The 2018 National Academy of Sciences report on proactive policing acknowledges that police strategies to prevent crime are likely to have collateral consequences on community outcomes, and in some cases (such as community-oriented policing) aim to shape community outcomes directly. However, strategies that effectively prevent crime have mixed effects on community outcomes, while approaches that improve community perceptions of the police often do not have strong crime control benefits. In this chapter I propose that the future of proactive policing may depend on developing a better understanding of the complex relationship between communities, police, and crime prevention. Rather than viewing community impacts and crime prevention impacts as two separate processes, I argue that community support and collaboration are inherent to proactivity and may ultimately moderate the success or failure of proactive policing strategies. I conclude with suggestions for future research and theory development to better understand this relationship and translate research into effective practice.

In this chapter we summarize the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report on proactive policing, focusing on impacts on crime and communities. We begin the paper with a description of how proactive policing was defined in the report, and a summary of the wide scale use of proactive policing approaches in American police agencies. We then turn to summaries of the evidence on crime control and community outcomes. The report concluded that there was sufficient scientific evidence to support the adoption of many proactive policing practices. We argue that successful prevention programs rely on greater focusing of police resources, and expansion of the tools of policing (for crime prevention). The Committee also found that crime prevention outcomes can often be obtained without producing negative community reactions, and that some community-based strategies have begun to show evidence of improving the relations between the police and public. In concluding, we argue that future proactive policing programs should seek to maximize both crime prevention and positive community outcomes and suggest how this can be done given the report’s findings.