Yesterday, at the Tampa Citizens Review Board monthly meeting, the Policing Project released its report summarizing the results of the community survey on the practices and performance of the Tampa Police Department. The survey is part of an ongoing effort to improve understanding of the community’s priorities and concerns around policing.
Policing Project's Public Engagement Process Leads to New LAPD Video Release
Today the Los Angeles Police Commission approved a new policy requiring the LAPD to release video footage of officer-involved shootings and other critical incidents within 45 days, unless there are extenuating circumstances that require delaying release. The change in policy comes in response to a report released by the Policing Project in September of last year, which showed broad public support for making video public in the interest of transparency and community trust.
Policing Project Partners with GAPA as Chicago Projects Picks Up Steam
This week, the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability (GAPA) revealed its plans for an ordinance that would create a Citizens Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. The Policing Project was pleased to lend its expertise to the GAPA group as it worked through what a citizen police commission could look like.
Show, Don’t Tell: Our Youth-Police Engagement Program at the Camden County Police Academy
Democratic Engagement of Bias-Free Policing in Cleveland
The Policing Project has been working with the Cleveland Police Monitoring Team to ensure that Cleveland residents have a meaningful voice on policies and practices throughout the implementation of the federal consent decree between the Cleveland Division of Police (“CDP”) and the Department of Justice. The Monitoring Team recently recommended that the District Court for the Northern District of Ohio approve CDP’s new Bias-Free Policing Policy, which provides guidelines around (1) CDP’s expectations for its members around bias-free policing; (2) the principles of procedural justice in police-civilian interactions; and (3) protocols to report bias-based policing. Cleveland residents had significant input during the Policy’s development.
Policing Project Takes Part in Privacy Localism Conference
Last week, Policing Project Deputy Director Maria Ponomarenko participated on a panel at the Privacy Localism conference, hosted by the Information Law Institute at NYU Law. The panel, “Local Governance of Policing, Surveillance, and Data” highlighted the lack of public input into decisions about police use of surveillance technology, and discussed possible solutions.
2017-2018 Policing Project Camden Youth Program Launched
The 2017-18 session of the Policing Project’s Youth-Police Engagement Program is officially up and running at Woodrow Wilson High School in East Camden, New Jersey! By bringing youth and police officers together in a classroom setting, our program seeks to give youth an active and ongoing voice in how their community is policed, to strengthen youth-police relationships, and to develop a national model for this sort of engagement.
Tampa CRB & Policing Project Launch Community Survey
The Tampa Citizens Review Board (Tampa CRB), with assistance from the Policing Project, has launched an online survey that invites members of the Tampa Bay community to give feedback on the practices and performance of the Tampa Police Department (TPD).
The survey will remain open until December 15, 2017, and all residents of the Tampa Bay area are encourage to participate at: TampaCRBSurvey.org.
Policing Project Releases Report on LAPD Video Release Policy
Today the Policing Project has released its report summarizing public and officer feedback on the LAPD’s policy for releasing video footage of critical incidents—which includes any incident in which an officer fires a gun or an individual dies in police custody. The report is based on [...]
Establishing Best Practices for Stop Data Collection
Few controversies in policing are as fraught as the use of Terry stops—temporary detentions made by officers upon reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, often accompanied by protective pat-down searches known as “frisks.” Studies have shown that racial minorities are disproportionately targeted for Terry stops, raising concerns about [...]
Policing Project’s Public Engagement Process Results in New NYPD Body Camera Policy
The NYPD has released its new body camera policy, responding to public comments solicited through a process run by the Policing Project. The policy will apply to a 1,000-camera pilot project scheduled to begin later this spring. During the summer of 2016, the Policing Project reached [...]
Policing Project Launches Youth Engagement Pilot Programs
The Policing Project is conducting pilot projects in Tampa, Florida and Camden, New Jersey to foster police-youth relations. Based on the report of the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing, the programs focus on bringing youth and police together to work collaboratively to solve an issue [...]
Policing Project Deputy Director Testifies Before Civil Rights Panel
On Tuesday, March 21, Policing Project Deputy Director Maria Ponomarenko testified before the New York Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She discussed the need for “front-end” democratic accountability around policing, and discussed the Policing Project’s efforts in this regard. She also emphasized the [...]
Policing Project Holds Conference on Cost-Benefit Analysis of Policing Practices
Which policies should police departments adopt? On February 9 and 10, the Policing Project and the Police Foundation convened over twenty experts on policing practices and quantitative methods to explore one possible answer to this question: those policies whose benefits outweigh their costs. [...]
Measuring the Intangible Impacts of Policing
Policing Project to Assist LApC on Body Camera Footage release Policy
The Los Angeles Police Commission has asked the Policing Project to run a community-wide engagement over one of the more complicated questions about body cameras: when to release footage after an officer-involved shooting.
Prompted in part by officer-involved shootings and other uses of force that captured [...]
Policing Project Calls for Improved accountability on Arrest-Related Deaths
In the last several years, a string of high-profile police shootings of unarmed civilians — primarily black men — has attracted national attention, including in the 2016 presidential campaign.
But the federal government continues to have problems collecting complete and accurate data on these shootings, mainly because [...]
Brainstorming the Cost-Benefit Analysis of Policing
What is the psychological cost of being stopped by a police officer? What are the potential privacy costs of using license-plate readers?
Elsewhere in government, questions like these would be a standard part of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) — a common procedure that attempts to identify and weigh [...]
Panelists Tackle the Tough Questions around Policing and Accountability in the Digital Age
The Policing Project and the Brennan Center for Justice co-hosted “Policing and Accountability in the Digital Age” on September 15th, a conference that addresses the challenges and benefits of rapid advances in policing technologies. A cohort of academics, law enforcement leaders, activists, and journalists tackled difficult [...]