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The crime news these days is mostly good. Over the last eight years, crime rates have plummeted to the lowest levels in decades. Sustained economic growth, reduction in the use of crack cocaine, tougher gun laws and enforcement, and more cops on the beat have combined to make America's streets safer than at any time since the first reliable statistics were collected in the 1960s. Many of these improvements can be attributed to a surge of community policing techniques around the country that have fundamentally altered the philosophy of how many police departments work and the way they interact with their communities.

Yet for all the good news there are troubling signs on the horizon. Crime numbers are not continuing to plummet everywhere (for example, in Dallas and Houston, Texas, and Tampa, Fla.). New drugs such as ecstasy may reinvigorate the narcotics trade. Racial profiling and a perception of unequal law enforcement has cast a pall over improved relations in areas where community policing was beginning to make a difference. And, perhaps most worrisome, demographers forecast by 2010 a bubble of 4.4 million more youths in the crime-prone 15-to-24-year age group.

What does this mean for the new administration in Washington? It means that an aggressive new crime-fighting strategy -- and appropriate funding -- must emerge from Congress to help cities and states get a handle on coming crime problems before they spin back into pre-1990s numbers. This anti-crime agenda should build on the new view of community-based crime fighting developed in the last decade and focus on three key priorities:

1) harnessing the new information and communications technologies to give law enforcement agencies new crime-fighting tools;

2) expanding community policing programs with strategies aimed at dangerous people in dangerous places;

3) replacing racial profiling with criminal targeting.

How We Got Here

To understand the choices we face today in crime fighting, it's important to understand how we got where we are. In the early 1990s the nation was mired in an ideological impasse on crime fighting, in which liberals demanded more money to attack social inequities and conservatives insisted on harsher punishment for criminals. President Clinton proposed a Third Way: a new focus on preventing crime by expanding the number of police and deploying them in more creative ways.

The cornerstone of the Clinton administration's anti-crime policy was the establishment of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) within the Department of Justice. COPS provided funding for 100,000 new police officers both to help undermanned police departments around the country and to encourage them to adopt the new, community-oriented policing strategies that had shown great promise in San Diego and other communities. Since its inception, the COPS office has provided more than $6 billion in grants to state and local agencies for technology and new police officers. The COPS office reports that because of its efforts, 109,139 new police officers are working with community members to make neighborhoods safer.

While the "100,000 cops" initiative grabbed most of the headlines, the most important accomplishment of the COPS program has been strategic: It has shifted the basic policing approach away from the old "911" model known as calls-for-service. This reactive approach is now moving toward community collaboration and preemptive problem solving. Instead of driving around randomly in cars and responding to emergency calls, police are now on foot and on bicycles so that they become visible fixtures in neighborhoods. They work with community leaders to identify conditions that breed disorder; they share information about potential problems; and they forge common strategies for preventing crime, not simply catching criminals after the fact.

In short, community-oriented policing has reconnected police with the communities they serve. It has also breached the bureaucratic barriers that prevented multi-agency responses to the quality-of-life problems that facilitate crime, such as broken streetlights and abandoned buildings. Effective crime prevention requires that lights be repaired so that crimes aren't cloaked in darkness and that abandoned houses be condemned and razed so that they cannot be used for prostitution and drug trafficking. Thus, "broken windows" environments are eliminated before they begin attracting or reinforcing criminal activity. Even filling potholes is good policing policy -- it frees officers from directing traffic to catching criminals.

Community-oriented policing also helps break down the stovepipe mentality of public agencies. It allows government and citizens to work together to tailor solutions that fit the crime problems in individual neighborhoods. It is supported by emerging information technologies such as wireless data and the Internet to improve the delivery of government services.

Agenda for the Future

Building on these successes, the new administration should pursue a technology-driven agenda for the future that breaks into three key parts - increasing COPS funding for technology tools, targeting hot spots and repeat offenders, and replacing racial profiling with criminal targeting.

1) Boost the technology budget of the COPS program. The federal government should push crime fighting into the digital age by providing national standards that support the deployment of cutting-edge information and communication systems. Through the COPS office, it should funnel seed money to state and local governments.

Rapidly collecting and disseminating good information about the people who commit crime and the places where crime occurs is the key. Yet most police, parole officers, and courts are operating with 20-year-old information technology. Even though high-speed digital technology is already available, many cops must still wait 20 minutes for basic information about a vehicle or person they've stopped (digital technology can obtain and transmit a car's record in 10 seconds). Days or weeks can pass before criminal warrants find their way into computers, leaving dangerous criminals on the street and police unaware they are wanted. Judges sentence offenders without seeing their criminal history records.

Some states, such as Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina, are working to establish statewide networks that improve information sharing and voice communication between the various components of the criminal justice community. These networks will link state and local law enforcement efforts and non-law enforcement agencies.

In addition to these initiatives, the criminal justice community must adjust to the new phenomenon of cybercrime. As criminals use communications and information technologies to commit traditional crimes in new ways (forgery, identification theft, drug trafficking, child pornography) and to devise entirely new types of crime such as cyberterrorism, law enforcement agencies need to make a techno-leap in crime fighting. This will require substantial new funds and training in areas about which police today have little knowledge.

2) Hit the bad guys where they work. Research on crime convincingly demonstrates two central facts: that crime is highly concentrated in geographic areas, with as much as 50 percent of offenses occurring at just 3 percent of locations; and that a small subset of criminals is responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of crime, with an estimated 5 percent to 7 percent of offenders committing from 50 percent to 70 percent of total offenses. To take advantage of this research, the Justice Department should establish a grant program to support local efforts to target crime hot spots and high-risk offenders.

Other research tells us that certain programs work. True community policing can shut down a drug market and keep it shut down while a traditional streetcorner sweep would simply move dealers down the block. A strict regimen of drug testing and treatment, backed up by escalating penalties for violations, can dramatically cut drug use among offenders. Structured afterschool activities linked to students' schoolwork can reduce juvenile crime and gangs, as well as drug use and teen pregnancy.

When well managed, each of these efforts can produce results. But used alone, no single approach can hope to turn a blighted neighborhood around, so they must be combined. Crime mapping technology can identify these crime-ridden areas and be used to track, in real time, shifting and emerging patterns so police can get a jump on new trends. Local leaders must coordinate a comprehensive effort with all government resources -- policing, parole, prosecution, prevention, drug treatment, nuisance abatement, housing, and business development.

3) Eliminate racial profiling and develop criminal targeting. Racial profiling is the single greatest threat to the progress we've made in crime reduction. To counter the practice, a number of states have passed legislation that requires police departments to track traffic stops with an eye to patterns of profiling. Some police departments are under scrutiny by the U.S. Justice Department because of allegations of racial profiling and brutality. Yet tensions between police and minority communities continue to increase -- to the point that some police chiefs fear they are just one nasty incident away from an outbreak of civil disobedience. Law enforcement action, whether stopping a motorist, prosecuting a case, or sentencing an offender, must be based on more than statistical probabilities. Police executives must support anti-profiling policies by collecting verifiable data on the contacts that their officers have with citizens and by taking appropriate action against those who exhibit prejudice.

Law enforcement officials must also become more much sophisticated about the nature of our cultural prejudice. They should develop a deep and meaningful appreciation of how practices based on invalid assumptions can be perceived as discriminatory by people of color. Then they can become effective and impartial enforcers of the law. They must also understand that racial profiling is ineffective as a crime prevention tool because when police devote time targeting innocent people, criminals are free to commit crimes. Finally, they must understand that racial profiling breeds distrust in the very communities that need aggressive policing, reinforcing racial stereotypes.

Among the tools necessary for color-blind law enforcement are technologies to collect data on traffic and subject stops. But data collection is not enough. The widespread belief that police routinely engage in racial profiling has more to do with outmoded reactive and random crime control techniques traditionally used by police than with overt bias. Ironically, the very Justice Department that is now at the forefront of ending racial profiling promoted the use of profiling as a tool to interdict drug shipments.

The federal government should take a leadership role in eliminating racial profiling and replacing it with criminal targeting based on faster access to good information. Washington must make it a priority to provide police officers the needed technology so that they no longer rely on hunches; then they can target the people who are actually involved in criminal activity. With real time access to information that targets people who have committed crimes as opposed to members of racial and ethnic minorities, police can do a more effective job.

Conclusion

Sixty years ago, advances in technology -- the patrol car and the two-way radio -- offered great promise to improve the effectiveness of law enforcement. Unwittingly, these advances separated police from the citizens they are sworn to serve.

The recent movement toward community policing has started to rebuild those bonds. Now, the technology boom must be aggressively used to exchange information and establish stronger ties between all government agencies and citizens.

Police action alone can never free neighborhoods from crime and violence. Nor by itself can it reduce fear. Only when law enforcement is viewed as an integral part of a fully accountable government structure will we be able to systematically create strong communities resistant to disorder, decline, and crime.

John D. Cohen is president and CEO of PSComm, LLC, and Executive director of the Progressive Policy Institute's Community Crime Fighting Project. Adam Gelb is chief operating officer of PSComm, LLC, and a former policy adviser to Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Robert Wasserman is chairman of PSComm, LLC, and former chief of staff of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.