Michael Burgess

I’m excited to share that my newest book, The Comprehensive Field Guide to Proactive Crime Prevention , is now available on Amazon in print and e-book. This is not a typical academic book. It is a practical, real-world field guide designed to help law enforcement and public safety professionals think through recurring crime and community problems in a way that is realistic, proactive, and easy to understand. The goal of this book is to help readers move beyond simply reacting to problems and...

“Great moments are born from great opportunity.” — Herb Brooks, Miracle That line may have been delivered in the context of hockey, but it speaks just as powerfully to the future of policing. Law enforcement has a great opportunity right now. An opportunity to move beyond simply answering call after call, taking report after report, and repeating the same cycle without ever getting ahead of the problem. An opportunity to think differently. To ask better questions: Who is involved? What is...

“Be proactive” is one of the most common phrases in policing — and one of the most misunderstood. In too many agencies, proactive becomes shorthand for more stops, more tickets, more arrests, and higher activity counts. The problem is: activity isn’t the same as impact. You can stay busy all shift and still return tomorrow to the same addresses, the same people, and the same problems. That’s why I wrote my recent Police1 article — to help put proactive policing into plain language and focus...