In recent years, a number of serious conflicts between police officers and members of the communities they serve have raised the importance of effective community-police relations in the United States. Building on its policing and community-based participatory research portfolio, RAND designed a community-based dialogue to address this problem.
The dialogue is designed to start a conversation about these issues among community stakeholders, including police, government agencies, social service providers, resident representatives, and other concerned organizations. RAND has also designed a youth-focused dialogue to address specific scenarios most relevant to youth-police interactions.
This dialogue follows a format that is similar to other RAND work that uses tabletop exercises for disaster planning. Using hypothetical scenarios based on real events, the dialogue pushes communities to consider and discuss what they would do if faced with a crisis event—one that might put the police and other stakeholders at odds.
Participants have an opportunity to talk through issues relevant to their community’s real conditions, but within the more neutral space of the hypothetical scenarios, and without the emotions and tensions involved in responding to a real-life crisis event. The dialogue ends with action items for participants and a plan, developed by participants, to maintain momentum.
RAND implemented the community dialogue in three sites (Santa Monica and Long Beach, California, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa) and the youth dialogue in two cities (Long Beach, California and Charlotte, North Carolina).
A free toolkit and guide is now available and can be used by communities to implement the community dialogue and youth-focused dialogue. For more information about the project, please contact the research team.
RAND appreciates the generous support for this work from The Lenzner-Coleman Challenge Fund for Criminal Justice Research, which was established by the late Terry Lenzner and Lovida Coleman, both longtime advisory board members at RAND. The Lenzner family continues to support police-community relations research, including expansion of the tabletop exercise and other practical tools and methods to better inform policymakers and community leaders across the country.
This work was also supported by the American Arbitration Association-International Centre for Dispute Resolution Foundation, which focuses on collaborative and community approaches to dispute resolution, as well as expanding access to alternative dispute resolution to support the prevention and resolution of conflicts.
