Cutting crime with knowledge and power - A doorway to effective policing

 

The 2025 Problem-Oriented Policing Conference returns 

to Madison, Wisconsin

By Gregory Saville

A few decades ago, television entered what critics call the Second Golden Age. Gone were the tidy cop shows of the 1970s. In their place came gritty realism. Among them was NYPD Blue, where Detective Andy Sipowicz embodied the flawed but dedicated street cop.

In one memorable episode, Sipowicz points to three hoodlums owning a downtown corner as he mentors a rookie about what it really means to police the streets: “Them three are bad and right now they own that corner. A good cop is gonna take that corner back so that people walking by don’t have to fear for their life.”

Today, that line may sound dated. Yet in its time, the sentiment rang true. As a young police officer, I too heard versions of that same lesson: your beat is your responsibility - protect it with pride. It reflected the enduring myth of the warrior in blue—the guardian who takes back the street.

NYPD Blue - the 1990s police procedural TV drama won 20 primetime Emmy Awards and 80 nominations over its 12-year run

Of course, reality was always messier. Crime is rarely solved by a lone act of heroism. Yet the drive to bring safety and dignity to a community remains. The difference today is that we know far smarter ways to do it.

FROM WARRIOR MYTH TO SMART STRATEGIES 

Despite what the skeptics say, police can and do stop crime— but only when they use the right tools. Sometimes that involves an arrest. More often, it means creative strategies that reduce harm without relying only on force.

This is the world of Problem-Oriented Policing (POP). Conceived by the late Professor Herman Goldstein, POP has become one of the most effective, research-backed models in modern policing. Instead of reacting case by case, POP asks: why is this crime happening here and how can we change the conditions that allow it?

Over decades, POP has built a proven track record: tackling robberies, drug markets, intimate partner violence, carjackings, and more. Its philosophy is simple: don’t just respond to symptoms— use crime analysis, community partnerships, crime prevention through environmental design, and many other inventive strategies to actually solve the problems.

 

Madison Wisconsin, site of the 2025 POP Conference
- photo Wiki Creative Commons

THE POP CONFERENCE 

The annual Problem-Oriented Policing Conference is the gathering place for this work. Previous conferences introduced new strategies and concepts, such as the SafeGrowth model presented for the first time last year.

In 2025, the conference will once again return to Madison, Wisconsin after having been there in 2015. This year it will bring together practitioners, researchers, and community partners to share cutting-edge strategies and real-world results.

At the conference, you’ll learn practical tactics, such as:

• Cutting gun crime through place-based prevention and community partnerships.
• Reducing school bullying by reshaping school climates and peer norms.
• Preventing robberies by focusing on repeat victims, and situational vulnerabilities.
• Applying CPTED and SafeGrowth to redesign public spaces and reduce fear.

The conference is about equipping police and city leaders with the evidence and tools to reduce crime in meaningful, lasting ways. You can register here

The conference is run by the Center for Problem-Oriented Police headed by Michael Scott - the nexus for innovative and effective policing

FROM SIPOWICZ TO POP HEROES

Sipowicz’s message—take back the corner—was once the rallying cry of police culture. It symbolized toughness and control. But today, real heroism looks different. It’s the officer who asks why the corner became dangerous, and then works with residents to change it. It’s the leader who measures success not in arrests, but in safer neighborhoods and stronger trust.

The Sipowicz era imagined the cop as a lone warrior. POP reimagines the cop as a problem-solver, a partner, and a guardian of community well-being.

That is the spirit of the 2025 POP Conference: to give practitioners the strategies, partnerships, and confidence to reclaim not just a street corner, but the whole city and, along with it, the legitimacy and trust that sustain safe communities.

And in that sense, Sipowicz’s line still resonates. Good cops do take back the corner—but today, they do it with insight, compassion, and strategy. Those are the true heroes who guard the community.

 

Building blocks for civic commitment - the key to safety

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Reaching for livability and safety 
through civic commitment

by Larry Leach

The role of commitment in civic life is no different than the desire for a crime-free, livable neighborhood.

Do you feel emotionally tied to something? Maybe a sports team, celebrity, or politician? I do—with the British football club - Liverpool FC. The club’s unique culture is inseparable from the city’s history and tragedies. Before each match, as thousands sing You’ll Never Walk Alone, every supporter invests their own meaning. The song became Liverpool’s anthem in the 1960s, adopted from the version release by the famous Liverpool band “Gerry and the Pacemakers”. The atmosphere isn’t managed by the club—it’s owned by the fans. Why? Commitment!

Which came first, the club trusting the fans or the fans’ deep loyalty? I’d argue the latter. Commitment comes first.

More often than not, making connections between people
involves community events focused on food

What does this have to do with SafeGrowth? When it comes to building local capacity for cohesion, problem-solving and crime prevention, it means everything. Successful communities share the same backbone: history, shared experience, and commitment. 

SafeGrowth aims to help neighborhoods organize this energy and it does so by accepting that many of those people living there are the experts. As Mateja and Gregory wrote in Third Generation CPTED, it’s a holistic approach tying safety to public health, economic vitality, and quality of life—anchored in community engagement and ownership.

Maslow reminds us that our personal needs for safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization come from many different sources, but they all depend on relationships. 

Sociologist Robert Sampson clearly revealed in his landmark research about collective efficacy, how, in many places (especially high crime places), those community ties have eroded. To restore them requires personal commitment. I’ve seen it in twenty years with my Community Association: real progress happens only when people stop dipping toes and fully commit.

Psychologist Maslow's heirarchy of individual needs overlaps
with quality of neighborhood life described in 3rd Generation CPTED

When I was Soccer Association President, someone joked, “You can’t ask a coach what they’re doing for the next five years.” Yet if you want a coach who teaches life lessons and inspires kids, that’s exactly the kind of long-term dedication required.

COMMITMENT FROM THE GROUND UP

How do we build it? There are two keys:

1.     Recognize that each community must be itself—not a copy of another. New York isn’t Paris; Tokyo isn’t Sydney. Great cities learn from each other, but they thrive on uniqueness and history. Communities must do the same: discover their assets, embrace their story, and commit to the work ahead.

2.     Strong leadership draws in strong members. Projects completed together build pride and belonging. That is why SafeGrowth Livability Academies create a pool of community leaders and use problem-solving projects to start the process.

Every time I pass the youth centre where I volunteer, I’m reminded that commitment is not abstract. It’s bricks, voices, and faces. That’s the kind of belonging every community deserves to feel—and the kind of legacy we leave when we choose to stay committed. When we choose to stay the course together, we don’t just build places—we build meaning.”

A reflection on Ronald V. Clarke: Honoring a "crime scientist" and an old friend

Geneva Park Conference Center, Orillia, Ontario. Site of the 1988 conference on Research Futures in Environmental Criminology. I invited Ron Clarke as a presenter - photo Unique Properties

by Gregory Saville

I want to share a short reflection on my old friend Ronald V. Clarke—known not just as a criminologist and recipient of the 2015 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, but as a pioneering crime scientist whose humanity, curiosity, and intellectual courage reshaped our understanding of crime and prevention.

Ron passed away on May 28, 2025, at the age of 84. His death marked the end of a life dedicated not merely to studying crime, but to reimagining how we can prevent it—not through punishment or psychology alone, but by redesigning our environments and systems.

It was Clarke’s co-authored 1976 paper, “Crime as Opportunity,” that truly turned the criminological world on its head. He urged us to stop fixating on criminals and instead look at the opportunities that allowed crimes to happen—changing the offense, not just punishing the offender. From better window locks and improved sightlines to dye-marked banknotes—his vision was pragmatic, grounded, and surprisingly effective. He’d say things like, “remove the opportunity and the crime collapses.” 

Ronald V. Clarke - Professor/Crime Scientist/Friend. Also interested in
preventing wildlife crime and poaching
- photo Benefunder

I first met Ron at a 1988 conference I sponsored at a conference center in Ontario overlooking Lake Couchiching. He had arrived in North America a few years earlier from his career at the UK Home Office, where he pioneered new studies on crime opportunity. I once told him I thought treating opportunity as a root cause of crime was a step too far, unsupported by the data. When he disagreed, it felt less like an admonition and more like a steady, hand guiding me back to the point.

I suspect he preferred “crime scientist” less for the scientific rigor in criminology —which remains limited—and more because the search for offender dispositions had done little to prevent crime. It was hard to argue that! Mainstream criminology often ignored his work and he expressed his frustration with big, elaborate statistical exercises when simple, real-life situational changes kept showing clear effects.

UK Home Office - London. Clarke headed a crime prevention unit for the British government prior to his tenure as Dean of Criminology at Rutgers University
- photo CC-SA 2.0 by Steve Cadman

Ron was also a leader in the practical application of theory. He served as head judge of the Herman Goldstein Problem-Oriented Policing Award—he was my head judge when I was serving as a judge on that program—and set a tone of rigor and fairness that inspired everyone on the panel. 

He was a featured speaker at the 1986 environmental criminology search conference, and he immediately latched onto the action research method that was at the core of our work (the search conference is an action research method). It was about the direct application of theory into practice. That idea became a throughline in his later work - as it had been in his UK work - and it is still a core value we honor today in SafeGrowth.

A LEGACY OF OPPORTUNITY

Ron’s legacy is subtle but profound: he showed us crime isn’t destiny—it’s often a product of ill-placed opportunities, overlooked context, and uninspired design. And by treating the environment as part of the solution, he gave cities, planners, and communities tools that work—without trials, without ideology, but with practicality and empathy.

I honored him by applying his situational insights during our project work on homelessness —believing that when we change the settings of homelessness, we shift the narrative away from fear and blame, toward safety and support. That felt like the truest tribute to his spirit: evolving his ideas with compassion, not just application. His insistence on translating research into real-world change is woven into the DNA of SafeGrowth’s global network today—every project, training, and innovation we advance carries a trace of Ron’s vision for theory in action. 

Thank you Ron, we owe you a debt.