Building on long involvement with community development conducted in isolation from policing and on a few earlier efforts to meld community policing with community development, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation launched the Community Security Initiative in 1994. The long-term goal is for economic development and community safety mechanisms to reinforce each other in ways that reverse the downward spiral of urban decay. These explorations are proceeding simultaneously in Seattle, Brooklyn, and Kansas City, Mo. Adherence to problem-solving techniques appears to have value in team building for the police/community partners as they organize work and allocate responsibilities. Consideration of the following process questions can help develop individual and collective competence and elevate the group's confidence to take strategically valuable risks: (1) tractable problems of interest; (2) information about victims, offenders, suspects and other stakeholders; (3) temporal information about offenses, victimizations, conditions, and locations; (4) susceptibilities of the problems, the problem solvers and strategic goals to optional interventions; and (5) analytic methods. Notes, references