Gene Stephens

Gene Stephens is an associate editor of USA Today and a professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He argues in the following viewpoint that the decline in crime since the 1990s is due to the movement toward proactive, community-oriented policing (COP), in which police work with communities to develop programs to cure community ills—such as alcoholism, drug abuse, and unemployment—to prevent crime before it happens. When crime does occur, Stephens writes, the emphasis should be on restoring the health of the community rather than punishing individuals. Stephens believes that this approach is much more effective than that of previous decades, in which police departments often had an adversarial relationship with citizens and crime- control efforts emphasized punishing criminals after the fact.

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