Learning to Build Police-Community Trust

By Jesse Jannetta, Sino Esthappan, Jocelyn Fontaine, Mathew Lynch , and Nancy G. LaVigne

Many communities throughout the United States that face high levels of crime and concentrated disadvantage—particularly communities of color—also struggle with high levels of mistrust in the police and strained police-community relations. Recognizing that a lack of legitimacy and community trust in policing was a serious and persistent problem with deep historical roots, and that addressing that problem required a wellresourced, multidimensional approach combining proven practices with new tools and approaches, the US Department of Justice launched the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice. Led by John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC), and in partnership with the Center for Policing Equity (CPE), Yale Law School (YLS), and the Urban Institute, the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice (National Initiative) brought together practitioners and researchers to deliver a suite of interventions focused on law enforcement and community members in six cities: Birmingham, Alabama; Fort Worth, Texas; Gary, Indiana; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Stockton, California. Core National Initiative interventions included (1) training and technical assistance for police officers on engaging with residents in a procedurally just manner, (2) trainings that encouraged officers to understand and mitigate implicit biases, (3) developing model police department policies and identifying key changes to extant policies, and (4) reconciliation discussions, during which police officers and community members had authentic conversations to acknowledge historic tensions, harms, and misconceptions and to repair relationships. The Urban Institute evaluated the National Initiative’s implementation and impact to inform potential replications and/or modifications of the initiative’s components, and to guide future research on police efforts to build community trust. The evaluation focuses on National Initiative activities occurring from January 2015 through December 2018. Researchers collected the following qualitative and quantitative data to support the evaluation: ◼ monthly teleconferences among members of the National Initiative implementation team that included partners from CPE, NNSC, and YLS ◼ publicly available information and media coverage of the National Initiative and issues pertaining to police-community relations in the pilot sites ◼ fieldwork that included observations of National Initiative activities and interactions between National Initiative partners and site stakeholders ◼ routine teleconferences with site coordinators, police chiefs, and other stakeholders ◼ documents provided by the sites and National Initiative partners ◼ semistructured interviews with police and community stakeholders in each site ◼ learning assessment surveys of officers receiving National Initiative trainings in each site ◼ surveys of residents in areas with high levels of concentrated crime and poverty/disadvantage in each site The implementation evaluation focused specifically on the successes and challenges of the collaboration among the National Initiative partners, participating police departments, and communities.

Washington, Urban Institute, 2019. 112p.