The project was a collaborative effort of a research team and the police department of Madison, Wis. The impetus for the project was a 1979 article by Herman Goldstein, who noted that police agencies place more emphasis on improving organization and operating procedures than on efforts focusing directly on the end products of their efforts. Goldstein, who became the project's principal investigator, recommended that the police develop a more systematic process for examining and addressing the problems that the public expects them to handle. This process would require identifying these problems in more precise terms, researching each problem, documenting the nature of the current police response, assessing its adequacy, exploring and evaluating alternatives, and choosing from among them. The research which constituted the first stage of the project examined each of these steps in detail. The main themes of the approach are its exclusive focus on substantive problems and its goal of introducing a new way of thinking about the police and policing. A bibliography of 29 sources and an appendix presenting questions on 3 substantive problems are provided. For the other three volumes in this project, see NCJ 91293-5.