Policing in the New Century: An Executive Session on Public Safety

Police agencies across the United States face a frightening array of new challenges, yet those agencies are equipped with organizational and strategic frameworks from an earlier era. What's more, they face these challenges at a time of high expectations established over a decade or more of declines in crime, and tight budgets at every level of government. Police agencies have access to many new tools and technologies'from weapons and surveillance equipment, to data systems, to forensic science'but these new tools are expensive and difficult to integrate into the strategies, operations, and skill sets of thousands of separate departments across the nation. At the same time, police and government leaders are asking themselves the most basic questions about how they can adapt the traditional practices of patrol, investigation, and community policing to achieve demonstrable reductions in crime and the fear of crime in the near term. The new Executive Session on Public Safety will bring together today's established police executives with those rising to take their place. Joining these leaders in policing will be local, state, and federal officials concerned with public safety as well as Harvard's scholars. Together, the members of the Executive Session will elaborate the strategies and frameworks needed for policing in this new century.

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