PERFcast

Building Public Trust Episode 1: Distinguishing Your Agency from the National Narrative on Police-Community Trust

• Police Executive Research Forum • Season 1 • Episode 1

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In this episode, police leaders and community members will establish the foundation for the rest of the series by discussing how police agencies can differentiate themselves from the national narrative by building trust with the local community they serve. 

Speakers (13) in order of appearance: 

  • Dustin Waters, PERF Editor and Audio Engineer 
  • Chuck Wexler, PERF Executive Director 
  • Rachel Apfelbaum, PERF Writer, Producer, and Narrator 
  • Nola Joyce, Partner and Principal Consultant of 21 CP Solutions and former Deputy Commissioner of Philadelphia Police Department  
  • Chief Joe Harvey, Golden (CO) Police Department 
  • Michelle Minihane, Golden (CO) Police Department Engagement Group 
  • Mandi Leigh, Golden (CO) Police Department Engagement Group 
  • Yasmine Bryant, college student and PERF HBCU Intern  
  • Chief Pam Davis, Punta Gorda (FL) Police Department 
  • Director Nancy La Vigne, Department of Justice (DOJ) National Institute of Justice (NIJ) 
  • Deputy Commissioner Sheree Briscoe, Baltimore City (MD) Police Department  
  • Captain Rob Fanelli, Gainesville (FL) Police Department 
  • Chief Leo Schmitz, Cook County (IL) Sheriff’s Police Department  

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.

President Joe Biden:

This is a call to action based on a basic truth. Public trust, as any cop will tell you, is the foundation of public safety.

Mitch McConnell:

This past year has seen the difficult job of law enforcement become even harder.

Chuck Ramsey:

It's about transparency. It's about respect. It's about accountability.

News Anchor:

So it's about building community trust; in some cases, rebuilding community trust.

News Anchor 2:

Chief says building trust in the community is going to be a process.

Chuck Wexler:

I'm Chuck Wexler, PERF's Executive Director. Thank you for joining us for this podcast series on building public trust. Police and sheriffs from around the country agree that building public trust in policing is essential to improving public safety. But what concrete steps can police leaders take to build that trust? In this series, you will hear from policing leaders innovative approaches and programs they have adopted to build trust and meaningfully engage their community members. And community members will share the strategies they have experienced to be successful in strengthening police-community trust, as well as further actions they believe are needed. The series will be narrated by PERF Senior Research Associate Rachel Apfelbaum, who conducted many of the interviews with law enforcement leaders, academics, and community members.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Hi, I'm Rachel. In a 2021 PERF survey, three-fourths of respondents said that increasing public trust in the police is one of the three most important issues facing police departments. The survey results are available at the link provided in the episode information. Since then, high-profile incidents like the murder of Tyre Nichols have made the issue of public trust even more important.

News Anchor 3:

Law enforcement agencies across the state are dealing with staffing shortages, rising crime, and strained public trust after the murder of George Floyd.

News Anchor 4:

From Atlanta to Boston, New York to Memphis, demonstrators took to the streets today to protest the brutal police beating of Tyre Nichols.

Chuck Ramsey:

I have to admit that I have not experienced anything quite as challenging as where we find ourselves today. All you have to do is turn on the nightly news or watch one of the cable broadcasts. And I can almost guarantee you that you're going to see a video from somewhere in the United States showing an action being taken by a police officer somewhere that, quite frankly, in some instances I find to be appalling. That's the environment that we find ourselves in today. And all that affects our ability to build trust in many communities.

News Anchor 5:

Now to some stark new numbers about the confidence or lack thereof Americans have in their institutions. Joining us now Gallup's editor in chief, Muhammad Yunus. Take us through some of these numbers.

Gallup Poll:

The police is at a record low in confidence or historic low and we really saw it dip dramatically in the summer of the murder of George Floyd.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

The Gallup poll results are linked in the episode information. Nola Joyce is a partner and principal consultant with 21CP Solutions and former deputy commissioner and chief administrative officer for the Philadelphia Police Department. She reflects on the poll and what the data holds today.

Nola Joyce:

So you look at the most recent Gallup poll, which actually was, I think, the end of 2020. The community trust measure declined--and declined for both African American and white respondents. Obviously, the public trust for African Americans was considerably lower than Caucasian. So based on that, and just based on the conversations that you sometimes hear, either portrayed by the media or in the community, public trust is still I think, still pretty low.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

The law enforcement leaders we spoke to recognize the impact of national news on trust and local law enforcement. Here's Chief Joe Harvey of the Golden, Colorado Police Department.

Joe Harvey:

We have to acknowledge that the first step in solving a problem is recognizing you have a problem. If we continue to keep our arms up and say it is us against them, because of the negative publicity that we all received, based on real events that happened in communities across the United States, then we will continue the cycle of failure. To improve, to rebuild public trust, we have to take the first step, which is to break down the barrier that we have in our own organizations first. We cannot say it is us against them. It has to be us saying first, we acknowledge that there was a problem within the profession. It doesn't matter whether it has happened in my organization or not. It has happened in the profession. And second, we can acknowledge it and talk about it. People are not screaming for police reform because they want to strip down everything we're doing. They want us to treat people with dignity and respect, with compassion and empathy. They want us to be fair and impartial.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Community members also told us that national events can affect their trust in their local department, even if they have established a relationship with their local chief and department. We spoke to members of the Golden, Colorado Police Department's community engagement group. Here is Michelle Minihane.

Michele Minihane:

Community police, such as the you know, the Golden Police Department that we're familiar with mostly, they're part of a larger culture of policing in the country. And as a member of the public, I see videos of horrific behavior and tragic outcomes that are not specific to the Golden Police Department. However, those incidents that happen elsewhere impact my perception of local police. So it's part of a national culture. And I think it's going to be really hard to build local trust without having the national culture change. So that it's, you know, the trust feels like it can be spread across the whole culture.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Mandy Leigh is a member of the community engagement group and of Golden, Colorado's anti-racism collective.

Mandi Leigh:

I also agree with what Michelle said about that mismatch between the public perception. And this is very true for me as well. When I see events that happen far away. I'm like, ooh, that's, you know, I think of in my classroom, if one student has a question, there's more people that have that same question. So if it's far away, it's probably here as well. So that can erode trust.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

At PERF's 2022 national conference on police recruitment and retention, issues we heard from Yasmine Bryant, a college student who participated in PERF's internship program for students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Yasmine Bryant:

From a young person's perspective, a lot of times now, what we think that is, what we think is preventing young people from joining or wanting to become a police officer is what they see in the media. And that's not necessarily, while that is a factor, that's not the biggest factor that there is. Because even before George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so on and so forth, the instances that we've seen in 2020, those were not the first names that we knew of, and especially not for minorities. They learned from their mothers or their fathers, their grandparents or great grandparents, who lived through the crack epidemic, who lived through the '60s, who lived through slavery; they have all been told by their family members not to go into this profession because of their lived experiences. And so when you have people that have such, that have trauma that has been passed down, they're already being told to not go into this profession.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

While a number of events have eroded trust in law enforcement, it's still possible to build trust or rebuild trust at the local level, separate from the national narrative. Nola Joyce, who summarized the Gallup poll findings earlier, points out that local perceptions of police don't necessarily match the national data.

Nola Joyce:

But I have to make a caveat. If you ask a local citizen, do you trust your officers? They'll probably say yes more often than they say no. So I think we have to be cognizant that all of policing is colored by events across the country and not just what happens at the local level anymore.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Chief Pam Davis of the Punta Gorda, Florida Police Department explains that trust can vary by geographic region and even jurisdiction.

Pam Davis:

So it's it's sort of area specific, in my opinion. I guess it was right after the George Floyd incident, we ended up having protests just like everybody else did. But it was non-adversarial. Now there were still people in the pro-, there was about 1,000 people, but generally they just were protesting police departments across the country, they weren't necessarily protesting ours. And part of that was, you know, we brought in the actual people that organized. And we said look, this is what we're doing, we're way ahead of the curve, we do best policing practices, we showed them policies, and they're like, Yeah, well, we don't, we're not here to talk about your agency, we think you guys are fine. We just want to make a statement across the country. So we had a lot of support. We actually went out there and, and myself and the sheriff in that county went into the protest with them.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Joe Harvey takes this concept to the individual level.

Joe Harvey:

You know, for me, it goes back to whenever I'm speaking to any individual that I'm preparing to hire, I remind them that they have a nametag that represents who they are, right? The name tag may say Joe Harvey on it. And then I have a patch on my sleeve that represents the city in which I work, which is the Golden Police Department. But the badge represents something bigger than just being a member of the Golden Police Department or representing who Joe Harvey is. It represents a profession. And therefore every single action that a police officer takes has the opportunity to either build trust, to tarnish trust, or to destroy it.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Nancy La Vigne, director of the National Institute of Justice, expands on the idea that opinions of law enforcement will vary even within a single community.

Nancy La Vigne:

I also think it's important to talk about the definition of community, because I think a lot of people talk about and treat the community as if it's a monolith. You know, the community thinks, the community feels, the community wants. And we know that that's just not true. That community, even within small geographies, there's diversity of opinion. And there's diversity of interest in do they want more policing or less.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

As we discuss the community, we cannot forget that law enforcement are members of the community. Many of the law enforcement officers and leaders we spoke to feel this very strongly. Here's Deputy Commissioner Sheree Briscoe of the Baltimore City, Maryland Police Department.

Sheree Briscoe:

Systemically, historically, there has been a challenge with policing and all of its communities. We need to take a note of the history lesson here and reevaluate what we're standing for and the concepts of policing and stop using community, the community as a jargon or hashtag. We are the community.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

And this is Captain Rob Fanelli of the Gainesville, Florida Police Department.

Rob Fanelli:

I think that that new strategy in my mind is making the officer a part of the community. I think, to be honest, I think we have to be careful when we say things like, you know, how are we engaging the community, because it almost makes it seem like the officer is separate from the community, going back to that piece about our officers are not coming from outside our communities to work. I think you know that that big us-versus-them kind of mentality is still still kind of hanging on. So when we ask an officer, you know, how are you engaging the community, again, that almost there almost paints that picture that they're separate, it's a separate entity. I think it needs to be, police departments need to be, a part of the community.

Rachel Apfelbaum:

Lastly, here's Chief Leo Schmitz from the Cook County, Illinois Sheriff's Police Department.

Leo Schmitz:

Let me say it, we are them, they are us. I mean, Sir Robert Peel--it's so true. And I try to tell people that all the time. There's no difference between you and me. It's just that I'm the one being the police here. I said while I'm here, somebody who were my family as being the police. We're all the same. It's us. It's not us and them. It's all of us. How do we save all of us? And people feel that way.

Rachel Apfelbaum: What is clear is that the need for trust is unanimous. While overall, community trust in law enforcement is low nationally, agencies can distinguish themselves from the national narrative and build trust at the local and individual level. In episode two, PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler will discuss the lessons learned and recommendations from the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing report that are relevant today with the task force co-chairs:

Chuck Ramsey, former commissioner of the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Police Department, and Laurie Robinson, professor emeritus at George Mason University and former assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs. This interview will put into perspective where we are today in relation to the state of trust in 2016, and set forth basic principles for building trust.

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.