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Police Foundation
Established in 1970, the Police Foundation (also known as the National Police Foundation) is a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization with the mission of supporting innovation and enhancing effectiveness in policing through collaborative efforts in research, technical assistance, and communications programs. The foundation has supported research in police behavior, policy, administration, and procedure, and aims to diffuse contemporary knowledge and best practices to all levels of law enforcement—especially local municipalities. More importantly for present purposes, for many years the foundation has sponsored research that has greatly contributed to our breadth of knowledge concerning policing in general, and to the development and application of community policing and problem solving in specific. After briefly describing the origins of the foundation, this entry discusses the purposes and pillars of the foundation, including research and professional services.
Origins
As noted on the Police Foundation’s website, the nonprofit Ford Foundation, through a $30 million fund, established the Police Foundation to “assist a limited number of police departments in experiments and demonstrations aimed at improving operations, and to support education and training projects.” This fund originally supported projects for a five-year period and sought collaboration with federal, state, and local agencies in an effort to serve as a force multiplier for the issues at hand. As a result of the foundation’s success in spearheading change within the law enforcement community during this five-year period, the Ford Foundation decided to continue its support of the Police Foundation. In 1993, the Ford Foundation provided an endowment fund in the form of a grant to the Third Decade Fund for Improving Public Safety to support the foundation’s work and secure its permanency.
Purpose and Pillars
The purpose of the foundation is to assist the police in being more effective in a variety of areas, including patrol, calls for service, and community policing initiatives. As knowledge about effective policing is gained through research, police agencies may need assistance to integrate that knowledge into practice. Similarly, as society’s demands increase, police agencies may need to revise their practices to not only meet these demands but also maintain an effective fit to protect and serve society. Thus, the foundation established the Institute for Integrity, Leadership, and Professionalism in Policing, which helps agencies address these issues.
Research
The advancement of scientific knowledge to best inform police practice is perhaps the strongest pillar of the foundation—knowledge that is both welcomed and unwelcomed by the community for which it is intended. The foundation strives to maintain an active research agenda by facilitating partnerships with law enforcement and the academic community. Such partnerships provide a means by which innovative ends can be identified. By bringing together professionals and academics, the foundation serves as a conduit for the two-way communication of new ideas and best practices. Leading scholars in the field of policing have presented their research and published their ideas through the foundation’s Ideas in American Policing series.
At times, research findings from experiments sponsored by the foundation have challenged traditional police beliefs. Two such experiments were the Kansas City preventive patrol and the Washington, DC, Policewomen on Patrol. In Kansas City, it was found that routine preventive patrol with marked vehicles did not significantly affect crime rates. In Washington, D.C., female patrol officers mirrored performance levels of their male patrol colleagues at a time when police administrators were hesitant to place female officers into the patrol function.
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- Changing Agency Culture
- Agency Mission and Values, Changes in
- Community Policing, Discretionary Authority Under
- Community Policing: Resources, Time, and Finances in Support of
- Customer-Based Policing
- Decentralizing the Organization/Organizational Change
- Implementation of Community Policing
- Involving Local Businesses
- Learning Organization
- Measuring Officer Performance
- Officers’ Job Satisfaction
- Publicity Campaigns
- Recruiting for Quality and Diversity
- Roles, Chief Executives’
- Roles, First-Line Supervisors’
- Roles, Middle Managers’
- Roles, Officers’
- Strategic Planning
- Crime Analysis: Technologies and Techniques
- Evaluation and Assessment
- Foundations: Evolution of Community Policing and Problem Solving
- Broken Windows Theory
- Building Partnerships and Stakeholders
- Citizen Patrols
- Collaboration With Outside Agencies
- Community Cohesion and Empowerment
- Community Justice
- Community Policing and Problem Solving, Definition of
- Community Policing, Evolution of
- Community Policing: What It Is Not
- Community Prosecution
- Community, Definition of
- Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design
- Directed Patrol, Studies of
- Evidence-Based Policing
- Fear of Crime
- Flint, Michigan, Experiment
- Foot Patrols
- Generations (Three) of Community Policing
- Intelligence-Led Policing
- International Community Policing
- Investigations, Community Policing Strategies for
- Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment
- Metropolitan Police Act of 1829
- Place-Based Policing
- Police Mission
- Police-Community Relations
- Policing, Three Eras of
- Predictive Policing
- Problem-Oriented Policing, Goldstein’s Development of
- Problem-Oriented Policing: Elements, Processes, Implications
- Problem-Solving Courts
- Problem-Solving Process (SARA)
- Problem, Definition of
- Restorative Justice
- Situational Crime Prevention
- Social Capital
- Team Policing
- Volunteers, Police Use of
- Wickersham Commission
- Future Considerations
- Public Safety Issues
- Supporting Legislation and National Organizations
- Center for Problem-Oriented Policing
- Community Oriented Policing Services, Office of
- Community Policing Consortium
- Executive Sessions on Policing
- Homeland Security
- National Center for Community Policing
- National Crime Prevention Council
- Neighborhood Associations
- Operation Weed and Seed
- Police Foundation
- Regional Community Policing Institutes
- Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994
- Training and Curriculum
- “What Works”—Selected Strategies and Initiatives
- Colleges and Universities, Community Policing Strategies for
- Domestic Violence, Community Policing Strategies for
- Drug Crimes, Community Policing Strategies for
- Elderly Victimization, Community Policing Strategies for
- Gang Crimes, Community Policing Strategies for
- Immigrant Populations, Community Policing Strategies for
- Immigration: Issues, Law, and Police Training
- Public Housing, Community Policing Strategies for
- Repeat Victimization, Community Policing Strategies for
- Rural Areas, Community Policing in
- School Violence and Safety, Community Policing Strategies for
- State Police/Patrol, Community Policing Strategies for
- Traffic Problems, Community Policing Strategies for
- Youthful Offenders, Community Policing Strategies for
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