The conference was addressed by Police Commissioner John F. Timoney of the City of Philadelphia Police Department, who has been closely associated with policing initiatives over the past decade which have resulted in major reductions in crime in the US.
Commissioner Timoney, who is tipped as the next head of the New York Police Department (NYPD), said that in the past 10 years American police officers had stopped seeing themselves as "report-takers" and began seeing themselves as "crime-fighters".
He said this change, resulting in dramatic reductions in crime, was due largely to the efforts of William J. Bratton, who became Police Commissioner of the City of New York in January 1994.
"Commissioner Bratton set the NYPD the goal of reducing crime in New York City significantly, picked a team of younger officers who believed that this goal was achievable and encouraged them to develop new procedures and new strategies for achieving it."
Commissioner Timoney said the heart of the new approach was Compstat, which involves the use of computerised maps and crime profiling of areas with high crime levels.
He said the Compstat process was "one of the most publicised and least understood innovations in policing of the last decade". Most commentators focused on the computerised maps used at Compstat meetings or the tension generated by the aggressive questioning of district commanders by the department's top managers.
"The Compstat process is much more than this. The key to its success is the devolution of responsibility for local policing to local commanders and the use of the regular meetings to hold them accountable for their performance.
"It forces the top management of the department to take an active personal interest in the fight against crime and thus sends a message to everyone in the department, from the officer on the beat to the support service specialist to the senior chief, that the department's top priority is fighting crime."
The priorities in policing in the United States were "to reduce crime in our cities, especially the violent and drug-related crime that has plagued our inner-city areas, without losing the support of the ethnic and minority communities that tend to live in these areas".