Roundtable: Findings from the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice: Impact and Insights

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract/Description

This roundtable will discuss promising findings from the five-year, multi-agency, USDOJ pilot project: the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice (NI), takeaways from associated research and implementation, and broader implications to national police-community trust building and violence prevention. Launched in 2014 at the height of numerous high-profile conflicts between police and communities of color, with the goal of strengthening trust and legitimacy between law enforcement and these diverse communities across the country, the NI has generated compelling results at police departments and in communities across all six of its sites: Birmingham, AL; Fort Worth, TX; Gary, IN; Minneapolis, MN; Pittsburgh, PA and Stockton, CA. This project thus bears important implications for other researchers and practitioners in the field.

Through this roundtable, speakers will review the NI’s frameworks of procedural justice, implicit bias, and reconciliation, outline best practices for leading such work, and discuss their impact on strengthening police-community trust and violence interventions at each pilot site. Speakers will also consider challenges to data collection and evaluation, the suitability of traditional criminology metrics for assessing success, and explore broader applications and limitations of the NI's frameworks and research findings on police-community engagement and public safety efforts across the country.

Sub Unit

• Area XI. Roundtables

Individual Presentations

• The National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice: Key Process and Outcome Evaluation Findings - Nancy La Vigne, Urban Institute

• Communicating the connection between trust building and violence reduction - Danneile Davis, National Network for Safe Communities

• Community Input on Unmanned Aerial Systems (Drones), Stockton Police Department - Sam Kuhn, formerly National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC) and currently Yale Law School

Chair

• David Kennedy, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Discussants

• Nancy La Vigne, Urban Institute

• Danneile Davis, National Network for Safe Communities

• Jeremy Travis, Arnold Ventures

• Chief Eric Jones, Stockton Police Department

• Tashante McCoy-Ham, The OWL Movement