Current police practice is mainly incident-driven and therefore reactive and is also based on aggregate statistics rather than analyses of particular neighborhoods or population groups. In contrast, problem-oriented policing focuses mainly on solving problems, although close police-community relations and decentralized decisionmaking are instrumental to this approach. Most of the research to date has been done in the Newport News (Va.) Police Department, which initiated this approach in 1984 in cooperation with the Police Executive Research Forum and with a grant from NIJ. Newport News has not yet developed all seven of the characteristics of a fully-implemented program. However, its experience has shown that police executives interested in pursuing this approach can make their agencies more effective. Figures and 28 references.