Herman Goldstein

Herman Goldstein was an American criminologist and legal scholar who joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1964 after earlier assisting O.W. Wilson during Wilson's tenure reforming the Chicago Police Department. Goldstein is best known for developing the problem-oriented policing model, articulated most fully in his 1979 article Improving Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach and his 1990 book Problem-Oriented Policing, which argued that police departments should organize their work around identifying and analyzing the underlying problems behind repeated calls for service rather than responding to incidents one at a time. His earlier book Policing a Free Society examined the tension between police discretion and the rule of law in a democratic society. His influence on policing practice was recognized in 2018 when he received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology.