository of information which could benefit other departments of all sizes. In 1991, the foundation published The Big Six report, comparing the policies, procedures, and practices of these six departments.

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Police Conduct

From its inception, the foundation has worked to ensure that the nature of force used by police is the minimum amount necessary to properly discharge their responsibilities under the law. In 1977, the foundation conducted a seven-city study of shooting incidents by police. The report of that study noted:

In the late 1970s, the foundation published a pioneering volume examining police use of deadly force and followed up this effort with further research and a project with the NAACP.

Foundation research on police use of force was cited at length in a landmark 1985 U.S. Supreme court decision, Tennessee v. Garner. The court ruled that the police may use deadly force only against persons whose actions constitute a threat to life.

In 1986, the foundation launched the Police Liability Program to reduce the exposure of local governments to the costs of defending inadequate and wrongful conduct suits stemming from police actions at the operational and administrative levels. The program conducted seminars and workshops for police administrators, legal officers, mayors and city managers, state and county executives, and other government officials.

Real or perceived use of excessive force by police has contributed to most of the country’s urban riots. While it is clear that the police alone cannot create the social change needed to defuse the potential for civil disorders, there are constructive, effective approaches that the police can employ to prevent them, prepare for them, and contain them if they do occur.

In 1993, the foundation published the first nationwide survey of law enforcement agencies regarding: (1) the extent to which police use force; (2) the policies and procedures governing the use of force; (3) the rates and dispositions of citizen complaints; (4) the characteristics of officers and citizens involved in those complaints; and (5) civil suits and criminal charges stemming from alleged excessive force. The study, published as a 360-page report, Police Use of Force: Official Reports, Citizen Complaints, and Legal Consequences, provides a baseline for future analyses of these important issues.

In 1997, with funding from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services of the US Department of Justice, the foundation conducted a representative national survey that would reveal the attitudes of police about sensitive questions of police abuse of authority. The survey sought as well to determine whether community policing impacts on police officer attitudes toward abuse of authority and the rule of law. Officers were questioned about their views on the use of force, the "code of silence", the role of extra-legal factors, methods of controlling abuse of authority, the impact of community policing, and the importance of race, rank, and gender. The foundation has published The Abuse of Police Authority: A National Study of Police Officers' Attitudes, the 197-page report of this study.

Recently, amid growing national concern over police practices that disproportionately target minority citizens, the Police Foundation has recommitted its efforts to ensure that tough, effective law enforcement is possible without sacrificing democratic principles and constitutional safeguards.

The foundation has developed two state-of-the art technologies to enable police agencies to systematically collect and analyze a wide range of performance-related data. The RAMS™II (The Risk Analysis Management System™) is an early-warning device that helps agencies manage and minimize risk through intervention before a crisis occurs in order to preserve lives, careers, and community confidence.

To assist agencies in preventing racial profiling, The Quality of Service Indicator™-QSI™-collects and analyzes officer-citizen contacts, including traffic stop data. The QSI™ allows each department to enter its own jurisdictional demographics and to compare performance with agency established standards.

Both The RAMS™II and the QSI™ produce detailed reports to assist police managers in making critical personnel and operational decisions.

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Community Policing

Community policing is an idea that grew out of foundation research. It was in Kansas City that the foundation learned, in a practical test, that random preventive patrol did not affect the crime rate or citizens’ fear of crime. It was the foundation that was among the first to learn that shortening police response time may have little effect on the chances of a burglar or robber being caught. It was the foundation, working jointly with the police in Houston and Newark, that began to see the advantages of foot patrol and door-to-door surveys as a way of dealing with the public’s fear of crime and disorder. The "broken windows" theory, first advanced in 1982 by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, derived from the Police Foundation’s Newark Foot Patrol study.

Many current and recent foundation research projects are directed at examining community- and problem-oriented policing in several contexts. For information about these projects, go to Research. Please go to Foundation Projects for a historical review of foundation community policing projects.

In order to be effective, the police must develop and sustain community trust and cooperation. Despite advances in community- and problem-oriented policing late in the twentieth century, too many communities remain fearful of the police, a fear exacerbated by highly publicized incidents of police misconduct. The RAMS™II/QSI™ software enhances cooperation between the principal parties responsible for crime control and public safety--the police and the public--by helping to prevent and control problems that erode community confidence in the police.

As a partner in the Community Policing Consortium, along with four other leading national law enforcement organizations, the foundation played a principal role in the development of community policing research, training, and technical assistance.

Increasingly, police agencies are relying upon computer crime mapping to identify and distribute information required by the community, police executives, and patrol officers to achieve a successful community policing partnership. Recognizing the importance of these new technologies, the Police Foundation in 1997 established a state-of-the-art Crime Mapping & Problem Analysis Laboratory.

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Special Projects

The foundation has encouraged the creation of new forums for the debate and dissemination of ideas to improve American policing. For example the foundation has helped to create independent organizations dedicated to the advancement of policing. These organizations include the Police Executive Research Forum, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, and the Police Management Association. The foundation funded POLICE Magazine, which was published from 1978 until 1983.

Although no longer in operation, special sections within the foundation were created throughout the years to address specific needs. In 1976, the foundation created the Police Executive Institute for executive development training of top police managers. The foundation assembled the National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police Officers in 1976. In 1979, the National Information and Research Center on Women in Policing was established in response to a growing need for information directly affecting women in law enforcement.

In the late 1980s under a grant from the National Institute of Justice, the foundation produced CRIME FILE, a 22-part criminal justice videotape series. Moderated by former foundation chairman, James Q. Wilson, each CRIME FILE segment focuses on a single subject such as deadly force, domestic violence, and gun control. CRIME FILE has been widely broadcast on public television stations across the country, and has been used as an educational tool in colleges and universities, in local law enforcement training academies, and by the FBI as part of its nationwide police training effort. This series, and a subsequent 10-part one, can be obtained from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service.

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COLLABORATION

Without the ideas, dedication, and support of America’s police departments, none of the foundation’s work would have been possible. It is in their contributions and willingness to experiment that our accomplishments are rooted.

As a member of the board of directors of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, the Police Foundation, along with fourteen other national law enforcement organizations, guided the development of this national monument to honor the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice.

The foundation is a founding member of the Law Enforcement Steering Committee (LESC), a national coalition of labor, management, and research organizations that work together on important national issues that affect the police, such as passage of the Brady Law requiring a national waiting period and background checks on handgun purchases.

In fostering improvement in policing, the foundation has also worked closely with many organizations and institutions. The foundation has sponsored efforts by others, as well as worked jointly with other groups on specific projects. Such partnerships have included the following agencies and organizations:

• Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety
• American Bar Association
• American Public Welfare Association
• Arizona State University
• Drug Strategies
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Harvard University
• Howard University
• International Association of Chiefs of Police
• International City-County Management Association
• International Personnel Management Association
• Institute for Law and Justice
• Massachusetts Civil Service Commission
• Mathematica Policy Research
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
• National Center for Victims of Crime
• National Commission on Productivity and Work Quality
• National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives
• National Civil Service League
• National Crime Prevention Council
• National League of Cities
• National Sheriffs’ Association
• New England Police Consortium
• Police Executive Research Forum
• Richmond, Virginia, Department of Social Services
• United Nations
• The Urban Institute
• U.S. Conference of Mayors
• Vera Institute of Justice

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SOURCES OF SUPPORT

When The Ford Foundation established the Police Foundation in 1970, it did so with a $30 million fund to "assist a limited number of police departments in experiments and demonstrations aimed at improving operations, and to support special education and training projects." The fund, which would support projects for a five-year period, would join with Federal, state, and local agencies in order to increase its impact. But at the end of that five-year period, Ford decided to continue its support of the Police Foundation because it had strongly established itself as a catalyst for change in policing and it was clear that much work remained to be done. Between 1970 and 1993, The Ford Foundation continued to generously support the Police Foundation’s work.

To ensure that the foundation would become a permanent institution and continue its work as an independent and nonpartisan advocate for innovation and improvement in policing, The Ford Foundation in 1993 provided a generous grant to The Third Decade Fund for Improving Public Safety, the Police Foundation’s endowment fund.

Many individuals, corporations, and foundations have funded or contributed to projects and to general support of the foundation’s work, and specific projects have been supported by Federal, state, and local government grants and contracts.