Evanston PD collaborated with community groups to create a protocol for asking jailed individuals what their needs are, efficiently connecting community members to services to alleviate those needs and prevent recidivism. The Community’s All In Recidivism (CAIR) Card addresses the challenge of law enforcement jailing and releasing people due to cyclical calls for a wide variety of reasons—many of which require the services of community organizations. ***NOTE: Our Evanston PD Fellows recently presented on CAIR Card before Evanston's City Council. Click here to view ***

A team of Northwestern University researchers are preemptively collecting qualitative and quantitative data with approximately 400 members representative of the community via surveys in each city sector and demographic. The surveys question whether knowing about this initiative affects confidence and trust in EPD, experimenting with how to align the initiative to the community.

After ensuring the community is supportive of the initiative, researchers will examine recidivism after EPD begins the initiative. Researchers will ensure officers question jailed people in a mutually trusting and empathic fashion, using survey data.

Police are often emotionally distant from the experiences of those sent to court. Sgt. Meg Hamilton (MPD) has led an initiative to incentivize officers’ participation in an alternative, a Community Restorative Court, where everyone involved in each case voices their perspective.

Officers’ participation may also increase their empathic and compassionate responding. University of Wisconsin researchers have spent hours interviewing upwards of 16 officers who were eligible to participate in restorative justice circles. The research team has identified likely barriers and propellers to participation.

Using the insights from the interviews, researchers will experiment with different ways to motivate police participation. Officers will be trained in how to participate, using concise, evidence-based lessons. Researchers will evaluate how officers’ participation in restorative circles affects the connection, compassion, and empathy they feel towards the community members in and out of court. Finally, researchers will track recidivism of those involved in restorative justice circles with, or without, these trained officers.

The Cultural Competency Immersion Experience for Probationary Officers will create culturally competent police officers who are more aware of community concerns, values, and accepted norms throughout the diverse neighborhoods LAPD serves. The initiative will create a transfer of all newly off probation police officers into the Community Safety Partnership Bureau (established in 2011 to address complex community problems that police alone cannot solve) for the first six months following their probationary period.

This time will afford the new police officer the ability to have a hands-on look, away from the day-to-day radio calls, to understand the diverse communities throughout the city of Los Angeles. It will enhance the police officer’s ability to create meaningful empathy, compassion and a deeper awareness of generational concerns members of CSPB communities share. Upon completion of their six-months at the CPSB, the police officer will return to patrol with a deeper appreciation for the community that they patrol.

Providing new officers with an opportunity to build empathy may lead to stronger community trust though lower use of force and arrest rates. LAPD will measure metrics of: officer empathy before & after CSPB rotation; community trust; arrest reduction (control group vs. experimental group); and use of force reduction (control group vs experimental group).

Lack of interest in criminal justice careers translates to low recruitment efforts, and little encouragement for women and minorities to aspire to policing careers. We need to build connections for youth career pathways in law enforcement through police-based programs that provide long term trust building and career pathways for law enforcement, in particular for women and girls.

The Law Enforcement Career Path Programming for Girls & Young Women will:

-Evaluate and provide rigorous data to document the positive preventive impact GROW (Girls Reflecting Our World) mentorship program has had and continues to have for Inner-city girls in Boston, as a means to support the idea of long term police based programming.

-Use GROW as a pilot for long term programming goals for BPD as a pipeline for the commitment to the 30x30 initiative, recruiting women into policing.

-Establish meaningful connections between historically underserved youth groups and community officers can significantly reduce risky behaviors and entry into the criminal justice system, specifically with girls to elevate chances of career in law enforcement (prevention).

-Engage female officers of all ranks and specialties within policing as mentors in the GROW Women in Policing pillar.

-Create a network of peer support for female law enforcement recruits, officers and future leaders in the field.

From 2013 to 2022, the Town of Zebulon saw an 87% increase in overall population. When comparing the same years, the Zebulon Police Department has a reported 63% increase in cases involving at least one child and a 63% increase in the number of children they are dealing with. They have seen a 106% increase in children committing crimes and a 45% increase in children who are victims or witnesses to a crime or trauma. Police in this area lack the knowledge, training, and practices to address the prevalent public health crisis: children exposed to violence.

Compassionate Policing for Traumatized Children & Families is a necessity here. Children depend on empathetic adults to make sure their psychical, emotional, and psychological needs are met. The bar needs to be raised when it comes to how law enforcement is trained and how they and community partners collaborate and respond to the most vulnerable and voiceless members of our community.

This program will be a collaborative effort between law enforcement and clinical specialists to support traumatized children and their families, focusing on providing a comprehensive approach to addressing the needs of these children. The program involves training law enforcement officers to recognize trauma symptoms in children, respond appropriately, and make appropriate referrals to clinical specialists. Follow-ups will be offered to all children, regardless of whether they are a victim, a witness, or the offender of an incident.

By combining law enforcement's role in ensuring safety with the clinical specialists' knowledge in trauma treatment, this program aims to improve the overall well-being and physical and emotional resilience of children affected by trauma in the community.

Ofc. Gamache is a liaison for multiple dorms at her University and she has heard complaints from students who feel UWPD doesn’t take action on reports of racial/hate bias, leading to mistrust in police. The Improving Reporting & Response for Hate/Bias Incidents initiative will address this critical issue.

There are currently three main ways to “report” things on campus: through UWPD, UW housing, and the University. All three are supposed to communicate, to tell UWPD if they get reports of criminal activity, but there are gaps in communication and inefficiencies in the system.

Clearly the three ways of reporting are not communicating effectively. There is also a lack of viable options for communities who are already distrusting of the police to report information. It is critical for UWPD to have a hate/bias form that goes directly to the PD to facilitate resolution. Ofc. Gamache’s background in dispatch tells her there is a disparity in the demographics of those who call the police; she wants to make the reporting methods as accessible as possible.

This program will re-educate staff in all three types of “reporting” (UWPD, University, UW Housing) on what information needs to be shared, what constitutes a crime etc.; and will add an online reporting for hate/bias on UWPD’s website and on a UWPD app currently in development, making reporting is as easy as the push of a button, and building community trust.

The Body Worn Cameras as a Tool for Community Engagement program will focus on the problem of trust/perception and recruiting in our most resource-deprived communities. Most importantly, the program will prioritize developing relationships with the African American youth of these communities. By developing a program that caters to African American youth in the most deprived areas of Los Angeles, Ofc. Walker believes LAPD can foster an environment that supports the community, builds their confidence, and provides tools they need to be successful in life and in a potential career in law enforcement.

Historically, the relationship between local law enforcement and our most deprived communities has been hostile. Ofc. Walker believes there are numerous factors that have created this environment. One problem was having “bad apples” policing the community and not following proper policies and procedures. Their negative contacts with the community have been passed down to generations like classic folk tales that usually end with “This is why we don't trust the police.” Those positive interactions that were happening were never discussed or publicized. This created the perception that good contacts and interactions were never happening. Another reason this is happening is due to fear and intimidation of the community. Oftentimes, minorities who are interested in law enforcement as a career are ridiculed and discouraged by the people they want to help the most.

This solution will be built around real interactions between officers and their community. The interactions will be used to create a public campaign, enabling community members to view the interactions. Officers will also have a disposition where they can tag an incident community engagement. From these incidents, Ofc. Walker and his department will create an archive of positive interactions and test how they change the perception of the community.

The Transparency on Police Use-of-Force program will address misconceptions about policing practices due to a lack of transparency.

During police encounters, particularly use-of-force encounters, citizens and suspects do not have a clear understanding of what happened and why. This is an issue for law enforcement because the lack of transparency around these encounters become the narrative, driving the thoughts and feelings of witnesses/suspects, and even friends and family members, who may have never had police interactions.

The root cause is the culture of our profession: police thinking we don’t have to explain ourselves or inform the general public about what we do and why we do it.

Det. Holliman believes his solution will be best built by first tackling the root cause, which is educating Evanston PD officers on the importance of articulating their why to citizens and suspects. He also plans to add the issue to Evanston’s current incident cards, adding the option for a “use-of-force review.” Getting buy-in from officers to voluntarily have mutual meetings with suspects and concerned citizens to explain the use-of-force and what events/behaviors led them to utilizing the force they used. These meetings will be facilitated by a neutral third party: potentially a mediator, social worker, victim services representative, or community violence interrupter with close ties to the community, and will occur following closure of the court case. Opening a dialogue, building mutual understanding and trust, and prioritizing transparency in police culture are the overarching goals.