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Building Public Trust Episode 4: Challenges to Building Trust and Ways to Overcome Them: Part 1

• Police Executive Research Forum • Season 1 • Episode 4

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In this two-part episode, police, academics, and community members share the challenges they have experienced in building trust and strategies to overcome them. Part one explains why conventional surveys and community engagement programs are unlikely to reach some residents. It also highlights some successful strategies to reach these groups and engage the broader community. 

Speakers (21) in order of appearance: 

  • Dustin Waters, PERF Editor and Audio Engineer 
  • Chuck Wexler, PERF Executive Director 
  • Rachel Apfelbaum, PERF Writer, Producer, and Narrator 
  • Romero Davis, Senior Program Manager, Social Current 
  • Director Nancy La Vigne, Department of Justice (DOJ) National Institute of Justice (NIJ) 
  • Chairwoman Karen Gaal, Metropolitan (DC) Police Department’s 3rd District Citizens Advisory Council 
  • Abrianna Morales, CEO, Sexual Assault Youth Support Network (SAYSN) and Program Manager, National Organization of Victim Assistance (NOVA) – Youth Advocacy Corps 
  • Ron Huberman, CEO/Founder Benchmark Analytics and former Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools & former Assistant Deputy Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department 
  • Michelle Minihane, Golden (CO) Police Department Community Engagement Group 
  • Sergeant William Corrales, Tucson (AZ) Police Department 
  • Executive Director Dwayne Crawford, National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE) 
  • Chief Leo Schmitz, Cook County (IL) Sheriff’s Police Department 
  • Eric Trout, Golden (CO) Police Department Community Engagement Group 
  • Bryan Kelly, Golden (CO) Police Department Community Engagement Group 
  • Nola Joyce, Partner and Principal Consultant of 21 CP Solutions, and former Deputy Commissioner of Philadelphia Police Department  
  • Captain Rob Fanelli, Gainesville (FL) Police Department 
  • Detective Chris Carita, Fort Lauderdale (FL) Police Department 
  • Gabriel Diaz, Community Service Officer, Tucson (AZ) Police Department 
  • Chief Joe Harvey, Golden (CO) Police Department  
  • Chief Pam Davis, Punta Gorda (FL) Police Department  
  • Mandi Leigh, Golden (CO) Police Department Community Engagement Group

Resources mentioned in episode:

This podcast series is part of the Critical Issues in Policing series, supported by the Motorola Solutions Foundation.

Thanks for listening to PERFcast, the official podcast of the Police Executive Research Forum. For more information on PERF, visit www.policeforum.org.

Dustin Waters:

Welcome to PERFcast, the official podcast of the Police Executive Research Forum.

Chuck Wexler:

I'm Chuck Wexler, PERF's executive director. Thank you for joining us for this podcast series on building public trust. In the last episode, police and community members discussed how the core principles of building trust can be integrated into policing operations in concrete ways. In this episode, academics and community members will share the challenges they have experienced to the police in building trust with community members and strategies to overcome these barriers. Police will share their innovative approaches to building relationships at an individual level and strengthening trust community wide. PERF Senior Research Associate Rachel Apfelbaum conducted many of the interviews and will be narrating the series.

Rachel Apfelbaum: Hi, I'm Rachel. As we have heard highlighted throughout this series, there are a wide range of perspectives when it comes to the current state of trust in police, both nationally and locally, as well as the best path forward for building it. However, what are some of the concrete strategies and programs local police agencies can implement to ensure that they're hearing and accounting for these diverse perspectives? How can individual interactions have far-reaching impacts on community trust? What are the specific community engagement programs that can be established to accomplish the goal of strengthening community-wide trust? Part one of this episode will provide answers to these questions in four sections. Section one: who you're not hearing from and possible reasons why. Section two: strategies for reaching underrepresented populations. Section three: values and protocols for one-on-one, police-community interactions. And section four:

programs for engaging individual community members to impact the broader community. In this first section, who you're not hearing from and possible reasons why, police and community members will discuss why conventional surveys and community engagement programs are unlikely to reach some residents. By understanding these barriers, your agency can develop surveys and programs that reach a greater number of your community members. Romero Davis is a senior program manager with the nonprofit Social Current, which works with community-based organizations to drive equitable solutions and bridge the community gap with police agencies. Trust is dependent on community involvement, he states.

Romero Davis:

No more trying to be solution oriented even from the law enforcement aspect around community trust without including community. That's the only way that it can be sustained.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Nancy La Vigne is the presidentially appointed director of the National Institute of Justice, the research, development, and evaluation agency of the US Department of Justice. Here she discusses why and how traditional surveys often do not represent the opinions of many community members, including those she believes most need to be heard from.

Nancy La Vigne: We talk so much about community trust. We talk about how the definition is multifaceted. But what we don't talk about enough is how to measure this and whether we're measuring it accurately. And whether that measurement is an authentic representation of the community, recognizing that the community is not a monolith. The typical ways that agencies measure community trust are through satisfaction surveys, and those tend to be administered online. Who learns about these surveys and how do they learn about them? Maybe they follow the agency on Twitter, or maybe they've signed up to receive emails. This is a biased sample. Even if the surveys are done in a traditional fashion like the Gallup polls, where they make sure that everyone is equally eligible to respond to a survey, those are still problematic because they're biased:

the respondents are biased towards people in the higher educational attainment brackets, with higher personal wealth, more likely to be homeowners, more likely to reside in safe communities, and with a very different perception of the police and their experiences with the police. This moment demands that trust be retained with those communities, but really be restored or even built from the ground up in communities that tend to not be represented or are woefully underrepresented in these traditional survey methodologies, and those are people who live in the highest-crime, most heavily policed communities. They also happen to be the most underresourced communities. They also tend to be communities that are predominantly inhabited by Black and brown people. And if we do not develop better surveys that more authentically represent their experiences with law enforcement, we are not meeting the moment. We are failing them and we will not develop strategies that can reach this population.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Chairwoman Karen Gaal, an elected representative of the Metropolitan DC Police Department's Third District Citizens Advisory Council, expands upon this and explains the importance of underrepresented residents being included as well as humanized in the data.

Karen Gaal:

My main goal is just to build a safer, stronger neighborhood by ensuring that there's an investment in our public safety, and investment in our transportation, and investment in our community agencies. And to make sure that that investment is applied properly, to those who truly need the services. And it's not where you just see the data only; you see the actual people who the data is applied to. Nine times out of 10, those people have been rejected in so many different environments. But they have been welcomed in environments that are institutionalized or through incarceration, or through poverty, or through exploitation. And now we're dealing with a city that's sort of battling with two environmental systems together. We have to find ways to work together. We can do this. I don't see it as an impossible task; I see it as a matter of understanding that people are human beings.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Abrianna Morales is the founder and CEO of the Sexual Assault Youth Support Network (SAYSN) and the program manager of the Youth Advocacy Corps for the National Organization for Victim Assistance. She discusses how researchers can support efforts to reach and elevate the voices of those who are underserved.

Abrianna Morales:

Research is really a way to elevate the voices and perspectives of certain people in a systematic and rigorous way. The power that comes with asking questions and answering them, with speaking to those who are not typically listened to or don't typically have a platform to be heard, is something that research has the power to do in a really, I think, unique and exciting way. And so when it comes to paying attention to what research is being done, what researchers are saying, it's just a matter of listening.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Director La Vigne expands upon her earlier comments to talk about underserved community members.

Nancy La Vigne:

What I'm seeing is a lot of well meaning agencies who sincerely want to restore trust but are doing it by doing more of the same in terms of engagement. And engagement most often looks like, we'll hold a community meeting. And more meetings just doesn't meet the moment. It has to be more intentional. I think police need to meet community members where they are.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Ron Huberman is CEO and co-founder of Benchmark Analytics, a provider of an evidence-based public safety management system. He's additionally the former superintendent of Chicago public schools, as well as the former assistant deputy superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. During PERF's annual town hall, PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler and Ron Huberman expanded upon why community meetings do not reach many community members and gave strategies for police agencies to effectively engage these populations and their broader communities.

Ron Huberman:

I was just going to make two comments where I see community policing go wrong. One is, I've all too often seen that we engage with who shows up. And very often who shows up is not the voice of the community. So we need a deliberate effort to go out and find the leadership in the community. Because we have community meetings, and we take who comes in the door, right? I don't think that ever works. Then we've got to go and find who is in the community who speaks for the community. And that's one big mistake. The second big mistake is that police departments take this on all by themselves. They don't pick institutional partners. And Chuck, you helped me a lot with this in Chicago when I was superintendent; we had incredibly good quantitative results in reduced shootings. We engaged the Chicago public school system with the Chicago Police Department on violence, as a community policing partner. The Chicago public school system is the number-one employer in the city of Chicago, with 50,000 employees. The schools are the center of the community and very often the most legitimate voices of the community are involved in those local school councils. So I would recommend in community policing, the school is the center. It has to be the partner; you can't ignore that institution. And pick lots of institutional partners--the hospitals and health care system matter. So you're not doing it alone; go out and find those community leaders. Because if you take who comes to you, it just doesn't work.

Chuck Wexler: That's such a great point. Because how many community meetings do you go to--you walk in and it's the same people who keep coming to these meetings. Some person is going to raise their hand and they're going to go on for 20 minutes about some incident that happened 35 years ago, and then this person is going to say this, and they're all gone. There's another hour I won't get back. But you know, a lot of those community members are so busy working, they're exhausted. They don't want to go to a community meeting at night. They have no time:

they have kids, they have daycare, they have all of that stuff. But how do you get the right people? When you were head of the Chicago public schools, how did you figure out who the right people are in the Chicago public schools?

Ron Huberman:

If you think about the police, your district commanders know them because they're on the phone with them. They may not show up to the meeting, but we have to raise up those community members who are the legitimate voice of the community. You've got to meet people where they're at. This can be informal. We all want to formalize community policing, with policies and with infrastructure, but the world doesn't operate on infrastructure and policy. I think we know who those folks are; good district commanders and captains are working with these folks in the community all the time. We've got to woo them in a way that works for them to get engaged.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Michelle Minihane, a member of the Golden, Colorado Police Department community engagement group, will now discuss strategies she shared with Chief Joe Harvey, who created the group, and former Chief Bill Kilpatrick.

Michelle Minihane: What is the goal that you have? Is your goal to have more members of the community engage with the police? Or is the goal to build relationships? Because if the goal is to build relationships and trust, one way is through the way that we're engaging with the police department:

we're understanding their policies better and the training they go through. And that's all been a great experience. But it's challenging for me personally to be in that room. It's hard for me to show up at the community engagement group meeting and spend two hours in the police department with armed police officers in uniform. And I've never had a negative interaction with police. So to say, Hey, let's get these other folks, maybe some of them have had negative interactions. It's actually a really big lift to say, Hey, come into this room and engage with us. So if the goal is to build relationships, if the goal is to build trust, then I would invite them into our community. I would say, come live in our community; come be my neighbor. I'm working for affordable housing, and I talked with Bill Kilpatrick about how important affordable housing would be to him and his police force before Joe Harvey was in. Evidence shows that police living in the community helps build trust. So I would invite them into our community. Whether that's volunteering, living with us, spending more time with us, I would invite them in to help them build relationships with us.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

The previous section discussed why you might not be hearing from some people in the community you serve. In the second section, strategies for reaching underrepresented populations, community members and police leaders will share strategies for successfully reaching these populations. First we will hear from Chairwoman Karen Gaal, who describes a concrete strategy for reaching those who have had negative experiences with police and those who have otherwise been underresourced.

Karen Gaal:

We participate in community engagement walks, where the core agencies in Washington, DC go around to various hubs where people have decided to gather as a village and try to see what they need. We do this every week. In those walks, what we have ascertained is that most of these people don't want to go to these community recreation centers because they're rejected; they're not welcome because they have lifestyles that don't welcome it. The majority of the issues are happening at night, between 5 pm and 2 am or 3 am. In order to reach people, you need to have those core services there at those major times. The services are needed at those critical times, not just to enforce but to assist. So if you want to teach people who have been rejected, who have not been in the educational system for a long time, if you already have an audience there, bring the educational process to them. If they can bring to these hubs of people--these mini-villages that are deemed as hotspots--if they can cool those hotspots down; if they can bring in ways in which the people can learn how to engage in the community, to show them that there's a way for them to be important to the fabric of society. They have the actual tools, they have the actual programs, but no one's showing up. So bring the programs to the people for real. If the police feel that they can do that--I know that's not part of their job, but because it's consistently being pressured as part of their job--I think that can help with resolving a lot of the issues that we're talking about. Because it's all about social betterment. It's all about making sure that we're living in this society together.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Sergeant William Corrales supervises the Community Service Officer unit of the Tucson, Arizona Police Department. Here he will discuss a fun, innovative, easy-to-implement strategy the department is working on to engage a different segment of their community.

Sgt. Corrales:

This is a little project that we're working on currently. We had a function at the police station several years ago; it was a benefit and we had a car show. And we had a Hispanic low-rider group there, and they were concerned that there were no low-rider police cars. We have muscle cars but we didn't have any low-rider police cars. And they said, people think that people with low-riders are all involved in criminal activity, that it's a Hispanic thing, you know, it just it looks bad. So could you guys get a low-rider with the police department? That's a great idea. You can reach to a different portion of that community that would never call you or talk to you. And it would open up conversations and so on. So we're working on a low-rider police car.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Dwayne Crawford is the Executive Director of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. At PERF's annual town hall in 2022, he talked about the community leaders who can better reach and represent voices of the community you serve.

Dwayne Crawford:

We know how to take care of our cities. But sometimes the people you're talking to aren't necessarily the folks that carry any influence. I would encourage you to go to those small churches you see in some towns, show up unannounced, and walk in the church and just sit there. You may find that the things you think you should be doing, or the things you're hearing, aren't necessarily validated. But I would just encourage you to reach out to some of the voices you don't hear from and don't assume that the people who knock your door down have any real say-so. You've got pastors and civic leaders who carry so much weight that are probably never going to come to your door and knock it down.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Building relationships with clergy was a community-policing and crime-reduction strategy very successfully used by Chief Leo Schmitz of the Cook County, Illinois Sheriff's Office Police Department when he was a commander of Chicago Police Department's Seventh District. Here, he and PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler discuss how he implemented the strategy and its positive outcomes.

Chuck Wexler:

If I remember right, you were made commander of the Seventh District. The Seventh and 11th Districts are the busiest districts in Chicago, with more violent crime, and you were put in charge of the most violent district. You reached out to the African American ministry there and you really developed a pretty impressive relationship. You're a white guy coming into a predominantly African American district and you needed to build trust with the clergy. How did you do that?

Leo Schmitz: When I came in there, they had a meeting immediately that the clergy set up with me. And they're all good guys but they just said, Hey, we don't think you'll fit here and we would like somebody else to be here. I listened to them and about 45 minutes in I said, Guys, can you just give me a chance, give me a chance to do this and we'll see what we can do? And one of the bishops stood up and said, That seems reasonable enough, let's give him a chance. And the same people that didn't want me--six months later they were my best friends. And still today, I can call them if I need them. They're good people. Now, how do you get to that point? I'll tell you how you get to that point:

you've got to earn it. You've got to earn it. So what I started doing is I worked the street with my people and I'd stop by and see them while I was working the street. And I'd start saying, Hey, how's it going, pastor? How's it going, bishop? And they got to know me at a certain point. Then they started saying, We're having problems here, can you help? We have ladies coming to here and we're having problems getting here in the morning, people are bothering them. Every problem they came up with, we'd address. And I believe once they knew that we were really trying to help them, we got that trust that we were trying to earn. And then they started having me come into their church and speak at the pulpit. And when they supported me, I then supported them. And I told their clergy or the people, Listen, I'm now good friends with your bishop here. And if you guys need anything, you go through him; he can get ahold of me and I'll be here to help you. And by that time, we started becoming friends. So it was fun to see them. I was looking forward to see them and they'd come see me.

Chuck Wexler:

Some people might look at what you did and say, Well, you're dealing with a community but it has nothing to do with reducing crime. But in fact, if my recollection is correct, while you were doing this it had an impact on violent crime in the Seventh District. Is that not the case?

Leo Schmitz:

Yes, we were the leading district in murders, some say in the country, and we dropped it by about 44% the first year. Every crime in the Seventh District went down substantially over the year; nothing went up. And I give that credit to not only the clergy helping, and the people that we made friends with, but the hard work of the officers. They started seeing things a little differently. And our motto was, make friends not enemies. And we did a lot of what we call walk and talks. I had everybody down for at least a half hour a day, parked the car, walked around the neighborhood and met people. And yes, we knocked the numbers out of the box.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

In this third section, values and protocols for one-on-one, police-community interactions, police and community members will talk about how visibility of officers and individual interactions between police officers and residents can have far-reaching impacts on community-wide trust. In the last section, Chief Leo Schmitz talked about how he got out of his car to talk with community members, and how this impacted trust and crime rates. According to Eric Trout, a member of the Golden, Colorado Police Department's community engagement group, this is a strategy that would be meaningful to residents and would enable them to have organic trust-building interactions with their local police. Here's Eric Trout.

Eric Trout:

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, certainly that leads to a younger audience. But how much engagement do you really get out of those platforms versus just somebody's sort of visceral, like-button interaction with anything that happens there? Does it really translate to someone showing up at a meeting somewhere? I don't know; I doubt it. And I think there's something to be said for some visibility of the police officers. Golden's not that large of a community; get out of your car and walk around. I understand that certain enforcement has to be done, but maybe just being visible in a neighborhood or being visible other than just sitting in a police vehicle sometimes. And I know that's sort of going a little backwards in policing, but if someone's in a house, I see a cop walking down the street, I've got a question, I can go outside and have that interaction without having to be at a community meeting or something like that. Even if it's a complaint.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Eric Trout discussed the importance of in-person visibility of police officers. However, Bryan Kelly, also a member of the Golden, Colorado Police Department's community engagement group, expressed that online visibility is also impactful. Here he talks about the department's email newsletter, The Beat.

Bryan Kelly:

The Beat is basically an electronic newsletter from the Golden Police Department that Chief Harvey started when he became the police chief. You know, I've lived in Golden for 15 years and I see police officers driving all over town and here and there, but I don't really know any of them. Or you don't really know their names; I know their faces but I don't know them. And one of the things in The Beat, each time it highlights an officer and tells a little bit about them and their story. And for me, it's been great just to put more personality to the police officers and help us citizens learn who they are and show that they're just like us. You know, kind of get to know them and feel more comfortable with them.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Nola Joyce is a former deputy commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department and is currently a partner and principal consultant at 21CP Solutions, an organization founded by many members of the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing that provides technical assistance to police departments and communities on developing equitable and inclusive public safety. Here Nola Joyce describes a community policing program implemented by the Detroit, Michigan Police Department to increase understanding between police and community members and its impact on citizen complaints.

Nola Joyce:

Detroit comes immediately to mind. What they've done--and this was only one of Detroit's districts, but they're looking at expanding it--a local pastor there approached the district commander and they worked together and they identified officers that had citizen complaints. And we're not talking about whether they were sustained or not, but a citizen's complaint. These officers were asked to come and sit in on a conversation with community members. The officers didn't wear uniforms; they were not introduced as police officers; they just began to have a conversation. And then only toward the mid-part or toward the end was it revealed that some of the participants were police officers. What happened was, sitting around and having a conversation just does something. And what they also found is that the rate of reoffending if you will, meaning the reduction of citizen's complaints against those officers, happened; they didn't get another citizen's complaint. It takes time, but police officers have to get out of their car; residents have to get out of their houses; and they have to meet in a common, safe place and talk.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Building trust can be as simple as listening to and seeking to understand each other's perspectives. And individual interactions between police officers and residents can have far-reaching impacts--positive and even more so negative--on community-wide trust in the police department, as explained here by Captain Rob Fanelli of the Gainesville, Florida Police Department.

Rob Fanelli:

We have to recognize that when someone calls us, though trust may be minimal, there is some trust there. Because crimes are vastly underreported--every crime, though sexual assault is the example given most often because those numbers have really been captured. So starting there, just recognizing that when a community member picks up the phone there is at least some level of trust. Now that trust may be balanced on a needle head, right? We might be right there where we can really ruin that trust right on the individual level. So I'll start there on an individual level. And I think for the most part, people test the waters, right? Like, they report something and they want to see how the individual officer reacts. In that interaction and that reaction by the officer, is there empathy shown? Is their response to what they're saying resulting in some kind of trust building and communication? And so just that investigative piece by an individual patrol officer--people share the negative stuff, so if they have that negative interaction, they're going to tell 10 people, but if they have a positive interaction, maybe they tell one--it starts with that individual action. And it starts with laying that groundwork before that call comes in.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Now, Detective Chris Carita of the Fort Lauderdale, Florida Police Department will share a story from when he was a rookie officer that shaped his approach to interactions with community members throughout his career.

Det. Chris Carita:

So at the beginning of my career, I started with the NYPD as a police officer in New York for four years; I've been with Fort Lauderdale for 14. But in that first year that I was on the road in New York City, I was at the time in East Flatbush, and I was lucky enough to be assigned to ride with a guy by the name of Tom Nasso. The one thing that I really took away from him was his ability to talk to people even in really stressful situations, and speak to them with respect in a way that kept them calm and really, ultimately kept us all safer for it. You know, one incident stands out in particular, Tom and I were riding together and we got called as backup officers for another stop. But when we got there, the senior of the two officers was actually berating the gentleman as he was sitting on the curb--you know, calling him every name in the book and telling him he was a crackhead, just going on and on at the guy. So at one point, finally, Tom seemed to have had enough and he called the officer over. He said Hey, let me talk to you for a second. And he pointed back over to the gentleman who's sitting on the curb, and he asked the officer, Hey listen, do you think that he doesn't know he's a crackhead? And the officer was kind of stunned for a second and didn't really understand the question. And Tom says Listen, if you think you're educating him, if you think you're helping him out by explaining to him that he's a crackhead, if you really don't think he knows what his life is like, then by all means keep going. Otherwise, wrap it up, because you're embarrassing all of us. The officer was kind of shocked, didn't really know where that was coming from, and quickly wrapped up the stop and sent the gentleman on his way. And as we're driving away there were a few minutes of quiet. Anybody who's been a new officer, you know that after you get in the car with a senior guy, you let him speak first; if he needs a minute, you give him a minute. And finally Tom turned to me, and he said, You know, every time you treat someone well, Chris, every time you talk to them with respect, you're going to make it safer for the next cop that has to deal with it; you're going to make it where you have fewer fights, and you know that the best and the biggest fights that you're ever gonna win are the fights that you don't have to have. And that really stuck with me. And it's really kind of shaped the way that I approach this. I can be a scary-looking guy getting out in uniform on the scene, but I don't need to be that scary guy. I can speak to people in a way that lets them know that they're gonna get a fair shake, you know, even at times where I've had to be more forceful, even at times where I've had to raise my voice. The people that I'm in contact with dictate that and then I bring that temperature back down as soon as humanly possible. And I have found that that has kept me much safer in the work I do. And it's kept the officers that I work with safe because those are fights we don't have to have.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

As Detective Carita made plain, officers can take specific actions to keep community members calm and deescalate situations. Gabriel Diaz of the Tucson, Arizona Police Department's Community Service Officer unit expands upon this concept with tangible strategies and protocols that departments and officers can implement to prevent situation escalation upon arrival to the scene.

Gabriel Diaz:

In the unit that I work in, we have social workers assigned to the unit. So we have people from Community Bridges that can connect to housing or even rehab for drug intervention. We have people from CODAC that go out with us. And most times we don't go out with the intent to make an arrest. And we even dress different. Our cars are different; we don't go out there in black- and-white patrol cars because that's going to amp up everybody's anxiety level and make an already bad situation an even worse situation. So a lot of thought went into this whole homeless outreach to try to help people. We don't tend to just show up and just drop the hammer. We're more, Here's a hand, we're going to help you and see what we can do for you. We also work with the mental health unit and substance use team. We can all work together to try to fix this, or if not necessarily fix it at least try to find a happy medium.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Chief Joe Harvey of the Golden, Colorado Police Department now shares an anecdote that exemplifies how departments can align their protocols with their agency values.

Joe Harvey: We had an officer who made a traffic stop as a young officer with very limited experience and stopped the car shortly after a snowstorm for a license plate that wasn't clear. And the officer ended up writing this person a citation for that violation. The sergeant was doing his job:

he was active, he's looking at this citation and he asked himself, why would this officer write a ticket for, you know, an unreadable license plate? But before he did that, we have a Flock system, which is the license plate reader system cameras set up throughout our city, he went and pulled up the license plate in the Flock system, and the camera picked it up. So the sergeant immediately asked himself, well, if the Flock camera picked it up, how could it have been that obscured that the officer couldn't see it? He brought the officer in and he immediately goes into that coach-and-teacher mode and starts asking, and the officer's response was, Well, it was a bad person. A good person would have their plate properly cleaned off. And the sergeant sat down with this officer and said, How does this fit within the mission and vision of the Golden Police Department? And the officer sat there and looked at him and he said, let's go over it together. The mission certainly includes writing tickets. But the chief has told us that we want to effect change by mitigating the harm in residential areas, in school zones and high accident locations. How does this fit within that mission? Then he went to the vision. How does this serve to treat people with dignity and respect? How does this show equity when you are out doing the job? This is a sergeant on the night shift, taking the time to build culture based on those previous steps.

Rachel Apfelbaum: Chief Harvey's example demonstrated how departments can prioritize equity and community policing in their agency protocols and ensure they are followed through proactive supervision. Similarly, the Oakland, California Police Department, as a result of research conducted in partnership with Stanford University, simply added a checkbox to their traffic stop report form asking:

was the stop intelligence-led, yes or no? Intelligence-led refers to whether the officer had evidence that the person had been involved in a specific criminal activity, rather than a minor violation like a broken taillight. The study data showed that the simple addition to the report form mitigated the potential impacts of bias on traffic stops conducted and led to a significant 37% decrease in discretionary stops. The study results can be found linked in the episode information. In this fourth section, programs for engaging individual community members to impact the broader community, we will hear from police leaders about a few of the programs they've established and how these community-engagement investments have paid off in terms of trust building. Chief Pam Davis of the Punta Gorda, Florida Police Department will first share how, prior to her taking the position of chief, a shocking incident eroded her jurisdiction's trust in the department.

Pam Davis:

You start right away with identifying key players in your communities. So when I first took over, the reason I took over was because the prior chief had been fired. We had an incident where it was a use-of-force demonstration for citizens, and one of the officers was shooting a blank gun--what he thought was a blank gun--and he shot a real bullet and hit one of our residents and killed her. So I came in and at that point in time there wasn't as much trust in the community with our agency. So I came in and immediately established what I call a citizen advisory council and a business advisory council. I just took people out of the neighborhoods and represented all neighborhoods within the city, as well as different businesses in the city, and started to explain what we were going to do. Every time we did something different I included them. So they understood what we were doing, got the buy in. They then went out to the community and said, Oh, Punta Gorda is doing this, they're doing that, this is great. And it started that whole chain of events where they were buying into now what we were doing because our citizen advisory council was brought into it. So having communication and having those people out in the community is a key thing that any chief, particularly any new chief should do immediately. You're just developing goodwill, because when and if--if and when maybe is a better term--something bad happens, you reach out to that group and it's kind of the bank of goodwill. And they help you get through whatever main negative issues are going on at the time.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Chief Harvey will now talk further about the Golden Police Department's community engagement group, some of whom you heard from earlier.

Joe Harvey: So I have 12 people on this group, I meet with them directly. I've engaged them in training, we engage in conversations, I put them on my policy development committee. But this is the key:

you can have this group, and they're only going to know what you feed them. I opened the door; I let them into the building. Transparency, we talked about that earlier. I have an incident review board inside my organization. It is made up of the executive staff members--both commanders and the deputy chief; it is made up of subject matter experts and all of the core training field. So our officers are required to put into our PowerDMS system every use of force. It doesn't matter for us if it's muscle manipulation; it counts. If they display a Taser or a firearm, it has to be put into the system; if it's a pursuit; if they damage property; if they damage another person's property, not just ours. So every one of these incidents gets put into the system. I invited the members of my community engagement group to that review process, and they see the videos; they listen to the conversation. They listen to the dischord sometimes, because we don't always agree.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

And now Michelle Minihane, a group member, will share her opinion on the value of this community participation.

Michelle Minihane:

I would say that involving the public in those incident review boards is a huge step in terms of transparency. It shows that the police department is willing to learn, to be vulnerable, to be open. And I think that that's really valuable. In addition, the feedback that I got from it was that it's not just the act of transparency, but what some of those folks saw in the room when they were going through the incident review board. So I think that's a big piece of it. I think if they'd seen something that was vastly different, the benefits would have been different as well.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Now, Bryan Kelly, another member of Golden's community engagement group, will share how the opportunity to participate in officer training scenarios gave him a new perspective.

Bryan Kelly:

So I was there; I did the training that was at an old elementary school and you just go through a couple of different situations. I think two of them had actors--you know, he'd have a gun that shoots blanks--and two of them were on large screens. And I walked away from that training just thinking that it was totally impossible to be a police officer. And I just didn't understand, because I screwed up every single one of the scenarios--not even close on any one of them. I don't think any one of the citizens that also did the training got any of the situations right. I own a house-painting company, and I'm just thinking that when we make mistakes at my job, it is so easy to fix those mistakes and just to be perfect all the time. But the consequences when you do make a mistake if you're a police officer, I just walked away from that really feeling bad for police officers. And I felt like gosh, this has to be an impossible job to pull off and we're expecting police officers to be perfect all the time. And that's not realistic.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Mandi Leigh, another group member, echoes these comments and expands upon the impact of the community engagement group.

Mandi Leigh:

It is impossible, or at least really difficult, to meet everyone's expectations of policing. Public perceptions and what people would like policing to be are complex and vastly diverse. So much so that some people will always be disappointed and angry. However, policing reform is still necessary and important. Police violence disproportionately harms Black and brown people, women of color, and transgender folks, and that's simply unacceptable. At the same time, acknowledging the difficulty of meeting the public's expectations makes room for the nuance and interpersonal trust building that is needed in policing. In my view, turmoil and crisis are also times for reconstituting healthy relationships, and police departments all over the country have a huge opportunity to build trust. The time is ripe.

Rachel Apfelbaum: The upcoming part two of episode four will expand on the topics discussed in this episode through three sections. Section one: effective policing history programs. Section two: effective community engagement programs. And section three:

the value of using research and implementation.

Dustin Waters:

Thanks for listening to this episode of PERFcast, the official podcast of the Police Executive Research Forum. Please be sure to subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and stay tuned for upcoming episodes. For more information on PERF visit www.policeforum.org or follow us on Twitter @policeforum. Thanks again for listening. This podcast series was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Motorola Solutions Foundation.