The experiment involved sector responsibility for each of four police shifts. When on duty, the shift would respond to urgent calls from the entire subdivision, but spare manpower would focus on the sector for which it assumed 24-hour responsibility. The aim of the project was to use proactive multiagency measures designed to encourage communitywide solutions to problems and bring the police and local citizens into a collaborative relationship. From the start there was a problem of clarity in the aims and methods of achieving them. The primary difficulty was resistance from rank and file officers, who had been conditioned to give priority to the police crime-fighting role. The community also resisted the effort, more out of confusion about police intentions than opposition to the concept of community policing. One lesson to be learned is that an innovation that involves a significant change in policing practices is likely to fail. The second lesson is that all innovative policing concepts, no matter how popular and faddish, must be subjected to empirical criticism to determine if they are workable under existing conditions.