By William Froehlich
Four years after George Floyd’s murder and sixty years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, many resident and law enforcement relationships – particularly for members of historically marginalized communities – remain strained, with demonstrators taking to the streets to advocate for changes in policing and in city hall. Many communities have harnessed the energy of advocates to bring community members together to build trust and enhance relationships between residents and law enforcement.
On May 25, 2022, President Biden issued Executive Order 14074, Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety. Among many directives, EO 14074 requires the Attorney General to “issue guidance . . . on best practices for planning and conducting law enforcement-community dialogues to improve relations and communication between law enforcement and communities, particularly following incidents involving use of deadly force.”1
The recently published guidance, Tools for Building Trust: Designing Law Enforcement-Community Dialogue and Reacting to the Use of Deadly Force and other Critical Law Enforcement Actions, shares ideas that have worked in other communities seeking to host law enforcement-community dialogues. Tools for Building Trust defines “intentional dialogue” through four key components: (1) collaboratively designed, (2) purposeful and goal-driven, (3) inclusive of both residents and law enforcement, and (4) sustained in both process and outcomes. In addition to highlighting components of dialogue processes taking place in dozens of communities, and featuring case studies from Falcon Heights, Minnesota; Sanford, Florida; and Seattle, Washington, the guidance suggests immediate steps after critical law enforcement actions.2
Leveraging this new resource, this article underscores the value of these elements and illustrates their implementation in two communities: Santa Barbara, California, and Erie, Pennsylvania. In Santa Barbara, law enforcement and community co-designed and hosted “VOICES,” a series of inter-group dialogues between small groups of law enforcement and historically disadvantaged community members. Grounded in communication research, these sessions were designed to reduce prejudice between law enforcement and non-law enforcement groups. Meanwhile, in Erie, law enforcement and community leaders worked with the Department of Justice Community Relations Service (CRS) to design and facilitate a one-day in-person program which brought together law enforcement and community leaders to “identify issues and collaboratively develop solutions that improve police-community partnerships.”
Collaborative Design
Intentional dialogue is “most effective when it emerges from a mutual planning process” which engages law enforcement, community leaders, advocacy group members, representatives from historically marginalized communities, and others. According to Tools for Building Trust, although such an inclusive process may take time, the “investment will pay dividends in trust.” Discussing a dialogue initiative in his home community, Sanford Police Chief Cecil Smith shared: “We took a step aside to permit the community to identify key voices for dialogue. We let the community know, when you are ready, we will be ready to join the dialogue.” 3 Collaborative process design groups led the development and organization of law enforcement-community dialogue in Erie and Santa Barbara.
In Erie, the CRS convened city government and law enforcement leadership and a diverse group of community leaders to plan a law enforcement-community dialogue program which CRS calls “Strengthening Police Community Partnerships” (SPCP).4 Through several months of work, this group identified participants, designed an agenda, and arranged for logistics.
Encouraged by the local police chief, two police lieutenants in Santa Barbara worked with a university communication professor, an experienced local mediator, and an established local activist. This design team reflected several important aspects of the community’s diversity and was charged with developing dialogue grounded in communication research and theory. The Santa Barbara design team met regularly to address potential barriers to participation and design a series of intergroup dialogue processes for the community. Concurrently, members of the design team developed relationships with community partner organizations who they hoped would work with them to develop an agenda and recruit both community and law enforcement participants to the dialogue.5
Purposeful and goal driven & Inclusive of both Residents and Law Enforcement
There are many methods of engagement between law enforcement and community. Intentional dialogue, as defined in Tools for Building Trust, is purposeful and goal driven. As retired Santa Barbara Police Chief Lori Luhnow explains, the “relationships developed through dialogue gave us the ability to connect, ask questions, and assess the temperature of the community. When tension emerged in the community, we were able to be more proactive by leveraging our relationships in the community.”6
A design team should develop and identify goals, facilitators, a plan for identifying participants, an agenda, and strategies for enabling low-risk conversation among participants. During the design process, the design team must identify and assess necessary resources: time, meeting space, technology, language and interpreter issues, accessibility, food, among other matters. Some design teams might simply invite members from a neighborhood or an entire community. Others – as in Erie and Santa Barbara – may make specific choices regarding the participants. Design teams may identify specific topics for conversation, while others may elect to host open-ended discussion.
In Santa Barbara the design team endeavored to bring “police and specific community groups together to engage in dialogue intended to reveal the humanity and commonalities of all participants.”7 The design team worked with community partner organizations to recruit marginalized community members to participate in small intergroup dialogue sessions facilitated by a local experienced mediator. Design team members worked with four community partner organizations to build trust and rapport to address potential power imbalances (between groups and law enforcement), and design an agenda for dialogue: 1) an LGBTQ+ community group, 2) a youth-initiated peer intervention organization supporting at-risk and previously incarcerated youth and adults, 3) a non-profit providing probation services for youth who are often involved in gangs, and 4) a non-profit focused on building leadership by dismantling forms of prejudice, discrimination, and oppression.
Eight law enforcement officers attended each session along with six and ten members from the community group. The design team worked with each community organization to tailor conversations to the organization’s needs and interests. To address power imbalances, the design team encouraged law enforcement participants to wear plain clothes and conceal weapons, and hosted sessions at locations commonly used by community members. The agenda for each of the sessions was tailored to the needs and interests of each community partner organization and included a welcome and overview, brief introductions, discussion of experience with law enforcement, group conversation, group debrief, short role play exercises, and group reflection. 8
At Erie’s SPCP, around 80 diverse community leaders represented seven community groups: youth, faith, social services, law enforcement, new Americans, business, and civil rights/advocacy organizations. The program began with welcoming remarks, followed by participants gathering in groups with others from their sector (e.g., law enforcement leaders met with other law enforcement leaders) to discuss community strengths, concerns, and key issues.
Next, CRS and volunteer facilitators helped each group prioritize these issues. Participants were then reorganized into mixed groups to brainstorm solutions and create action plans. At the dialogue’s conclusion, each sector group selected one member to serve on the “SPCP Council.” These Council members meet regularly with law enforcement to monitor and support the implementation of the solutions and action plans developed during the event.9
Sustainable in both process and outcomes
As Tools for Building Trust explains, “one series of dialogue sessions may enhance relationships, break down biases, and begin to build trust, yet one session or series cannot remedy legacies of inequitable treatment or community harm.”10 Intentional dialogue and its outcomes must be implemented and sustained. Communities that host dialogues yet fail to implement or sustain outcomes run the risk of deteriorating trust with those who participated but then feel that their time was wasted.
At the conclusion of each VOICES session in Santa Barbara, community participants completed an anonymous survey which asked whether the event was an effective use of their time, if the event changed their perception of law enforcement, and whether they would participate again. Responses to these inquiries were overwhelmingly affirmative (between 80-100 percent).11
The original VOICES dialogues took place in 2017. In 2021, Santa Barbara hosted a second VOICES conversation “to improve the relationships between police officers and Spanish-speaking immigrant community members.”12 Evaluation of this dialogue session focused on three themes: empathy, trust, and police-community relationships. Specifically, the dialogue led community and law enforcement participants to “view the other with greater levels of empathy and mutual understanding” and “led community members to express a greater level of trust in, and empathy for the police.”13 Further, the dialogue “led both groups to believe that VOICES could improve relationships between police and the public more generally.”14
In Erie, the SPCP process was designed to be a catalyst for developing the community’s SPCP Council, whose vision is to “make Erie safer through the creation of a strong partnership between the community and police by committing ourselves to open and honest communication, understanding, and mutual respect.”15 A study conducted three years after the initiation of the SPCP council suggests several measurable enhancements between law enforcement and community, including increased trust between law enforcement and community members, decreased racial tension, and improved relationships between community members and law enforcement.16 Now, more than six years after its inception, Erie’s SPCP council continues to bring law enforcement and community together to build trust and partnership.
Ideas for your Community
Tools for Building Trust provides a series of ideas for hosting intentional law enforcement-community dialogue to enhance trust, relationships, and capacity. Intentional dialogue might look like Santa Barbara’s intergroup dialogue, or Erie’s SPCP process – or it may take another form. If your community is considering a dialogue process, Tools for Building Trust provides steps and illustrations for consideration, and the Divided Community Project stands ready to help.
William Froehlich is the Director of the Divided Community Project (https://go.osu.edu/dcp) at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and the lead writer of Tools for Building Trust. His work on law enforcement-community dialogue is funded in part by federal award number 15JCOPS-23-GK-03990-PPSE awarded to The Ohio State University by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. He can be reached at [email protected].
