The study made headlines for reporting that 3/4 of all white police expressed racial prejudice against blacks. Yet Reiss also found that there was no difference in police brutality rates against blacks and whites, with about 3 per 1000 citizens of both races illegally assaulted by police in front of observers. Reiss’s analysis of the distinction between reactive and proactive police work helped shape a revolution in police practices, in which police leaders took control of decisions to launch proactive strategies. With better computer software and rapid crime mapping, police organizations could use Reiss’s framework to define specific crime patterns and “proactively” assigning officers to deflect them. This idea was the foundation for the major innovations in policing in New York City in the 1990s under Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Giuliani, including the “Compstat” method of assigning police patrols that was later adopted around the world.

Now a part of ordinary vocabulary in corporate and governmental life, the idea of proactive management was so novel when Reiss suggested it in 1965 that the American Sociological Review refused to print an article he co-authored with David Bordua using the word “proactive,” saying the word did not exist in the English language (although the article was later published by the American Journal of Sociology). The Oxford English Dictionary (1989, Vol. XII, p. 533) now credits Reiss with the first printed usage of the word in its common modern meaning.

Reiss’s interests in measuring crime emphasized the organization of criminal networks, both among delinquents and legitimate businesses. He encouraged police chiefs from Peoria to Stockholm to plot the co-offending patterns among delinquents, so that they could find the “typhoid Marys” who seem to stimulate crime in many first offenders. While most criminologists emphasized the number of crimes an offender committed, Reiss emphasized the number of new criminals an offender recruited into crime as co-offenders.

At the corporate level, Reiss focused on patterns of collusion linking organizations. During the Carter administration, he was commissioned to write two reports on how to measure corporate and organizational crime more systematically, but his proposals were shelved under the Reagan administration. Reiss was later appointed by President Reagan’s Director of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), James K. Stewart, to co-chair the design of the largest study of crime and human development ever conducted, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Jointly funded by the MacArthur Foundation and NIJ, the $40 million project gathered both observational data on public places and interview data on growing young people across the age span. Now led by Felton Earls and Robert Sampson at Harvard, the study has discovered surprisingly large differences in crime rates within poverty areas, rooted in their differences in social structure and culture - See the New York Times article (December 3, 2006): Do Immigrants Make Us Safer?

Albert John Reiss, Jr. was born on December 9, 1922 in Cascade, Wisconsin. He interrupted his education at Marquette University to serve as a meteorologist with the US Army Air Corps in World War II. He worked his way through the PhD program in sociology at the University of Chicago working on and leading a range of studies on probation, juvenile delinquency and neighborhoods, as well as teaching at the University. Promoted to assistant professor when he finished his doctorate in 1949, he moved to Vanderbilt University as Chairman of the Sociology Department in 1952. He left Vanderbilt in 1959 for the University of Iowa and then the University of Wisconsin, prior to his accepting the Chair in Sociology at the University of Michigan in 1961, where he did his field research on the police.