COPS Evaluation Brief No. 1 
 

Promoting Cooperative Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling 
 

 
Institute on Race and Justice 
Northeastern University
Boston, Massachusetts 
 
April 2008 
  
This project was supported by Cooperative Agreement Number 2003-HS-WX-K048 awarded by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice.  The opinions contained herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.  References to specific companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the author(s) or the U.S. Department of Justice.  Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.


 
Contents

………………………………………………………………………

Section 1. Background and Evaluation Objectives…………………………………
   The Public Concern about Racial Profiling…………………………………………
   Promoting Cooperative Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling………………………
   Evaluation Methodology……………………………………………………………..

Section 2. Funded Program Areas and Major Observations……………………………
   Accountability…………………………………………………………………………
      Potential Benefits…………………………………………………………………….
      Limitations and Caveats……………………………………………………………..
   Case Studies……………………………………………………………………………
      Arlington, Texas……………………………………………………………………..
      St. Paul, Minnesota…………………………………………………………………..
      Denver, Colorado……………………………………………………………………
      Challenges and Lessons Learned…………………………………………………….
   Recruitment and Hiring………………………………………………………………..
      Potential Benefits…………………………………………………………………….
      Limitations and Caveats……………………………………………………………..
   Case Studies……………………………………………………………………………
      Jersey City, New Jersey………………………………………………………………
      Indianapolis, Indiana…………………………………………………………………
      Lansing, Michigan……………………………………………………………………
      Challenges and Lessons Learned…………………………………………………….
   Minority Engagement………………………………………………………………….
      Potential Benefits…………………………………………………………………….
      Limitations and Caveats……………………………………………………………..
   Case Studies……………………………………………………………………………
      Buffalo, New York…………………………………………………………………..
      Rochester, New York………………………………………………………………..
      New Haven, Connecticut……………………………………………………………
      Challenges and Lessons Learned……………………………………………………
   Using Technology……………………………………………………………………..
      Potential Benefits……………………………………………………………………
      Limitations and Caveats…………………………………………………………….
   Case Studies……………………………………………………………………………
      Redlands, California………………………………………………………………..
      Tacoma, Washington……………………………………………………………….
      Austin, Texas……………………………………………………………………….
      Challenges and Lessons Learned…………………………………………………..
   Training………………………………………………………………………………
      Potential Benefits…………………………………………………………………..
      Limitations and Caveats……………………………………………………………
   Case Studies………………………………………………………………………….
      Brookline, Massachusetts………………………………………………………….
      Metropolitan Nashville, Tennessee………………………………………………..
      Phoenix, Arizona…………………………………………………………………..
      Challenges and Lessons Learned………………………………………………….
   Data Collection………………………………………………………………………
      Potential Benefits………………………………………………………………….
      Limitations and Caveats…………………………………………………………..
   Case Studies…………………………………………………………………………
      Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina………………………………………….
      Dothan, Alabama………………………………………………………………….
      Kansas City, Missouri…………………………………………………………….
      Oakland, California……………………………………………………………….
      Challenges and Lessons Learned…………………………………………………

Section 3. The Challenges of Addressing Racial Profiling……………………………
   Common Themes Across Strategy Areas…………………………………………….
      Organizational Buy-In…………………………………………………………….
      Community Involvement………………………………………………………….
      Managing Technology and Planning Issues………………………………………
      Keeping Focus…………………………………………………………………….
   Understanding if Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling Are Working………………

Tables
   Table 1. Benefits, Limitations, and Caveats of Strategies for Reducing Racial
       Profiling………………………………………………………………………….
   Table 2. Lessons Learned from the Field: Strategies for Reducing Racial Profiling…

References………………………………………………………………………………

Case Study Participants…………………………………………………………………





 


Section 1. Background and Evaluation Objectives 
 
In the past 2 decades, public agencies—including law enforcement—have become increasingly concerned about ensuring organizational integrity and accountability.  During this same period, concerns about racial profiling or bias-based policing threatened to undermine the integrity of law enforcement nationally.  Although there have long been allegations of police targeting people of color, aggressive crime-control strategies used by police in an effort to reduce crime during the last 2 decades have heightened perceptions that police may use pedestrian or traffic stops as a pretext for conducting disproportionate numbers of investigations of Black or Hispanic individuals. As a result of such perceptions, addressing racial profiling has become vital to law enforcement’s efforts to ensure and promote integrity.  This publication identifies a number of promising strategies supported by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS Office) program titled “Promote Cooperative Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling” (PCSRRP) that law enforcement can use to identify, address, and prevent concerns about racial profiling in their agencies.
   
The PCSRRP grant program was part of a larger initiative from the COPS Office to promote cultures of integrity in law enforcement following the adoption of community policing models.  During more than a decade, the COPS Office has supported the development of creative and innovative strategies to strengthen integrity in state and local law enforcement organizations.  In 1996, the COPS Office and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) were joint sponsors of a symposium attended by law enforcement executives and community representatives that helped move the discussion around integrity “from a narrow focus on police officers’ behavior and internal investigations of corruption to an understanding of the importance of other factors” (Gaffigan and McDonald, 1997:iii).  The symposium made the issue of organizational integrity a high priority and opened the door for law enforcement agencies to begin experimenting with different models for enhancing integrity.
   
Public Concern about Racial Profiling 

The issues of police misconduct that emerged in the late 1990s because of media attention to high-profile events suggested a strong racial component to acts of misconduct such as excessive use of force (incidents involving Rodney King, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo), racial profiling (New Jersey State Police, evidence of the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA] profile in Operation Pipeline), and invasive searches of nonwhite drivers and pedestrians (Wilkins v. Maryland State Police).  In June 1999, the Department of Justice brought civil rights, police, and other government leaders together at the “Strengthening Police-Community Relationships” conference to address the subject.  The participants identified five main priority areas of integrity on which to focus in the coming years: 1. Racial profiling, 2. Police use of force, 3. Accountability, 4. Citizen complaint processes, and 5. Recruitment and hiring.  This COPS Evaluation Brief addresses specific responses to the problem of racial profiling.
 
The term “racial profiling” is derived from the “profile” of drug couriers developed by the DEA during the mid-1980s to interdict interstate drug trafficking.  The use of criminal profiling techniques was promoted as part of a specific strategy to apprehend interstate drug traffickers through routine traffic stops.  While the original DEA profile did not explicitly include race, evidence emerged that some local and state law enforcement agencies were applying the profile in race-specific ways. The line between criminal profiling based on individual behavior in concert with known offender characteristics, and racial profiling based primarily on the use of race as the basis for suspicion, is not always clear to officers.  While most professionals agree that police may not use racial or ethnic stereotypes to select whom to stop and search, they may use race or ethnicity to determine whether a person matches a specific description of a particular suspect.  There is less agreement about how race can be lawfully considered when investigating a particular crime problem committed by a group of individuals who share racial or ethnic characteristics.  Clear policies, training, and monitoring by supervisors are often required to help officers navigate such challenging, but fundamentally important, decisions.
  
Public concern over racial profiling became so common in the late 1990s that the practice became popularly labeled “driving while black” or “driving while brown.”  Today, racial profiling is generally understood as the practice of targeting or stopping a person based primarily on the person’s race, rather than on any individualized suspicion.  The Department of Justice’s A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems defines racial profiling as “any police-initiated action that relies upon the race, ethnicity, or national origin of an individual rather than the behavior of an individual or information that leads the police to a particular individual who has been identified as being, or having been, engaged in criminal activity” (Ramirez, McDevitt, and Farrell, 2000:3).  While no clear consensus exists about the severity and prevalence of biased enforcement, the widely held concerns about racial profiling represent a significant threat to police legitimacy. 
  
In the wake of high-profile cases in New Jersey and Maryland,1 dozens of states enacted legislation banning racial profiling and requiring mandatory data collection,2 hundreds of  jurisdictions voluntarily began collecting traffic stop data,3 community groups and police departments started working together to develop strategies to identify and prevent racial profiling, social scientists began conducting research on how to measure racial profiling, and attorneys began pursuing both civil and criminal litigation based on racial profiling claims.  Indeed, addressing community perceptions about racial bias in traffic stops became a top priority for law enforcement professionals across the country.  The support provided by the COPS office for innovative strategies to reduce racial profiling shaped many of these responses.
   
Promoting Cooperative Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling 

The COPS Office took a position of national leadership by developing strategies to help police departments respond to concerns about racial profiling.  As the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division investigated and filed legal suits against a number of police departments for a “pattern or practice” of racial profiling, the COPS Office provided support to agencies to proactively address the issue through a variety of initiatives:  
•
•	The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) received support to publish a guide outlining departmental responses to biased-based policing.  The substantive chapters from the PERF publication Racially Biased Policing: A Principled Response provided the basis for subsequent COPS Office funding areas under the PCSRRP grants described in more detail below. 
•
•	The Regional Community Policing Institutes (RCPI) received funding to develop curriculums and training materials related to racial profiling issues.  Each RCPI has its own signature emphasis in curriculum development. 
•
•	The COPS Office sponsored local law enforcement agencies, such as the Boston Police Department, to produce roundtables on ethics and integrity.  These roundtables brought together a number of law enforcement executives and researchers to discuss issues of integrity with a special focus on race.   

1 Three high-profile cases—the 1996 Soto decision from the southern New Jersey Turnpike, the 1992 Wilkins case from I-95 in Maryland, and the April 1998 shooting incident on the northern New Jersey Turnpike—largely defined the early public discourse on racial profiling.   
2 State legislative efforts are documented at the Institute on Race and Justice’s online Racial Profiling Data Collection Resource Center, http://www.racialprofilinganalysis.neu.edu/legislation/index.php . 
3 Such data collection efforts are documented at the Institute on Race and Justice’s online Racial Profiling Data Collection Resource Center, http://www.racialprofilinganalysis.neu.edu/background/jurisdictions.php   
4 The cooperative agreements provided grantees with additional oversight.  COPS project managers held monthly conference calls with the PCSRRP recipients.  Various subject matter experts were invited to talk with agencies in different strategy areas.  The COPS Office held six monthly conference calls with cooperative agreement departments.   
 
5 42 USC Sec. 2000e-2(a)(2) 
 
6 The term “minority” is used here because it was part of the original COPS Office grant solicitation. 
7 For example, the MORE (Making Officer Redeployment Effective) and ISTEP (Information Systems Technology Enhancement Project) programs. 
 
  As part of its comprehensive strategy in responding to racial profiling, the COPS Office entered into 21 cooperative agreements with law enforcement agencies throughout the country to support the development of new racial profiling-prevention strategies.4 While many ideas existed about the best way to deal with the racial profiling issue, the cooperative agreements funded projects that demonstrated some of the most promising practices for local law enforcement agencies.  The PCSRRP projects include six main areas for intervention:  
•
1. Recruitment and selection. 
 2. Training and education of police and community members. 
 3. Minority community engagement initiatives. 
 4. Accountability and supervision. 
 5. Collecting and analyzing traffic stop data.  
 6. Using technology to reduce racial profiling and increase officer safety. 

 
To help other agencies learn from the experiences of PCSRRP recipients, the COPS Office partnered with the Lowell, Massachusetts, Police Department through a Police as Problem Solvers/Peacekeepers grant to provide technical assistance to the grantees in preparing a technical assistance guide with recommendations and considerations for other departments contemplating similar strategies.  The guide would also serve as a final report to the COPS Office. Four other agencies, Tampa, Florida; Sacramento, California; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Colorado Springs, Colorado, were also awarded problem-solving grants to provide different kinds of technical assistance to PCSRRP grantees across the county. 
  
To better understand the value of the PCSRRP grants in providing promising approaches to improving integrity in law enforcement agencies, the COPS Office supported a research partnership between the Lowell Police Department and the Institute on Race and Justice (IRJ) at Northeastern University to conduct a national evaluation of the programs funded through the PCSRRP program.
 
Evaluation Methodology 

Using the technical assistance guides submitted to the COPS Office as the primary source of data, the Lowell/IRJ evaluation team constructed a series of case studies that described the major components of each project supported under the PCSRRP program.  This methodology  highlights details of a program from the viewpoint and experiences of the participants.  The case studies in this COPS Evaluation Brief describe the real-life contexts in which interventions have occurred.  A benefit of this kind of evaluation is that it can identify the positive as well as the negative aspects of the various programs and provide concrete examples of challenges encountered by agencies. The limit of this approach is that the experiences of agencies adopting each approach may not be generalized for all police agencies throughout the country.  Additionally, there are limits on the type of conclusions that can be drawn from such a study.  The evaluation strategy used here largely describes and assesses the processes that agencies undertook to implement each grant program.  Agencies were not expected to conduct an evaluation or to provide evaluation results to Lowell/IRJ; therefore, it is not always possible to measure the impact of these programs in reducing racial profiling.  This COPS Evaluation Brief, however, identifies a number of common challenges and successes that grantees encountered using different strategies to reduce racial profiling. 
 
Section 2 describes the six strategy areas funded under the PCSRRP program.  The following format presents information about each strategy area: 
•
•	A short description of the strategy 
•	Identification of the positive aspects of the particular strategy 
•	Identification of the limitations of the particular strategy 
•	Examples of the strategy in practice  
•	Identification of the challenges of implementing such a strategy.   

The final section of this guide compares and contrasts programs across the six strategy areas and offers a common set of suggestions about how to implement strategies to address and reduce racial profiling most successfully. 

 
  
 
 Section 2. Funded Program Areas and Major Observations 
 
This section describes the strategy areas and projects funded under the Promote Cooperative Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling (PCSRRP) initiative.  For each subsection, we provide (1) an explanation of the strategy, the potential benefits offered, and limitations and caveats, (2) summaries of the projects implemented by the grantees, and (3) important challenges and lessons learned during implementation.     
 
Accountability 

Accountability means holding officers responsible for their conduct, making sure that their behavior advances the goals of the department, and, at some level, making the actions of the officers and the values of the organization answerable to the wider community.  Police officers work under conditions of low visibility and high discretion, which provide them with a great deal of leeway to make decisions. In return, they must be able to explain and justify their decisions if they are questioned by supervisors or members of the community.  It is the perception of most police officials that in most agencies a small number of officers may be responsible for a large share of the actions that community members perceive as racially biased.  For departments seeking to reduce racial profiling, ensuring the accountability of individual officers or groups of officers through an early intervention system (EIS) has been identified as a positive strategy for reducing or preventing racial profiling.
  
Early intervention is a data-driven management process that allows managers to identify officers who have recurring problematic behavior and to intervene through counseling and additional training (Walker, 2000).  The idea behind EIS is that officers may not recognize problematic behavior unless it is identified and brought to their attention by supervisors.  Once identified, officers have the ability to improve their performance and correct the conscious or unconscious behavior causing problems, such as racially biased traffic enforcement.  The data collected by these systems also offer an overall picture of an officer’s activity that can provide context when addressing allegations of biased policing and can indicate that racial disparities are associated with factors other than an officer’s bias, for example, deployment allocations.

Early intervention systems generally consist of five main steps:  
•
1. Selection of the various aspects of officer performance to track or measure.  
2. Identification of officers whose performance indicators exceed an agreeable threshold for departmental concern (e.g., more than three force incidents during a given period). 
3. Determination of whether intervention is warranted by a supervisor through review of existing information on, and trends of, officer activity.   
4. Intervention, if necessary, to address the officer’s specific performance problem, which often consists of counseling, training, close supervision, more frequent performance review, or reassignment. 
5. Post-intervention monitoring and ongoing assessment of the intervention’s effectiveness, during which data collection and monitoring continue.   
 
Potential Benefits
 
EISs are thought to provide law enforcement agencies with a practical tool to address allegations of racial profiling that complement traditional data collection and analysis mechanisms.  Even though traffic stop data may reveal racial disparities in traffic enforcement, agencies may not know if such disparities are driven by the activities of a few officers or by institutional or department-wide practices.  By identifying and concentrating training and intervention efforts on the officers who data indicate may be engaged in racially biased policing, the department can address the potential problematic behavior in a more efficient manner and subsequently monitor officers’ activities across assignments.  Positive change through monitoring and intervention, when necessary, may reduce citizen complaints and agency liability. 

Although an EIS generally examines a broad variety of policing activities, traffic stop data can be incorporated into preexisting systems, or a system can be built around traffic stop data already being collected.  If a department is concerned about an officer who may have biased tendencies, it is likely that the officer in question would act in biased ways in a number of different situations.  For example, a biased officer may be more likely to stop and search African-American drivers, use force against African-American citizens, and may also be more likely to receive complaints from members of the African-American community in his or her jurisdiction.  By including these sources of data in a single early intervention system, a department may be in a position to identify potential problem officers even earlier than if only traffic stop activity was monitored.  Early intervention broadens the departmental focus beyond racial profiling. It addresses multiple accountability and supervisory issues at once and provides incentives for individual, unit, and supervisory accountability throughout the department.  In addition, data from the system can help guide agency policies, trainings, and responses to community concerns.   
 
Limitations and Caveats
 
Implementing an EIS can require a significant commitment from agencies in effort and resources.  Well-designed systems call for high levels of technology capacity and commitment of resources.  Agencies looking for less expensive off-the-shelf products need to be aware that these systems may not provide the ability to monitor all indicators that a department deems important, including the monitoring of traffic and/or pedestrian stops.  Agencies also must carefully determine thresholds for alerts and intervention.  There is no magic level at which officer activity should trigger monitoring or intervention; more effective systems use a rate of activity (such as number of stops per week) compared with other officers working within the same area or assignment.  A discussion of agency priorities will be needed to decide what these thresholds should be.  It is important to understand that the value of an EIS is limited unless agencies are willing to use information to identify and address organizational explanations—as well as those of individual officers—for troubling patterns.   
 
Case Studies  

Arlington, Texas
 
The Arlington Police Department developed and trained officers on a new early intervention program (EIP) to identify behaviors that may indicate racial profiling and other police misconduct.  Previously, the department collected a large amount of data on employee activities, including data related to traffic stops, but no central repository existed for this information to be linked and made available for analysis and intervention when necessary.  
 
Project Components 

Measurement and Thresholds. The EIP collects data on use-of-force incidents, open internal affairs cases, citizen complaints, summary discipline, unexcused sick days, pursuits, and commendations.  The information collected in the database is managed by the department’s Internal Affairs (IA) Unit.  Supervisors and administrators developed the EIP thresholds.  They agreed that if one of the following occurred within a rolling 90-day period an intervention would be warranted: three use-of-force incidents, two IA cases, three citizen complaints, two summary disciplines, four unexcused sick days, two pursuits, or receipt of two racial profiling complaints.  The department subsequently increased the use-of-force threshold to six incidents in 90 days;  stringent reporting policies governing use of force were generating too many unnecessary alerts.  Arlington is also looking into a software upgrade that would allow the system to provide alerts based on combinations of events.    
 
Intervention. The intervention process consists of several steps.  First, the program alerts IA staff, who then notify the officer’s supervisor.  The supervisor then investigates the incidents and discusses them with the officer.  Following this meeting, the supervisor reports to the deputy chief, and together they decide the outcome, and, if necessary, develop an intervention program for the officer.  In addition, an officer who receives two commendations is similarly identified and brought to the attention of these same parties.  In this way, the system not only identifies officers with potential problems but notifies supervisors of officers who deserve acknowledgement and praise for doing a good job.   
 
Training Evaluation. All commissioned Arlington officers attended training to learn about the purpose, policy, and procedures of the EIP.  The training program was offered by the Tampa Police Department, which was operating under a COPS Office Police as Problem Solvers and Peacemakers grant initiative that provided technical assistance to PCSRRP grantees.  A separate training was provided for supervisors.   
 
After the training, officers filled out a 16-item survey designed to capture their attitudes and perceptions toward the EIP.  Overall, the survey showed that officers felt that the training provided officers and supervisors with important information about the use and protections of EISs.  In response to a survey finding that nonsupervisory personnel held less positive views of the prospective system than supervisory personnel, the department worked with employee groups to promote the program and overcome this perception.  The IA commander made presentations to employee associations, invited association leadership to the supervisory training, and provided opportunities for officers and supervisors to offer input on types of behaviors tracked and threshold settings.  Although the department was unable to implement the EIP before the end of the grant period, the system is up and running.   
 
 
St. Paul, Minnesota 
  
The city of St. Paul initiated a program to increase police accountability and decision making as part of an agreement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) following community concern about racially biased policing.  As part of the mediated settlement, the department developed and implemented an integrated early intervention system (EIS) to identify officers engaged in biased policing.  The department also wanted to decrease the likelihood of hiring individuals who would engage in racial profiling.  To this end, the St. Paul Police Department  partnered with the community to identify the positive characteristics they would want an officer to possess. 
 
Project Components
 
Measurements and Thresholds.  Prior to this grant, St. Paul’s EIS was fragmented.  In the previous system, information on internal affairs complaints, number of sick days used, and disciplinary actions was collected manually.  The department contracted with a software development company to integrate information from various sources to enhance the existing EIS.  The new system captures information on both officers engaged in inappropriate behaviors (e.g., abuse of sick time, excessive use of force).    
 
Officer Characteristics and Community Expectations. In conjunction with developing the EIS, the department decided to reexamine its hiring practices (see the section on Recruitment and Hiring in this report for information on this strategy area) and identify positive characteristics that would be integrated into both the hiring and officer accountability systems.  It is the department’s belief that racial profiling could be minimized if it hired people who represent the positive ethics and goals of the police and more closely represent the community they serve.  To achieve this goal, the department conducted interviews and focus groups with community leaders to determine the characteristics and attributes believed to epitomize the ideal community policing officer.      
 
The results of the interviews and focus groups showed that the best candidate would  personify 15 characteristics: enthusiastic, fair, possessed of good judgment, creative, self-motivated, self-confident, courageous, tenacious, respectful, compassionate, honest, loyal, responsible, a team player, and unafraid to engage the community.  Community members’ definitions of these characteristics were also culled from the focus groups.  Three psychologists refined the model by comparing more recently hired officers against the model characteristics.  The department planned to contract with an organizational development consulting firm to further review and modify hiring practices based on this model.  The firm researched the hiring practices and psychological assessment tools of more than a dozen law enforcement agencies, consulted experts in the field of psychological assessment, and conducted a literature review in support of developing recommendations for the department.  Although the best candidate characteristics were not explicitly connected to the agency’s EIS, such linkages are a longer term goal.  
 
 
Denver, Colorado
  
In 2000, the Denver Police Department created a community task force to promote a healthy relationship between the department and the community through mutual accountability.  To address the task force’s concerns about the department’s ability to identify and prevent racial profiling, the department sought to enhance its existing Professional Performance Review program.  This system suffered from limited identification processes, requiring more manual analysis than the department was able to conduct.  Under this initiative, the department designed a new system that was intended to more effectively identify officers engaging in high-risk behaviors.   
 
Program Components
 
Research, Development, and Contracts. The Denver Review Board, whose members include representatives from the City Attorney’s Office, police administration, and the police labor union, investigated existing early intervention system models used by other departments across the county.  Board members visited the Phoenix Police Department to observe its highly regarded EIS, and Denver subsequently contracted with Phoenix’s project manager with the hope of benefiting from his experience.  To ensure that the new system would operate in the current network, the department created a system in Microsoft Visual Basic, which would ride on a Microsoft SQL server platform.  The officer’s badge number served as the link in all relevant databases. 
 
Measurements and Threshold. The Denver Police Department’s Early Identification and Intervention System (EIIS) is able to capture a large amount of human resource information including personnel assignments, leave, overtime, and limited duty.  The system can also track and monitor several performance indicators such as arrest data, computer-aided dispatch (CAD) information, citation data, commendation information, civilian complaints, civil liability violation complaints, use-of-force incidents, informal incident investigations, and police vehicle accidents.  It is also able to track and monitor officers’ offense reports, pursuits, court appearances, and training and education received.  At the end of the grant period Denver had not yet determined thresholds for generating alerts concerning officer behavior.  After thresholds were established, the chief suspended their use in December 2004 following a review of  Denver’s EIIS reports and feedback from across the department.  He noted that the discretionary arrest data collected had too broad a scope and was too loosely defined, and the system was not sufficiently able to compare triggers based on such factors as assignment, shifts, and districts.  In 2006, the Denver command staff, union representatives, Citizen Oversight Board, and representatives from the Office of the Independent Monitor developed a plan to address these issues.  Specifically, first-line supervisors rather than the chief’s office would be responsible for identifying potential problem behavior; and system thresholds would be based on comparisons between officers in similar work situations.  
 
Officer Buy-In. To address officers’ negative perceptions that the information could be misused, the department created several layers of security to prevent inappropriate access.  A number of tests were conducted on each screen and each control to ensure that they would protect against security breaches.  Once the debugging was completed, a final draft of the system was presented to the chief and command staff.   During this process, the department decided that the system’s importance as a supervisory tool meant that it should not be used to facilitate media or open record requests.  Requests would be fulfilled through accessing the original source database rather than the EIIS.     
 
Training. Following training for the chief and command staff, supervisory staff members were instructed on the system policies and received hands-on training on the program.  Training was mandatory for all officers of the rank of sergeant and above; it was voluntary for all other officers.  Since the system was implemented, more than 230 officers have been trained. 
   
Challenges and Lessons Learned: Accountability Case Studies
 
 The following issues were identified as being common across the accountability case studies or were particularly important to one grantee. They represent challenges encountered when trying to implement accountability and are not necessarily the limitations related to decreasing racial profiling, which will be addressed in more detail in Section 3.  The issues may help agencies to identify and prepare for challenges they might face in adopting similar types of accountability programs.

Officer Resistance. Implementing an EIS is commonly met by resistance from the rank-and-file officers who fear that the system will unfairly identify officers for punishment. To overcome this resistance, it is important to include patrol officers in the planning and implementation of these systems.  Arlington’s survey, which found nonsupervisory personnel more wary of the coming EIS than supervisory personnel, illustrates the importance of overcoming officer resistance in EIS development.  The Denver police recognized the need for top-down support and effective communication with officers through training and supervisors to change negative perceptions of the agency’s disciplinary process and promote the EIS.  St. Paul has regularly invited the union to participate in various departmental initiatives and enjoys a productive relationship with line officers as a result.  Demonstrating that the administration will not use the system for formal discipline may also improve attitudes toward the system.  Agencies should take great care to ensure that the EIS does not incorrectly identify officers based on inaccurate data  because the process may never be judged as fair.  In addition, first-line supervisors will need specific training to help them accurately and consistently interpret data assembled by the EIS and to conduct effective interventions with employees when it is determined that such action is necessary.

Stakeholder Involvement. The community is a stakeholder in public safety and expects accountability from its police department.  In some cases, however, getting to the point where the community is willing to work productively with the agency takes considerable effort.  In St. Paul, early collaborative meetings were marked by antagonism, and in some instances community members would bring up other topics and concerns for discussion.  By scheduling additional meetings and forums with community members and making the effort to listen, the department was able to mold criticism into positive action steps and obtain valuable feedback from the community.        

Managing Technology.  Hiring a program manager with the appropriate level of experience, as Denver did by contracting the Phoenix EIS manager, can be indispensable in implementing the most cost-effective system and keeping the project on track.  Many complex challenges are involved in merging various forms of information, particularly if they are on different platforms.  There are also limitations with off-the-shelf products that agencies should fully understand before purchasing one of them.  Before starting a technology program, departments should refer to the COPS Office Law Enforcement Tech Guide: How to plan, purchase, and manage technology (successfully!). (Harris and Romesburg, 2002.)
  
Privacy Concerns.  An EIS collects large amounts of data on individual officers, much of which may be considered confidential, which can be a cause for concern for many line officers.  As the Denver police recognized, minimizing the number and types of people who could view the information through layered security can prevent inappropriate access and assuage officer concerns.  Agencies considering an EIS should be careful about confidentiality and check the status or legality of the data collected, especially regarding the public record.

Navigating the Bureaucracy. Cutting through the red tape can be extremely time-consuming, but including it in the timeline may help lessen frustration and delays.  Denver’s experience shows how time-consuming navigating the city bureaucracy can be.  After receiving the grant award and before the city attorney preparing the contract with the program developer, the department needed to obtain approval from the city’s e-government leaders team (top managers) and e-government operational leaders team (top technology officials), requiring explanations of other options and why the department chose this one.  The department had to submit its plans to the City Council Safety Committee for review.  Finally, the draft contract was sent to the developer for review, resulting in several discussions between the developer and city attorney.  Understanding  the administrative steps necessary for implementation as fully as possible before starting will reduce delays and frustration.   

 
Recruitment and Hiring
 
Recruiting talented and dedicated officers has long been understood as central to the success of a law enforcement agency.  As American society has grown more diverse, law enforcement professionals have begun to recognize the important role a diverse workforce plays in the successful administration of justice.  Additionally, during the past 60 years, the legal landscape has changed dramatically, protecting the rights of persons seeking employment and enabling applicants facing discrimination to seek compensatory and punitive damages from employers or potential employers.   

•	Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: Employers cannot “limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” (§ 703 (a) (2)).5   

•	The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972: Amended Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and bans discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex in all terms and conditions of employment.  Employers may face liability if they do not establish employment standards, such as written exams, that apply to all applicants without a purposefully disparate effect.   

•	The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990: Amended Title VII by prohibiting impermissible consideration of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, or disability.  It also allows for compensatory and punitive damages based on membership in one of these groups, whereas previously this recourse had been available only to racial and ethnic minorities.   

Regardless of the legislation in place to ensure equality and allow for civil litigation, “the main incentive for hiring a diverse group of officers is that by maintaining a police department that reflects the community, agencies are able to practice more effective policing” (Gascón and Schaefer, 2001:2).  Recruiting and hiring a police force that represents the community which it serves has been recognized as a strategy that helps reduce racial profiling by conveying a sense of equity in departmental practices and increasing understanding between the police and members of diverse communities (Fridell et al., 2001).  The most successful campaigns have targeted a specific population group in the community and have been promoted by the highest levels of police administration.   
 
Potential Benefits. One of the greatest challenges to diversifying law enforcement organizations has been the long-standing history of mistrust between the police and minority communities.  After highly publicized and racially charged police incidents in New York City and Los Angeles in the early 1990s, police departments nationally have made a concerted effort to diversify their workforces.  Additionally, law enforcement has begun to recognize that diverse workforces are a central component of community policing, which expects police agencies to solicit input and participation from citizens and communities.  Agencies’ efforts to solicit these communities have led to numerous creative strategies to increase agency diversity and better reflect community demographics.
   
  Appropriate minority representation in the police force can be an important asset helping police departments gain the trust of minority community members who might not otherwise serve in a police-community partnership.  Increasing the diversity of officers and employees can convey a sense of equity in agency practices and enhance community trust in the organization.  Diversity in hiring also creates opportunity for a positive culture change within the agency.  
 
Limitations and Caveats. Recruiting minority communities with less-positive perceptions about law enforcement may be challenging, both for changing institutional practices as well as courting members of the community.  Despite widespread acceptance of, and support for, diversifying the law enforcement profession, the majority of law enforcement agencies continue to struggle with issues of recruiting a diverse workforce—particularly people of color and women.  This area of ability is still a concern among those in administrative positions in police departments (IACP, 1998).  Recruiting minority candidates is hampered by both higher levels of distrust toward the profession of policing in minority communities as well as educational and/or legal requirements such as drug testing and background checks, which often disproportionately disqualify interested minority applicants.
  
In addition to the challenge of recruiting minority and women candidates, agencies often find it challenging to retain a diverse workforce. The life experiences of women and minorities can vary widely from the conventional model of a police officer, limiting the probability of female or minority members being promoted into the department’s upper echelons.  Agencies need to recognize that increased recruitment and hiring of diverse pools of candidates does not ensure that minorities will stay with. It is also crucial to understand that increasing the racial and gender diversity of employees does not automatically result in the changes in cultures necessary to prevent racial profiling because internal norms are frequently adopted by the small number of female and minority officers.  These factors all need to be understood and addressed, which may require wide-scale organizational change.   
 
Case Studies

Jersey City, New Jersey
 
The goal of the Jersey City Police Department  was to find qualified candidates within the city’s minority communities who could serve as bridges between the department and the community.  In 1999, the department created the Office of Minority Recruiting and allocated time and resources specifically for this endeavor.  In an effort to become more representative of the city’s demographics,  Jersey City used its PCSRRP grant to refine its recruiting practices to increase the number of minorities joining the force.  A secondary goal was to ensure that, more generally, department recruits had not been involved in any negative, racially charged incidents.  Through the investigation of any such incidents, departmental accountability would be reinforced to minority communities.  To enhance their already existing program and to engage these communities, the department developed a marketing campaign to encourage applications. 
 
Project Component
 
Education and Marketing Campaigns. The Jersey City Police Department sought to accomplish its goals through a multipronged campaign to reintroduce the police department to the community and facilitate a connection between the community and the department by focusing on the “human side” of law enforcement.   One part of the initiative involved recruitment officers speaking with community and high school groups about policing as a positive career option.  A media campaign intended to target all citizens of Jersey City used several media outlets to reach this mass audience.  Advertisements were played on cable television, strategically placed on billboards throughout the city, and printed in several minority newspapers.  The department also distributed flyers in supermarkets, malls, churches, and block association meetings, and mailed job applications to citizen contacts of the department.  Additionally, the department offered a free seminar open to all applicants to give them more information on, and help them prepare for, the entrance exam. 
 
Through the media campaign, the department was able to educate and provide a new level of understanding to the public.  This new knowledge and awareness led to the department successfully enrolling more minorities in the 2003 recruit class than in any class since the 1970s.  The department continues to use the media to promote recruitment endeavors, particularly to reach eligible applicants from diverse ethnic backgrounds.  Posters and newspaper articles have been successful methods of reaching a larger pool of eligible applicants who are representative of the community.  Ensuring that majority applicants have not previously been involved in negative racial incidents has been institutionalized as part of the department’s investigatory background check process.   
 
Indianapolis, Indiana
 
Before it was awarded funding, the Indianapolis Police Department had implemented many successful approaches that increased the number of women and minorities on its force.  Despite these efforts, minorities were still underrepresented. The chief and top administrators decided that a multipronged recruitment strategy would be the most beneficial approach to building a police force mirroring the racial, ethnic, and cultural composition of the community.  By doing so, they hoped that excessive force, cultural insensitivity, and racial profiling would be stopped, negative perceptions of the police department could be eradicated, and trust between the police and community could be cultivated.   
 
Project Components 

Marketing. The Indianapolis Police Department contracted a marketing firm to help the department create a recruitment campaign, produce and organize events, and disseminate information to the local media and community at large.  The campaign, centering on the theme of police as “everyday heroes,” was kicked off with a press conference outside the city-county building to make the event accessible to all citizens.  During the campaign’s run, advertisements conveyed the messages on television (local and cable channels) and radio, on billboards, and through a grassroots marketing campaign. 
 
Ministers’ Breakfast. To reach out to African-Americans, Latinos, and women, the Indianapolis Police Department and Christamore House (a neighborhood community center) co-hosted a ministers’ breakfast.  The department explained, the need for minority officers and offered suggestions on how ministers could help in the outreach of minority recruits.  Despite a disappointing turnout, the event was considered a success because it reached a much larger audience by being broadcast on the local access television channel. 
 
Virtual Academy. The Virtual Academy exposed the public to positions and opportunities available at the Indianapolis Police Department.  The sessions included a welcome from the chief of police, an orientation about departmental opportunities, and physical agility and scenario training.  Select officers participated in one-on-one mentoring, where they escorted interested candidates to mid-shift roll call and on ride-alongs.  Participation exceeded expectations: 86 individuals, almost all African-American, Latino, or women, attended.  Most attendees had already completed applications to join the police force.   
 
Tutoring. Interested candidates were paired with department officers who became their tutors.  The tutors received training in tutoring and provided participants with lessons to help them pass the different components of the hiring process, including the written assessment, oral exams, and physical agility test.  
 
According to the department, the proportion of African-Americans doubled from 10 percent of the pre-grant recruit class to 21 percent of the post-grant class, the proportion of other minorities tripled from 4 percent to 12 percent, and the portion of women remained constant at 24 percent following program installation.  The mentoring component appears to be particularly valuable in helping participants pass to the next stage as they proceed through the hiring process.
 
Lansing, Michigan
 
In 2001, the Lansing Police Department made a commitment to its citizens to address and prevent racially motivated traffic stops.  To begin this process, the department collected data using Management Analysis of Traffic Stops (MATS) forms that provided basic information on who was stopped by the police.  In addition to the data collection procedures, the department wanted to recruit minority candidates who would better reflect the community the department serves.  In an effort to achieve this goal, the department decided to target youths in their community with recruiting outreach.  
 
Project Components
 
Outreach. The Lansing Police Department selected a young, diverse group of officers and cadets and trained them in recruiting strategies, including public presentations and effective ways to interact with area youth. The teams placed booths in schools where interested students could obtain information, brochures, and interactive CD-ROMs on choosing a career in law enforcement.  Contact information was obtained from each student who visited the booths and was used to follow up with interested candidates. 
 
Student Surveys. To build an effective advertising campaign, the department used a survey created by researchers at Michigan State University to question 11th graders in two of the three city high schools about their backgrounds, interest in a policing career, and their stereotypes and perceptions of police officers.  
 
Analysis of the survey revealed that 20 percent of all respondents indicated that they could see themselves becoming a police officer.  This represented 24 percent of White youths and 16 percent of minority youths responding to the survey.  Across racial groups, students reported that the ability to help others was the most attractive characteristic of a career in law enforcement.  The findings helped shape the department’s new recruitment strategy.   
 
Focus Groups. The department held focus groups, one with law enforcement and six with students, to obtain information about effective recruiting methods that could be used within its community.  Law enforcement personnel were asked about what attracted them into the field, while the six student groups concentrated on future plans and the stereotypes they held regarding police officers.   
 
Marketing. Several advertising strategies were used to market law enforcement as a career.  With the help of a public relations company and the survey and focus group data, the department developed a campaign targeted to local youths.  The youngest and most diverse group of officers were the face of the campaign in hopes of attracting youthful and minority candidates.  Television and radio commercials and printed advertisements in newspapers and on billboards were also used.  The television and radio commercials aired during programs and on stations that targeted a teenage audience, and the newspaper advertisements were printed in several papers including those that are published for audiences in minority communities.  The billboards were strategically placed throughout the city.  Unfortunately, budget cuts limited the extent to which the recruitment campaign could be implemented.   
 
Challenges and Lessons Learned: Recruitment and Hiring Case Studies  

 The following issues were identified as being common across the recruitment and hiring case studies or were particularly important to one grantee. They represent challenges encountered when trying to implement recruitment and hiring programs and are not necessarily the limitations related to decreasing racial profiling, which will be addressed in more detail in Section 3.   The issues are intended to help agencies to identify and prepare for challenges they might face in adopting similar types of recruitment and hiring programs.

Officer Buy-In. All agency constituencies may not initially be on board with project goals.  The Jersey City Police Department notes in its technical assistance guide that when the Minority Recruitment Unit was established in 1999, the unit did not find support coming from all quarters.  The department conducted an education campaign within the department and provided opportunities for officers to contribute input and suggestions about hiring and outreach strategies.  Paying attention to the perspectives of representatives from all units in the department may build a stronger program that can deliver consistent messages in outreach to the community.

Community and Stakeholder Involvement.  It is essential that recruitment efforts go directly to the groups the agency is attempting to attract.  Tailoring marketing to specific communities, targeting media sources seen by these communities, and working with community leaders can be effective methods for reaching out to members of these groups.

Emphasizing the positive aspects of a career in law enforcement is vital when addressing members of the African-American, Latino, or Asian communities, who previously may not have considered the benefits of such a career.  Focusing on leadership, problem solving, and community service may do more to promote positive images than emphasizing apprehending criminals.  Jersey City emphasized officers’ human side as people who live and work in the community, coach sports teams, and hold positions in their churches.  The Indianapolis campaign, created by the community-police grant team, focused on officers being everyday heroes.

Ensuring that the message is reaching the right people is an important part of the story because the best argument for joining the police force is worthless if nobody hears it.  All three sites targeted recruitment advertising to minority community members using media outlets focusing on those communities.  Where necessary, multilingual media campaigns should be conducted.

Involvement of a broad array of local key community leaders is essential.  They can help communicate as well as provide legitimacy to the messages the department is attempting to send.  Indianapolis hosted a ministers’ breakfast to reach out to African-Americans, Latinos, and women.  Getting buy-in and support from faith or secular minority community leaders can help bridge the divide between the community and the agency.

Mentoring. It is the experience of many departments that it is important to do more than simply recruit to help people succeed in getting into the department.  Mentoring recruits through the written, oral, and physical agility exams, as Indianapolis did, can increase the likelihood of their success, both in passing the entrance requirements and retaining employment with the department.

Keeping the Focus.  Planning and implementing an effective recruitment strategy to diversify police agencies represent long-term commitments. Often, the effects of these programs will not be seen for some time.  Effective programs take a substantial amount of time to get off the ground, often at least 2 years to recruit, screen, tutor, test, select, train, and place the hired officers on the streets.  In most cases, it is too early to determine whether diverse workforces actually decrease perceptions of racial profiling.  Once a diverse group of officers has had time in the field, the department should begin to evaluate whether hiring more minority officers had an effect on racial profiling.     

 
 
Minority Engagement6 

Race is one of the most consistent predictors of attitudes toward, and reported experiences of, the police and other criminal justice institutions. The reality that these attitudes and experiences are often negative has been a serious problem for law enforcement throughout its history in the United States.  The authors of the Kerner Commission Report noted that “rigid social, economic, and educational barriers” have prevented African-Americans in particular from “fully participating in the mainstream of American life” (Report of the United States National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders [Kerner Commission], 1968:207). They specifically note the damage done when members of minority communities perceive that the police are stopping minorities without an obvious reason for the stop (p.303).  The expression “driving while black” reflects the deep suspicion with which many in these communities continue to view the police.  The danger is that when laws are enforced in a discriminatory or insensitive manner—or are perceived as so—traditional enforcement strategies may fuel this perception.
   
Given the potency of negative experiences, the police cannot rely on a majority of positive interactions to overcome the few negative interactions.  They must consistently work to overcome the negative image that past policies and practices have cultivated.  Being viewed as fair and just is critical to successful policing in a democracy.  When the police are perceived as unfair in their enforcement, it will undermine their effectiveness.  According to the National Research Council’s (2004) review of research on policing since 1968, “people obey the law not just because they are afraid of being punished or because they believe the law is morally right, but also because they believe that the law and its enforcement are fairly administered” (p.6).  Legitimacy is at the heart of democratic law enforcement.  An integral part of policing, then, is the effort to demonstrate to the public that the law and its enforcement are indeed fair and unbiased.   
Engaging minority communities in meaningful ways facilitates this process.  By “engaging communities,” we are referring to strategies that give communities voice and input in departmental decision making on policy or other important initiatives, establish ongoing and meaningful opportunities for dialog between communities and law enforcement, and provide communities with current information on issues of importance to them.  

6The term “minority” is used here because it was part of the original COPS Office grant solicitation. 
 
Potential Benefits
 
Well-designed community engagement programs can help reduce negative public perceptions of the police by demonstrating a willingness to value minority community members’ input and innate worth.  If the effort is seen as being made in good faith, the community may come to view the inevitable biased-appearing situation as an aberration rather than business as usual.
   
Race can mediate perceptions of the police in various ways.  A recent study suggests that high-profile incidents of police misconduct may have a negative influence on African-Americans’ views of the police in general, whereas the negative perceptions by Whites attach only to the officers actually involved in the incident (Chermak et al., 2006).  Similarly, Weitzer and Tuch (2005) found that minorities are more likely than Whites to view discrimination in policing (and other arenas) as representing a more pervasive problem rather than as isolated incidents.  Improving minority community members’ opinions of law enforcement is possible, however, and may have an effect on their perceptions of the prevalence of racial profiling specifically.  In a recent study of perceptions of the New York City Police Department, Reitzel and Piquero (2006) found that while non-Whites were more likely to believe that racial profiling was widespread, people who approved of the department were much less likely to believe that racial profiling was widespread, regardless of race.   This is not to say that biased policing is a figment made real through general dissatisfaction with the police.  It is more likely that the perception of biased policing is correlated with how much people approve of the department.  When perceptions are negative, however, the likelihood that any stop will be perceived as justified declines.  Establishing an ongoing dialog with minority communities may increase public understanding of police goals and policies, which may encourage a willingness to comply with officers’ instructions during stops and increase the public’s willingness to work with law enforcement to increase public safety.    
Engaging immigrant populations can also improve public safety.  Developing relationships with these communities may help mitigate their fears of law enforcement brought with them from countries where the police are tied to oppressive regimes, and help increase their willingness to report crime.  By understanding how immigrant communities’ cultural norms for interacting with law enforcement differ, agencies can work with community leaders to communicate officers’ expectations, which may help to resolve police-immigrant encounters more safely.   
 
Limitations and Caveats
 
Given the longstanding negative attitudes of many minority communities  that stem from prior experience and as well as repeated incidents of misconduct, racism, and abuse, strategies for engaging members of the minority community in an effort to reduce racial profiling should not be viewed as quick fixes.  Engagement strategies need to be long-term, ongoing efforts to be effective.  Enhanced interactions between the groups it is hoped will lead to a deeper understanding between the police and local minority groups and eventually reduce the perception of racial profiling.  

Longevity is important to the process, and engagement programs that fold after a few months are likely to be potent symbols that the agency does not take these goals seriously.  Engagement needs to involve meaningful opportunities for input and partnership, while poorly designed programs may exacerbate existing tensions or create new ones.  Community trust depends on officer willingness to engage the community and to be open to community concerns.  This is perhaps the most difficult part of an engagement program.  It shows the community that the agency’s leadership is serious and is committed to ongoing and positive engagement with the community.    
 
 
 
 Case Studies

Buffalo, New York 

Bringing the community together with law enforcement to study issues around racial profiling, the Buffalo Police Department partnered with United Neighborhoods, an organization with experience both in collaborating with other community-based organizations and conducting study circles in the community. 
 
Project Components
 
Planning and Training. The Study Circle Resource Center helped with facilitator training and provided guides and other materials, which the Buffalo project partners modified to address racial profiling specifically.  The Buffalo Police Department initiated a pilot study circle, which the project team assessed and modified.  The research partner and Buffalo’s project coordinator trained study circle facilitators and recorders in part through mock study circle sessions critiqued by the trainers.  A second training provided helpful hints on how to keep the group focused and to engage the participants in topics concerning racial profiling. 
 
Study Circles. After a kickoff event to introduce the program and its community-based and academic partners to the community, United Neighborhoods sent letters to its member block clubs and contacted previous study circle participants to recruit for this project.  Buffalo defines study circles as “facilitated discussion groups, comprised of approximately 10 to 12 persons who gather to discuss an issue, usually a social or community concern, with the two-fold goal of increasing people’s understanding of the issue as well as providing recommendations and developing action plans for addressing the issue.” To engage the individuals most affected by and concerned about racial profiling in their neighborhoods, United Neighborhoods used its existing relationships to recruit people from different neighborhoods, including minority youth and the local Muslim community.  Four study circles were held once a week for four consecutive weeks.  Among the positive findings were the results of surveys conducted after each group that showed that 80 percent of participants said their ability to discuss issues openly and frankly increased.   
 
To appeal to the youth of the community, the department held an all-day summit at which the two Chicago police officers who founded the Slick Boys Rap Group and Slick Boys Youth Foundation gave the keynote address.  This summit provided an opportunity for the participants to discuss with the police the problems faced by young people in their neighborhoods and concluded with an open mike where teens could perform.  In another event, United Neighborhoods and Late Nite Noise developed a competition called Community Feud, an adaptation of the television game show Family Feud.  The teams consisted of youths and police officers who were asked questions ranging from teen trivia to more serious questions about racial issues, prompting active dialogs between the groups.  These competitions were held at various youth-oriented events and venues.   
 
Action Forum. The department presented the study circle recommendations to the public and policy makers at an action forum.  The forum began with Dramatic Solutions, a theatrical group that addresses organizational issues through scenario performances, enacting some of the issues and concerns that arose from group discussions.  The first scenario illustrated an officer interacting with a youth and making judgments based on his appearance and clothing, a problem that was brought up in at least two study circles.  Based on the success of the discussions at the action forum, the Dramatic Solutions group was contracted to train the Buffalo Police Department on how to approach youth-police encounters.
   
Rochester, New York
 
After meeting with prominent community leaders to discuss strategies for improving community relations, the Rochester Police Department implemented a comprehensive approach that built on existing programs using PCSRRP funding.   Strategies included enhancing community education programs, improving communication between police and community constituencies, and recruiting qualified minority candidates.    
 
Project Components 

Cadet Program. Funding helped the department to provide additional information to high schools to guide recruitment of appropriate candidates to the cadet program and to expand the program from one high school to all high schools in the Rochester School District as well as to students at the local community college.  The program’s purpose was to guide and train students for a career in law enforcement.  It gave participants an opportunity to work with various police department units, participate in a physical fitness-training program in preparation for the civil service exam, and receive mentorship from officers.  Although the program is no longer in operation because of a lack of funding, a Public Safety Aid program at the community college level offers students a part-time paid position and mentoring by Rochester police officers.   
 
Clergy Response Team. Before receiving the grant, the Rochester Police Department collaborated with clergy members when responding to critical incidents and addressing community issues.  Response team members were called into action to help the department react to crisis situations in the community.  Members of this team must have graduated from the Clergy Police Academy, where participants are trained in how the team is “activated” or called into action, along with response team duties, protocol, and policy, as well as crime scene management and evidence preservation.  The team was supported by the department’s Family and Victim Services Unit as a part of the Family Crisis Intervention Team.  Members of the Family Crisis Intervention Team were provided with pagers and jackets and shirts so that line officers could identify them.  
 
Officer and Community Interaction. In partnership with medical students from the University of Rochester, the police department educated community members and youths on the conflict resolution strategies and the criminal consequences and medical effects of drug use.  Additionally, officers worked with local places of worship on various programs, such as the Friends and Families of Murdered Children initiative, through which officers assisted grieving family members, and the poster campaign, for which officers worked with families and volunteers to gather information regarding recent homicides. 
 
Review of Internal Processes on Race Relations. The department also conducted an internal review of race relations, recruitment and promotion of minority officers, and the complaint process.  First, 15 minority officers were interviewed about current organizational practices as well as their perceptions of what is working well and what needs improvement.  Subsequently, two focus groups explored the issues raised in the interviews.  Participants were also led through an exercise to create a vision for the Rochester Police Department
.  
New Haven, Connecticut
 
The New Haven Police Department engaged Latino and African-American communities through an initiative called the “Community Justice Dialogue Project” that provided opportunities for officers to communicate with and educate community members, as well as to learn about community members’ perceptions and concerns.  

Project Components
 
Participant Recruitment. The project was guided by an advisory board consisting of community members, police officers, NAACP representatives, community advocacy groups, Yale University, the state’s Attorneys Office, and the Board of Police Commissions.  Word of mouth greatly encouraged minority participation, while more formal presentations at departmental meetings were needed to inform officers about the aim of the program and when these dialogs would be held.  
 
The Dialogs. The objective of the dialogs was to allow individuals from all backgrounds to talk about racial profiling, its effect on the communities, and how problematic interactions between the police and community members could be minimized.  In addition to providing an open forum for discussion, the sessions also afforded the officers an opportunity to educate the community participants on the nuances and challenges of police work. 
 
The dialogs addressed participants’ personal experiences of race, the history of the problem of racial profiling, issues needing to be addressed for progress to be made, the roles of institutions and groups in the change process, and action steps for moving forward to combat racial profiling in the community.  Dialogs were also targeted at certain groups (e.g., males, youths, Spanish-speaking).  The dialog format was expanded to include nearby cities and towns to actively engage other communities that could also be affected by racial profiling.  Approximately 180 community members and approximately 42 officers participated in dialog sessions in seven New Haven community locations as well as in the neighboring jurisdictions of East Haven, West Haven, and Hamden.    
  
Action Forum. The results of the dialog sessions were presented at a 3-hour community Action Forum attended by 105 people from both the community and law enforcement.  Information obtained through the dialogs had been compiled into recommended action steps in the following broad categories: 1) Ways for the community to help itself; 2) Interactions between the police and community to build trust and understanding; 3) How to improve police training, education, and recruitment; and 4) Ways to educate citizens about their rights and police procedures.  Along with presenting the action steps, there were several artistic performances (e.g., dance and poetry readings) by members of the community, as well as personal testimonials by program participants of their experiences with the dialogs.    
 
Challenges and Lessons Learned: Minority Engagement Case Studies
 
 The following issues were identified as being common across the minority engagement case studies or were particularly important to one grantee. They represent challenges encountered when trying to implement minority engagement programs and are not necessarily applicable to alternative strategies for dealing with decreasing racial profiling, which will be addressed in more detail in Section 3.  The issues may help agencies to identify and prepare for challenges they might face in adopting similar minority engagement programs.

Officer Buy-In.  Initiatives that give community members input into departmental operations, particularly on issues involving race, can be difficult for some officers to accept.  The grantees in this area had to deal with officers’ concerns about the implications of the program and found that it was essential that police leadership clearly communicate program goals to the line officers.    .   

In New Haven, more than 40 officers participated in dialogs with the community.  The officers were recruited through the recommendation of agency or community leaders or through self-selection.  Those who participated in a discussion introducing them to the study circle process raised several concerns, including that study circles could turn into “cop-bashing” sessions, that information shared could be used against officers, and that certain community members may come with hidden agendas.  Trainers addressed all of the issues raised, and officers were encouraged to participate on a voluntary basis.   
 
Initially, officers in Buffalo were not adequately briefed on their role in the study circles.  Some officers reasonably assumed they were there to answer community members’ questions rather than participate in the discussion.  The project coordinator and the Buffalo Police Department chief of staff subsequently discussed the project at roll calls, which helped to better prepare officers and further publicize the program among members of the department.   
 
Recognizing that members of the department possessed valuable insight, the Rochester police conducted interviews and focus groups with minority officers to explore their views on race relations in the agency and what was and was not working, as well as to involve them in creating a strategic vision for the department.

Community and Stakeholder Involvement. Effectively involving the community is obviously paramount to a successful minority engagement initiative.  Several issues were prominent, including recruiting participants, facilitating discussions, and clearly communicating the project goals.   

Recruiting for a forum on racial profiling can prove difficult, especially if no instigating event has occurred.  Citizens may feel uncomfortable discussing their feelings and perceptions in front of police officers.  Buffalo and New Haven worked with community leaders to build trust in the process.     
 
In Buffalo, once participants were recruited many wanted to talk about other issues facing the community.  The partners decided to strike a balance, discussing these issues as well as racial profiling, so that the community felt that their concerns were being heard.  In this way, the department was able to get the information it needed while providing a broader opportunity for the community to raise additional issues that were also important to them.  Nevertheless, departments should be careful not to let the discussion widen so greatly that the focus on racial profiling is lost. 

Focusing Efforts. Agencies need to focus their efforts on engaging communities and segments of communities most affected by racial profiling.  Buffalo realized that recruiting block clubs or geographic neighborhoods for study circle groups, rather than individuals specifically interested in the issue of racial profiling, tended to be concerned with more general crime and safety issues and did not view racial profiling as a pressing issue.  For subsequent circles, project organizers recruited individuals who were more likely to have been affected by racial profiling, such as minority youths and members of the local Muslim community.  Youths are a special population within the minority community whose impact and perceptions are important but often are misplaced in the realm of the adult world.  Focusing events around their interests and engaging them will provide a perspective not often heard but still vital to community-police relations.

Training Consultants. It is important that those who lead focus groups or study circles understand the issue of racial profiling.  Using the most up-to-date and relevant information will not only explain the basics of the issue but will also provide context.  This will help participants appreciate the broader implications of racial profiling and will provoke conversation. 

 
 Using Technology
 
For much of the modern history of policing, law enforcement agencies have looked to new technologies to improve public safety and their internal administration and management.  Earlier revolutions in law enforcement’s use of technology, such as the transition to automobile patrol and the use of two-way radio communication, are today considered basic necessities as well as the foundation for more recent innovations (e.g., computer-aided dispatch, mobile data terminals) that continue to change the way policing is carried out. Some have noted, however, that these same innovations have also created problems.  Walker (1998), for example, describes how the public’s use of the telephone to summon the police served to boost officers’ workload enormously.  This led to increased reliance on new equipment, which contributed to more calls for service, creating a vicious circle and serving to raise public expectations that calling the police is the appropriate response to even the smallest concerns.  Regardless of one’s viewpoint, it is undeniable that during the last 20 years technology has changed radically in policing.   

By speeding the retrieval and processing of information, new technology creates opportunities for law enforcement to become more efficient and analytical in its approach to community problems.  The widespread adoption of community-oriented policing, with its emphasis on data-driven decision making and evaluation in many recent implementations, has made technology (particularly information technology) indispensable to the business of policing in the modern world.  Police, particularly those in larger urban areas, are now are more accountable for knowing where, when, and how they intervene.  One example of a major strategy to fill this need is CompStat (computer statistics) a management accountability process developed by the New York City Police Department in 1994 that has since been adopted in varying forms by a large number of law enforcement agencies across the United States.  The CompStat program collects crime statistics from every precinct in the city and the data are used to monitor the performance of each precinct and to hold precinct commanders personally accountable for decreasing crime in their areas. The commanders are required to develop and carry out intervention strategies to address these problems and demonstrate measurable results or  explain why their efforts have not been successful.
   
It should be noted, however, that the availability of technology is an opportunity for, rather than a cause of, organizational change (Chan, 2001).  Before the advent of community policing, strategic and tactical decisions relied almost exclusively on calls for service and crime reports.  Today, the need for performance measurement, problem solving, and accountability—initiatives vital to community policing—drives the acquisition of new technologies and information sources.  Since its establishment in 1994, the COPS Office has funded the procurement of technology within thousands of police agencies throughout the United States to promote organizational change toward community policing.7       
  
Potential Benefits
 
In addition to enhancing public safety strategies, technology offers the opportunity for law enforcement to monitor and address concerns about police misconduct and civil rights.  Concern over the existence of racial profiling has emerged as one of the most prominent examples because it requires police to begin systematically collecting information on traffic stops, data that historically have not been collected.  Technology offers tools to facilitate collecting and analyzing data.  Well-designed systems, using tools like hand-held computers or in-field reporting on mobile data terminals, make collecting data faster and easier for officers in the field and can ease the task of cleaning the data in preparation for analysis.  Technology can offer a means of identifying disparities between the proportion of drivers of a particular group stopped and their representation in some benchmark population, as well as for identifying officers who may be engaged in disparate stop practices to target for intervention or assistance.  Appropriately reported data can also increase transparency to the public.   

7For example, the MORE (Making Officer Redeployment Effective) and ISTEP (Information System Technology Enhancement Project) programs.    
 
Limitations and Caveats
 
While there are many advantages to using technology, it is important to note that technology can be viewed as a double-edged sword.  Although various tools can be used to promote departmental accountability and integrity, they may have the potential to foster public distrust in the police as well as officer distrust in the agency’s administration.  The distinction lies in the way in which the technology is deployed rather than the tool itself.  The technologies being used in these PCSRRP grants are no different.  Critics question whether the use and sharing of certain data violate individuals’ civil liberties or whether those actions could, if they are not adequately constrained, be used to target certain groups.  At times within law enforcement, officers have been critical of early intervention systems because they dislike the idea of being “tracked” and  fear that the information gathered will be used to punish them.  Often, the department can achieve buy-in from the rank-and-file officer if management takes special steps in how they introduce the technology to the officer.  Including officers in the development of the technology, for example, can demonstrate to patrol that there is no hidden agenda and an opportunity for officers to provide input on how the technology will be used.  Likewise, the public needs to be educated and given meaningful assurances that there is a legitimate reason for collecting certain data and, most important, that their personal information will not be used inappropriately.
     
On a more technical level, the commitment to technological solutions should be recognized as significant.  Implementing traffic stop data collection technology requires a commitment to training (at least initially), information technology expertise, and resources and must be integrated with other existing data systems within the agency.
  
Finally, it must be understood that technology is only a tool; proper data analysis is necessary to identify meaningful solutions.  Traffic stop data analysis requires specialized knowledge and may necessitate assistance from outside research consultants.  Part of the analytical process requires agencies to determine benchmarks against which stops will be compared. This decision is crucial in determining whether disparities will be identified and the degree of the disparities.  Ultimately, analysis may identify disparities but often does not definitively identify whether racial profiling is actually occurring. 

Case Studies

Redlands, California
 
The Redlands Police Department sought to establish a common set of expectations for police officers and community members during traffic stops.  The goal was to reduce the potential for racial profiling while increasing officer safety.  Using advanced technology, specifically hand-held iPAQ computers and digital recording systems, the department collected data on discretionary motor vehicle traffic stops and implemented a voice and video recording system that would provide valuable information if allegations of biased were made.  The department also found other uses for, and advantages of, the iPAQ technology and successfully integrated the new technology with the existing computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system.   
 
Project Components
 
Community Advisory Board. The Redlands Police Department convened a community advisory board composed of local members of under-represented community groups that would be involved in the entire project.  The board met frequently throughout the planning phase, attended all training sessions for officers, and listened to the research team explain data analysis and methodology.  Also, the board distributed an informal community survey at the end of the project to determine community response to the police efforts to curb racial profiling. 
 
Data Collection.  Redlands partnered with Hewlett-Packard, a leading technology company that built software specifically for the iPAQ hand-held units and customized the software with drop-down menu options to suit data collection needs.  Hewlett-Packard also developed a solution for transferring stop data from the iPAQs to a database accessible to officers and department supervisors with seven access points to “synch-up” the data on the handheld computers.  The iPAQ technology was chosen because it is small in size, convenient, and easy to use by officers.  It also came equipped with a built-in voice recording function to record all traffic stops, which was complemented by the installation of in-car digital video recorders.  The department also found that the iPAQ hand-held computers could be used for many purposes beyond simply collecting racial profiling data, such as giving officers access to crime bulletins and maps and generally reducing paperwork.  According to the department, officers view the iPAQ as an important tool that will be increasingly useful.  In fact, the department organized an iPAQ development committee to identify additional uses for the device.   
 
Analysis. A consulting group trained the officers on the importance of both racial profiling data collection and benchmarking.  Benchmarking is an alternative population group used in lieu of census data to compare with data collected.  Redlands conducted stationary road surveys to determine a more realistic driving population, compared the results with the racial profiling data, and generated an analysis of the comparisons.
  
Tacoma, Washington
 
The Tacoma Police Department sought to prevent racial profiling and increase officer safety while building trust between the police and the community.  In addition to creating a community/law enforcement task force and holding several public forums, the department planned to develop a data collection system to analyze the characteristics of traffic stops by its police force and develop an early intervention system. 
 
Project Components
 
Minority Community Engagement. A Racial Profiling Task Force, composed of community and police department representatives, developed a data collection tool and system for reporting on racial profiling in the city of Tacoma.  To design a community survey, the task force researched the nature of racial profiling and its indicators and asked members of the minority community for their perceptions and concerns. An independent consultant analyzed the data and provided the city council and the public with a report of its findings and recommendations.   
 
The department also held several public forums that helped the department understand the perspectives of members of the multicultural minority community in Tacoma.  The forums were advertised in the six languages, other than English, that are common in the local population—Russian, Korean, Lao, Cambodian, Spanish, and Vietnamese.  Each forum featured interpreters in at least one of these languages to provide essential communication and clarification of the concerns posed by community members.  This feedback, particularly the frequent disconnect between the expectations of the police and members of different immigrant communities, provided important content for subsequent officer training.    
 
Data Collection and Analysis. Following completion of its research and the public forums, the Racial Profiling Task Force, in close partnership with noncommissioned union members, compiled a 19-variable survey.  Factors compiled for analysis included the reason, time, and date of stop; the perceived age and race of the driver; and the duration and result of the stop.  All police officers were notified of the data collection effort, trained in the use of the data collection cards, and directed to complete them at each traffic stop or pedestrian traffic violation.  Tracking the officers’ efforts added another layer of accountability and supervision.  An independent statistical analyst helped with developing the format of the survey and analyzing the data.  Additionally, the department mounted computers on its motorcycles to allow for mobile data records access.   
 
The agency experienced some challenges when implementing these efforts.  Initially, data collection had to be accomplished manually because of hardware delivery delays.  The department, however, was able to deploy mobile data terminals for data access from the field.  Plans for systematically tracking officers’ compliance with the data collection effort were dropped when responsibility shifted from the Administrative Services Bureau to the Operations Bureau, which had not  been involved in the project and was not invested in the initiative.  Additionally, the computers had been mounted on the motorcycles in a way that constituted an officer safety hazard and had to be removed.  With the input of the union, city safety committee, motorcycle manufacturer, and agency IT staff, the computers were reinstalled in a more appropriate location. 
 
Austin, Texas
  
In April 2000, the Austin Police Department held candid discussions on racial profiling with community leaders and took steps to document police-citizen interactions.  Pursuant to its COPS grant application, the APD designed a framework for collecting and analyzing information from pedestrian and traffic stops to determine whether officers were engaged in biased enforcement practices.  To collect these data, the department had to develop new technology to allow officers to enter information about stops using hand-held data devices.     
 
Project Component
 
Procuring Hand-Held Devices. In an effort to gather uniform data on racial profiling, the department proposed the purchase of hand-held devices with which its officers would collect the required standardized data from the site of each incident or stop. The data then would be transmitted to the department’s field observation database through a wireless connection.  Unfortunately, this initiative found itself entangled in an interagency struggle that resulted in significant project delays and the withdrawal of funding by the COPS Office. 
 
Although the department worked hard to determine the type of data to collect and develop a data collection instrument, the project ultimately was sidetracked by a local controversy within the city about technology.  In the process of gaining city approval to move forward with the procurement of hand-held devices, the department was confronted with strenuous objections from Austin’s municipal court staff.  The court staff had previously approached the department to request the use of hand-held devices for issuing citations but the request had been denied because of costs.  The scope of the COPS grant project was different and the court staff had not been notified that hand-held devices were being considered for this initiative.  Once they found out, they voiced strong objections and as a result, formal approval of the initiative was taken off the city council agenda.  Ultimately, the department was unable to purchase the technology necessary for automated traffic and pedestrian stop data collection.     
 
Challenges and Lessons Learned: Technology Case Studies 
 
 The following issues represented common challenges across the technology projects or were particularly important to one grantee. They represent challenges encountered when trying to implement technology projects and are not necessarily the limitations related to decreasing racial profiling, which will be addressed in more detail in Section 3.  The issues may help agencies identify and prepare for challenges they might face in adopting similar technology-driven programs.  

Officer Buy-In.  No officer wants change that brings more paperwork.  One advantage of the Redlands use of the hand-held computers is that the traffic stop data collection form is easily accessible and is not a paper that has to be saved.  In addition to holding the form, the device functions as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) providing access to crime bulletins, electronic maps, and other information in the field that can increase officers’ safety and efficiency.   

The inclusion of the police union from the project’s inception was a major contribution to the ability of the Redland Police Department to incorporate the hand-held units and digital video recording technologies into its existing systems.  To cite one example, to reassure the rank and file, the department promised not to view recordings randomly to find fault with an officer’s behavior.  Because officers were involved throughout the entire process, the department experienced a high level of officer buy-in and trust in the technology.   
 
 Community and Stakeholder Involvement.  The Redlands and Tacoma police departments created advisory groups that explicitly included the community in a decision-making capacity.  In Redlands, the Community Advisory Board, composed of community leaders of minority constituencies, participated in the initial discussion about what information to collect, attended officer data collection training sessions, and plays an active role in determining project strategy.  The Tacoma Racial Profiling Task Force consisted of agency personnel and community members and addressed the specific details of the design and implementation of the data collection system.  Tacoma also made specific efforts to include the city’s immigrant populations by advertising public forums in the six primary languages other than English spoken by members of these groups and by providing interpreters at the forums.  Austin’s police department has sponsored discussions on racial profiling with community leaders and created a community-based oversight committee to address the issue. 


 Planning.  Effective communication and coordination and adequate staff time are essential for project success.  One recommendation is either to assign a project coordinator or develop an interagency project team with the technological and fiscal knowledge, experience, and authority to carry out the project.  This can prove to be essential when undertaking a project that involves interagency collaboration.  To prevent unnecessary delays, early efforts should be made to determine whether other agencies or departments (e.g., the city’s information management division) need to be involved, what existing tools cost, how closely they appear to reflect department needs, and which vendors are appropriate and reputable.  Austin’s experience with interagency conflict and miscommunication is particularly instructive.   

 Managing Technology.  All technology has limitations and departments should expect these imperfections.  How the department responds is often more important than being able to foresee and prevent all implementation problems.  By being up front, honest, and responding quickly when a problem with the technology arises, officers may be more likely to support the endeavor instead of deciding that it is a waste of time.  Testing the technology in a variety of settings before a full rollout is a vital complement to the planning process.  

Managing technology involves navigating bureaucratic relationships, as well.  Austin’s project experienced delays when court and police personnel clashed over an unresolved issue involving the proposed use and scope of the hand-held devices.  The subsequent review of the issue exacerbated the delay but appears to have resulted in a more robust system.  The department recommends creating a formal interagency grant project team to prevent such problems in the future. 
 
Redlands recognized that technology is a tool and not the solution to racial profiling or other important issues.  The department notes that nontechnological policy development, training, and citizen input must accompany implementation of technology.   
 
Equally important to the successful integration of technology was the relationship the departments shared with their technology vendors.  For example, the Redlands Police Department recommends that other departments attempting a similar project should include a successful integration clause in the vendor contract to ensure that new systems are up and running without difficulty before the vendor contract expires.  Redlands also learned that it is important to inspect the main database often to ensure that the technology is working properly and to verify that the data in the database are accurate.   
 
 
Training
 
The complexity of policing in a democracy is embedded in the tension between the protection of individuals’ civil liberties and the protection of public safety.  Officers must understand the importance of each and learn how to balance both mandates.  This balance requires sound judgment in the use of discretion, a foundation for which is found in the training provided for police recruits and ongoing, in-service instruction.
   
Although all police training tends to include basic training for new recruits, in-service training, and advanced training for specialized areas (Kratcoski, 2004), the specific nature and focus of individual trainings vary widely across the United States.  Despite this wide variation, practically all officers in the United States receive some level of training related to race and policing.  The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports that in 2002, “Ninety-six percent of law academies addressed racially-biased policing as part of their basic training program.  Ninety-three percent addressed this topic during academic training, 40 percent during practical skills training, and 31 percent during field training” (Hickman, 2005).  The specific content and rigor of this training is not known.  Additionally, the report does not indicate the degree to which these subjects are part of in-service training.   

The advent of “pattern or practice” legislation in the mid-1990s has bolstered the impetus for agencies to provide adequate training on equitable traffic enforcement.  Settlements stemming from these Department of Justice investigations often require agencies to develop and implement new policies and procedures on traffic stops.  Training is necessary for these new rules to be inculcated and followed.  Training officers to avoid using racial, ethnic, or gender characteristics when making traffic stops can help prevent not only the actual practice, but the perception of this practice, by members of the community.  This may also help an agency avoid a Justice Department investigation and possibly mitigate the severity of negative investigative findings.  In addition, it will help the agency be more effective in its traffic enforcement practices because targeting minorities has proved to be an ineffective crime-control strategy (Fridell et al., 2001).    
 
Potential Benefits
 
Not only does training provide the basic knowledge and foundation for exercising particular skills (e.g., de-escalation techniques, firearms instruction, interview strategies), it offers an opportunity to instill positive organizational values at the beginning of an officer’s career as well as to reinforce them through ongoing, in-service instruction.  Training is particularly important for agencies that have undertaken significant organizational change in response to community policing.  Officers need to understand the new responsibilities involved in their roles as “proactive problem solvers, resource catalysts, and communicators responsive to quality of life issues” (Palmiotto et al., 2000).  Although some of this training will involve discussing these values explicitly, teaching officers the skills to actively solicit input from the community, analyze problems and prepare appropriate responses, and avoid using race as justification for suspicion, may provide a more profound illustration of what is important within the agency.  Additionally, training sessions can be an opportunity for agencies to provide a forum for members of the public to share their experiences and perceptions with law enforcement. 
 
Limitations and Caveats
 
Addressing racial profiling in training is challenging and can be confrontational, so great care should be taken when choosing a training curriculum and facilitator.  There is also no guarantee that officers will adhere to the lessons from relating to reducing racial profiling and biased policing.  Additional monitoring may be needed to ensure that officers engage in the behavior promoted by training.  Training should be part of a comprehensive program of organizational change. 

Case Studies 
 
Brookline, Massachusetts
  
The Brookline Police Department has incorporated the philosophy of police integrity into its training and daily operations and has engaged the community through its Citizen Police Academy and Community Emergency Response Team.  In keeping with its philosophy of integrity, fairness, cultural awareness, and involvement with the community, Brookline developed training films for its officers to ensure that they fully comprehend the department’s policy against discriminatory practices and are willing and able to work with the jurisdiction’s diverse population.   
 
Project Components
 
SimulationTraining Development. The department purchased the Range 3000 XP4 Force Control Simulator, an interactive training system from IES Interactive Training that can film, capture, and edit scenarios in keeping with the department’s unique training requirements and goals.  The FBI uses the simulator at its National Academy.  Three Brookline officers who were trained on the system also attended a 2-week advanced training curriculum at the IES facility in Littleton, Colorado, where they learned how to use the film-making and editing functions as well as the finer points of the system. The COPS award also provided the funding for video cameras, an editing computer, and training.    
 
Officer Training. Training on the system is mandatory for sworn officers during in-service training and for academy recruits.  The in-service training consists of a 2-hour classroom component during which officers learn about, and are tested on, Massachusetts general law and departmental policy as they apply to racial profiling  This is followed by a practical application of the knowledge through testing on the simulator.  The decision-making elements can involve shoot/don’t shoot scenarios as well as other nonforce scenarios.  Depending on the officer’s response, the system operator can adjust the difficulty through “branching” (the ability to access different filmed sequences).  During and/or after the scenario, questions appear on the screen that the officer to answers interactively, applying his or her knowledge of state law and Brookline police policy to the situation at hand.  Participants in the Citizen Police Academy also have the opportunity to use the system.   
 
Training Films. Using the knowledge gained at the advanced training in Colorado, the Brookline Police Training Division made numerous training films, including several on issues related to racial profiling.  The department annually produces a half-dozen scenarios with several “branches” for each so that officers do not encounter the same scenarios repeatedly.  Film topics include traffic stops, burglary, shoplifting, stop-and-frisk, threshold inquiry, Fourth Amendment, and use of force.  
 
Community Involvement. The department included several minority students from Brookline High School, minority members of the town’s Building Department, and various community members in the films.  The students received “citizen credits” from their school for their participation. 
  
  
Metropolitan Nashville, Tennessee
 
The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department developed a racial profiling training program for in-service officers, new recruits, and the public.  By teaching officers the importance of avoiding racial profiling and by educating the community on police practices and policies when making traffic stops, the department hoped that the two groups would be able to achieve a more complete understanding of each other’s viewpoints on racial profiling.   
 
Project Components
 
Steering Committee. The department formed a steering committee composed of community leaders from a cross section of the population and law enforcement officers from all levels of the department.  The committee set the goals of the training program, established the definition of racial profiling, and contracted with local universities to conduct focus groups with both the community and the police to identify the key concerns about of racial profiling.    
 
Officer Training. The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department selected the Safe and Legal Traffic Stops (SALTS) training curriculum developed by the Florida-based Institute of Police Technology and Management.  SALTS covers the importance of public and police racial profiling education, cultural misperceptions during traffic stops, perceptions of police officials by the motoring public, law enforcement officers as role models, conducting ethical traffic stops, pertinent court issues, and department policy and procedure in traffic stops.  The program was first presented to sworn in-service classes and will also be used in recruit training.     
 
Community Training. The department used the interactive program Perspectives on Profiling from the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles to teach the public about the difference between criminal profiling and racial profiling, probable cause, use of statistics for predicting behavior, racial overtones in a police agency, and escalation avoidance in racially charged stops.  The software asks participants to make choices in a variety of real-life scenarios relating to bias-based policing.  The sessions, held at community locations rather than police or government buildings, included both community members and sworn personnel in civilian clothing to make the community participants feel more comfortable.    One sworn police officer and one community representative conducted the training; each had gone through a train-the-trainer program.     
 
Analysis. Researchers from Vanderbilt University conducted focus groups with community members and police officers to analyze the effects of the training program.  The sessions revealed five main areas of concern: 1. Limited and negative police-resident interactions; 2. Differential service delivery; 3. Lack of police officer respect toward members of certain communities; 4. Bias-based policing; and 5. The need for targeted recruitment, selection, and training of officers.  Recommendations included cultivating new opportunities for positive police-resident interactions and collaborations, establishing department-wide relationships with community organizations, and providing additional training and in-services sessions on diversity, community policing practices, and communication. 


Phoenix, Arizona 

The Phoenix Police Department used a multipronged strategy to reduce the probability of racial profiling through a process of information-seeking, processing and refinement, and developing a set of promising prevention strategies.  The process involved interviewing internal stakeholders on the nature and causes racial profiling and strategies for prevention, conducting internal stakeholder group workshops (called Knowledge Cafés), holding internal and community stakeholder public forums and focus groups (study circles).       
 
Project Components
 
Internal Stakeholder Assessment. In structured interviews, officers offered their perceptions on the nature, pervasiveness, and causes of racial profiling, as well as how the department had addressed racial profiling in the past.  Officers’ input about the opportunities and strategies they thought would be successful for prevention (e.g., officer monitoring, diversity training, involvement in the community) had a direct effect on the curriculum content of the group workshops under development and guided the wider prevention strategy development process. 
 
Knowledge Cafés. Officers and supervisors subsequently participated in group workshops, or Knowledge Cafés, 3-hour workshops of 20 to 25 supervisors from three or more precincts.  Each workshop began with a survey about the officers’ perceptions of various aspects of racial profiling in their department and then shifted to a training mode using the Perspectives on Profiling curriculum.  Participants’ responses to an evaluation of the workshops indicated that approximately 90 percent of officers rated the experience positively.  
 
Youth and Community Forums. The department held two forums to promote dialog and to discuss perceptions of the police.  One, focusing on youths from 13 to 21 years of age, included a role-playing exercise depicting various traffic stop scenarios and a discussion in which the role-players shared their experiences and perceptions.  The other forum brought together community representatives, the media, advocacy organizations, and law enforcement to obtain perspectives on the nature, causes, and prevention of racial profiling.  The panels ended by recommending various racial-profiling prevention strategies, which were discussed in more depth during study circles held by the police department. 
 
Focus Groups. The previous components led to the final phase of the Phoenix Police Department’s strategy.  Three study circles (focus groups) were held to develop, prioritize, and codify recommended racial-profiling prevention strategies, given the information gathered from the Knowledge Cafés and forums to generate a best practices guide for preventing racial profiling.  The focus groups generated five prevention strategies: 1) Increase observation by supervisors to ensure that officers comply with policies; 2) Develop a mentorship program in which experienced officers mentor new officers and community youth; 3) Take educational programs to middle and high schools to teach youth how to interact with police; 4) Train community members on their legal rights and how to interact with police; and 5) Extend community service in the communities where officers work.
  
Challenges and Lessons Learned: Training Case Studies
 
 The following issues were identified as being common across the training projects or were particularly important to one grantee. They represent challenges encountered when trying to implement training programs and are not necessarily the limitations related to decreasing racial profiling, which will be addressed in more detail in Section 3.   They may help agencies to identify and prepare for challenges they might face in adopting similar types of training programs.  

Officer Buy-In.  Including personnel from a wide variety of divisions across the department can increase officer buy-in.  The Metro Nashville Project Steering Committee, for example, came from a wide swath of the agency, including the Training Division, Strategic Development Division, Behavior Health Division, Office of Professional Responsibility, Fraternal Order of Police, and Black Officers Association.  The leadership of the agency believed that this broad participation was a key element in the success of the initiative.  
 
The Phoenix Police Department engineered an intensive campaign to involve all internal departmental stakeholders.  Through interviews, focus groups, group workshops, and dialog with external stakeholders such as community members and the media, the department worked hard to prevent internal resistance from patrol or other constituencies.   
 
Community and Stakeholder Involvement.  The inclusion of community stakeholders in an advisory capacity throughout the development as well as during the presentation of training can help build credibility and legitimacy for the initiative.  Each grantee involved the community in its training programs.  Metro Nashville and Phoenix, in particular, used community constituencies in fundamental ways, through participation on steering committees and by providing meaningful opportunities to influence the development and delivery of the training 
 
These initiatives provide the impetus for law enforcement and the community to engage one another and build positive relationships that will be reflected in trainings.  All initiatives were highly interactive and, in many cases, the trainings were opportunities for both law enforcement and community members to speak candidly and educate each other through presentations, dialogs, and workshops.  Grantees went to great lengths to be inclusive, having both agency and community representation.   
 
Agencies should not assume that they understand community members’ perspectives on racial profiling.  It is also helpful to learn more about how officers within law enforcement agencies view the issue.  In addition to their training programs, Phoenix and Metro Nashville conducted focus groups with both groups to obtain information on their perceptions.
   
By recruiting a cross section of the community and officers of all ranks, it is possible to obtain the views and perceptions and identify the concerns and perceptions of the public and police needed to educate and train both interested parties.   
 
Internal versus External Training. Departments struggle with the decision of whether to bring in a curriculum or trainers from outside the organization to provide the training or to develop or implement the training internally.  There are good reasons to support each approach, such as the expertise available externally and the ability to tailor a training to the specific concerns of a particular community.  In these communities, the agencies chose to begin with externally generated curriculum or technology and to adapt that technology to the specific issues of racial profiling in their communities.  While resources may not be available in all agencies to adapt existing curriculum, this approach may be the best option for agencies with the capacity to use it. 
 
Keep the Focus.  Creating true collaborations can help keep projects on track through difficult stages.  Metro Nashville’s Project Steering Committee, made up of several units, including the union, and community organization leaders, were dedicated to the success of the initiative even when changes in the department’s organization and the city’s manner of conducting business changed dramatically.  When delays occurred, the committee stayed in contact with project partners, kept them informed on the reasons for the delays, and renewed everyone’s commitment to the initiative.   
 
Use a Comprehensive Approach.  The grantees recognized that training alone is not enough to create the change necessary to reduce racial profiling.  Integrating training into the overall mission of the agency is important to the success of the training’s goal.  Observing the subsequent behavior of officers and providing reinforcement when needed should be thought of as inherent components of any training endeavor.  The agency may find it valuable to complement training initiatives with direct supervision of officer behavior as well as programs to deal with problem officers who may be identified.   

Measure the Effects of the Training. The best way to know if training worked is to for the agency to measure actual changes in behavior.  This can be done through a formal evaluation or through an accountability mechanism such as an early intervention system.  It is important to determine at the outset of training what specific behaviors the agency wants to change.  Well-crafted training curricula will address the steps that lead to these behaviors. 

 Accountability Measures. By identifying the actual behaviors to change, an agency can determine which members of the agency should be responsible for ensuring that officers adhere to the lessons put in place to effect this change.  Supervisors and other managers should be held accountable for observing their officers and intervening with support when necessary.       
 
Data Collection
 
In response to allegations of racial profiling, jurisdictions around the country began to track information about individuals who are stopped, searched, ticketed, and/or arrested by police officers during routine traffic encounters.  These data collection efforts are an attempt to provide the reliable numbers that will enable police and community leaders to better understand their policing activities.  With this information, departments will be able to examine and revamp policing strategies based on effectiveness, reconfigure deployment of police resources, or take other measures to reduce the instances or perception of racial profiling. 

Data collection includes both obtaining information on stops and objectively analyzing the data, which is often done through a partnership between the police department and outside experts.  Once a law enforcement agency begins to gather traffic stop data, the question then becomes what steps should be taken to understand and interpret the data.  By themselves, the demographics of traffic stops are difficult to interpret (Fridell, 2005).  External benchmarks involve developing an estimate of the percentages of persons of various racial and ethnic groups who are at risk for being stopped on roads that are patrolled by the law enforcement agency in question.
   
In addition to external comparisons, a jurisdiction that collects information on officer identification can compare traffic stop data for the same unit (or the same officer) over time or could compare that data for several units (or several individual officers) that patrol the same area (or similar areas).  Additionally, data on speeding tickets and searches may be analyzed to determine if minority drivers are disproportionately ticketed or searched.  Finally, data on searches may be analyzed to compare the percentages of persons searched, by race, with the corresponding hit rates (i.e., searches producing contraband) for different racial groups.
    
Potential Benefits
 
Data collection has the ability to provide departments with important information about the characteristics of different types of stops being made by officers, the proportion of police time spent on high-discretion stops (those stops for minor violations, e.g., license plate light out), and the results of such stops (Farrell et al., 2005).  This information can be used to help shape and develop training programs to educate officers about racial profiling and interactions with the community.  Additionally, data can be used by agencies to develop police and community dialog to assess the quality and quantity of police-citizen encounters.  Data on traffic stops also allows law enforcement agencies to be able to address questions about the effectiveness of their traffic stop enforcement activity, often for the first time.  Historically, most police agencies have not recorded information or systematically analyzed traffic enforcement data to see what works.  These data, while collected to address concerns about racial profiling, can also help law enforcement agencies understand the effectiveness of one of their most frequent activities, traffic enforcement.
   
The data analysis process can facilitate law enforcement collaboration with community stakeholders through public presentations and discussion of the results. These efforts provide valuable opportunities to improve police-community dialog and increase officer accountability. 
 
Limitations and Caveats
 
While jurisdictions can derive many benefits from implementing data collection systems, they also face several potential hindrances.  Concerns about budgetary expenditures associated with collecting data are a common preliminary challenge.  There certainly is the fear that data collection will be a burden to officers in the course of their normal activities.  As a result, some agencies have concerns about police disengagement from their duties, which may lead to officers scaling back on the number of legitimate stops they make.  Departments also need to audit these records to ensure that officers will comply fully with data collection.  Finally, understanding and interpreting data that are collected to measure racial disparities in traffic enforcement is a challenging undertaking.  Agencies may be concerned that the data analysis challenges will produce incomplete or misleading findings.
 
Case Studies
    
Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina 

In anticipation of a mandate by the North Carolina General Assembly that would require every police agency in the state to collect data on traffic stops, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department began the process of racial profiling data collection.  With PCSRRP funding, the department was able to implement a data collection system using advanced technology, collect a substantial amount of valid data, and work with a research team to analyze the data collected.   
       
Project Components
 
Project Development. In early 2000, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department drafted a policy and outlined a project plan to address “arbitrary profiling,” the department’s term for “an officer’s use of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, age, citizenship, sexual orientation, or any other arbitrary classification in conducting a police activity that is motivated by discrimination” (Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department  Technical Assistance Guide).  The draft policy and data collection plan were developed through a series of meetings with officers from all ranks.  Representatives from 14  community organizations met with the department and reviewed the policy, data collection forms, and methodology.  This joint meeting provided a forum for community and police to work together to shape this initiative in an effort to build trust and reduce incidents of racial profiling.  
 
Data Collection. The department researched several methods of data collection and determined that an Intranet-based system could easily be integrated with the already existing department technology.  Initially, however, the state would not accept agencies’ data submitted electronically and required them to submit paper forms or enter data at the state’s web site.  Following efforts by Charlotte-Mecklenburg and other large state law enforcement agencies to change this policy, at the state’s request, Charlotte-Mecklenburg developed a program that validates agencies’ data before submission through the Internet to the state and the state validates the data a second time when received..

The department collects data on both vehicle and pedestrian stops. Officers using the automated data collection system do so from laptops in their cruisers, while  officers on motorcycle, bicycle, and foot patrols use a paper-based system. 
 
Training. An extensive training program launched by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, which included a supporting message from the chief, taught commanding officers the legal ramifications associated with racial profiling.  A detailed manual provided information on how to complete both the electronic and paper stop-data forms.  Supervising officers were ordered to take the knowledge they learned from the course and train the officers under their command.  
 
Field Testing. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department used a systematic phase-in approach by testing the both the online and paper systems in a single district.  The department made changes based on officer concerns and as system obstacles arose.  Once the officers in this district had adapted to the new procedure, the technology was implemented in each patrol district.   
 
Analysis. After collecting data for 1 year, the department contracted with a research team at North Carolina State University to produce a data analysis report that would provide information about traffic stop practices within the department, assess causes of disparate traffic stop activity, and address the issue of racial profiling both internally and with the community.  The department issued public final reports in 2002, 2003, and 2005 and planned to generate internal reports for management purposes.  In addition to preparing the agency for future legislation requiring data collection on traffic stops, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s efforts to develop electronic data collection systems have served as a model for statewide practices.

Dothan, Alabama
  
The Dothan Police Department believed that bias-based policing can occur at any level of policing, not just in traffic stops.  In light of this, the department upgraded existing technology to record extensive data on every police-citizen encounter in the jurisdiction.  The department hoped the data could be used not only to address the issue of racial profiling but to serve as a management tool for supervisors to monitor officers’ behavior and to provide officers with bias awareness training, among other uses. 
 
Project Components
 
Steering Committee. A steering committee composed of community representatives and members of the police department, along with a local university and a private consulting firm, designed the data collection system and a bias awareness training program for officers to ensure accurate data collection.  The steering committee focused its efforts on three specific initiatives: 1. Identify data collection requirements and capabilities, 2.  Establish oversight and accountability goals and procedures, and 3. Finalize outcome and benchmark decisions.  The department chose to gather information on reported incidents of excessive force and citizen complaints as a baseline to determine whether the data collection reduced incidents of racial profiling.  
 
Technology. The department initially used PDAs to collect traffic stop data, but officers found it difficult to use such a small device.  Entering large amounts of data was time-consuming, using the keyboard was difficult while wearing gloves in cold weather, and at night officers needed to use their interior lights, decreasing their outside visibility.  Additionally, some data connectivity problems were experienced with the PDA system:  Wireless coverage was spotty, and the city’s technological infrastructure was problematic.  These issues resulted in low officer buy-in.  Later, tablet PCs were purchased to replace the smaller PDAs.  Equipped with a wireless modem and tracking software, the tablet PCs were tested and approved by officers, using the equipment in the field.  Connectivity and coverage continued to be problems, however. 
 
Dothan notes five key issues that affected the outcome of its project: 1. Lack of change management efforts, 2. Shifting project definition, 3. Minimal training efforts, 4. Lack of mechanisms and strategies to hold personnel accountable at various levels in the organization, and 5. Inadequate pilot testing periods for technology solutions before their purchase.  Because information technology (IT) staff were not involved in the planning stages of the project or alerted to the need for their expertise early on, the project was delayed 9 months because of other IT department commitments.  
 
Kansas City, Missouri 
 
Following the Missouri Legislature’s passage of legislation mandating all law enforcement agencies to collect traffic stop data in 2000, the Kansas City Police Department decided to collect more data than required by law and extended its efforts to all discretionary stops.  The department hoped to glean a more complete picture of stop activity and to show the community that it was willing to address the issue of racial profiling openly and directly.   
 
Project Components
 
Community Involvement. The Kansas City Police Department realized that internal organizational communication on issues related to race and diversity would need to be strengthened, along with communication between the department and public.  As a result, the department identified two goals for the forums that it would convene: 1. “Identify, address, and resolve minority issues within the department” and 2. “Identify, address, and resolve minority issues between the department and the community, a part of which is racial profiling perceptions and allegations” (Kansas City Police Department Technical Assistance Guide).  Forums were held with command staff to talk about race and diversity and areas needing improvement within the agency.  Additionally, the chief of police assembled 33 representatives from a variety of community organizations and 22 department members of various ranks to discuss racial issues in and around Kansas City.  The group, constituting the participants of the police-community forums, identified three major areas of concern: minority recruitment, youth programs, and accountability.  This group of police and community members continued to meet periodically throughout the entire data collection project.   
 
Data Collection. The Kansas City Police Department found considerable room for improvement with the state’s manual data recording forms and explored different data collection methods.  The department determined that it could improve existing technology by purchasing racial profiling data collection software.  To meet the goal of giving every officer in the department the ability to collect traffic and pedestrian stop and check data electronically, handheld computers (iPAQ) were purchased and integrated with the existing mobile data terminals (MDT) and desktop computers.  The software and technology would allow every officer to record data at the time of a stop, and at the end of a shift, officers would synch up and upload the data to a server for storage, reference, and retrieval.   
 
Training and Phase-In Approach. Following 1 year of project design and development, representatives from each department division were trained on the new technology and software in a hands-on training curriculum provided by the software vendor.  Participants were charged with sharing what they learned with the officers in their bureau, acting as a liaison during data collection implementation and attending each roll call during the implementation phase.  The department tested the new program in the Central Patrol Division, which had a high number of both MDT and iPAQ users.  After 1 month of testing and working through problems that arose, the department moved on to the Special Operations Division, followed by the rest of the department.  The department wanted to ensure continuity, standardization, and accurate data collection throughout the process, therefore, it took this systematic approach so that each division and each officer had the same information and knowledge of the new technology and software.   
 
Although the department did not conduct a formal evaluation, user accounts indicated that the new data collection method was beneficial.  The shift from filling out paper bubble forms to using computerized technology eased data collection and improved accuracy of the data.     
 
Oakland, California 

The Oakland Police Department established a racial profiling task force comprising a cross section of community representatives to develop a departmental policy on racial profiling and a comprehensive data collection program.  The department recruited members from nine local and national organizations, all of whom had proven to be successful partners in earlier police-community projects.  Because the department recognized that other constituencies would want to be involved, it held public meetings to obtain input and feedback from other community constituencies that were not part of the original task force.     
 
Project Components
 
Training. At the outset of the task force, the group identified common goals and objectives and met at least once a month throughout the project.  Task force members participated in various formal training courses to gain experience and understanding of a broad range of viewpoints on the subject of racial profiling and went on ride-alongs with Oakland police officers.   
 
Understanding the Problem. Once trained, the task force held a Bay Area workshop on racial profiling to educate the public and make it aware of the Oakland Police Department’s efforts to address concerns about racial profiling.  The task force also administered two surveys, one measuring community perceptions of racial profiling by the department, the other addressing officers’ perceptions of the problem of racial profiling.  The results showed a large gap between the perceptions of the two groups, demonstrating the need for data collection and analysis to address racial profiling.  Two vendors, Scantron Corporation and the RAND Corporation worked with the Oakland Police Department to identify the type and format of information to collect on stops and to plan a strategy and protocol for the collection process. 
 
Data Collection. The Oakland Police Department’s new racial profiling policy outlined the data collection process.  Data would be collected on all stops (vehicle, pedestrian, and bicycle).  No arbitrary consent searches would be allowed; instead officers would be required to complete a field contact form to identify the reason for a search.  Supervisors would be required to closely monitor those under their command, and biannual reports were to be submitted to the chief.  Two different systems would be used to collect data on all traffic stops: paper forms and hand-held PDAs.  The department developed a system to manually scan paper forms and translate the data into a statistical software program.  Officers using the PDAs would synch up to the main database at the station at the end of their shift to download all data on stops.  These two methods of collection were merged into one file where the data could be analyzed and reports could be generated. 
 
Analysis.  During almost 6 months, officers recorded 7,607 stops.  Through their partnership, RAND and the Oakland Police Department analyzed the data and published their findings to share with the community as well as with other departments across the country.  Using U.S. Census Bureau figures for Oakland, the researchers found disparities in stops but did not conclude that such disparities were evidence of racial profiling.  An interesting feature of the analysis was that the researchers compared the disparities between officer perceptions of the race of drivers and the census figures both during the day and at night, when officers would be unlikely to identify the race of the driver prior to the stop.  Researchers suggested that because rates of disparities between the race of drivers stopped and the race of the census figures were consistent across daytime and nighttime stops, it was unlikely that that stops made under conditions where officers could see the race of the driver would be attributable to bias. 
  
Challenges and Lessons Learned: Data Collection Case Studies
 
 The following issues with data collection were identified as being common across the data collection projects or were particularly important to one grantee. They represent challenges encountered when trying to implement data collection programs and are not necessarily the limitations related to decreasing racial profiling through data collection, which will be addressed in more detail in Section 3.   The issues are intended to help agencies identify and prepare for challenges they might face in adopting similar types of data collection programs.  

 Officer Buy-In.  The integration of new technologies often necessary for data collection requires a strong, detailed project plan with support from the chief down to the line officers.  Without administrative support, officer buy-in at all levels, IT team support, and a good training program, a project of this magnitude may not succeed.  Officer buy-in is crucial to the success of a racial profiling data collection initiative.  The Dothan Police Department recommends developing a change management plan in part to put into place a well-considered strategy for obtaining buy-in from internal constituencies.   

 The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department involved officers from the start and made modifications based on their comments and concerns.  In one case, officers were concerned that they could be unfairly accused of profiling and wanted to be able to provide additional information on the collection instrument.  As a result, new data collection fields were added to the database to capture reasons for the stop as well as for the search, if it was performed.  A function to allow officers to enter data in stages rather than begin again each time was also added to save time.  The ability to address this concern and modify the data collection instruments helped increase officer support. 
 
To adequately research technological equipment and readily identify problems from an early stage, Charlotte-Mecklenburg recommends working closely with the agency’s technology division.  The agency’s Computer Technology Services Division worked with officers to develop a system that met their needs as well as state mandates.   
 
Community and Stakeholder Involvement.  Each strategy area is, in addition to its own stated purpose, an opportunity for law enforcement to forge relationships with community members and to increase transparency and accountability.  With data collection, bringing the community to the table with law enforcement to address the issue together is apt to pay more dividends than trying to create and administer a data collection system without community input.  In fact, without doing so could further exacerbate community perceptions that they are not valued by the agency.  Each data collection grantee included the community in fundamental ways during the initiative.  Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Dothan, and Oakland established steering committees with members of the community and law enforcement, and Kansas City held several focus groups and community forums to discuss the issue of racial profiling.  Kansas City has continued to work with these constituencies on issues of race and diversity.   
 
Planning Issues.  A solid project plan and room for modification in the project timeline are important.  The project should be viewed as more than just producing an analysis report; it is a long-term process that must have support from all levels of the agency and from the community.  Within the project, careful preparation and planning for each meeting with a task force or the community are essential for maintaining a productive working relationship and achieving project goals. Racial profiling is an extremely sensitive topic for both police and community members to address; therefore, meeting plans with defined goals and parameters are helpful to keep members focused on the tasks at hand.  Creativity can yield unexpected benefits. For example, the Oakland police decided to hire one of the task force members to draft its racial profiling policy.  The hiring of a civilian was rare, but the task force and the department felt that the member’s objectiveness and experience led to the cultivation of a solid policy of which all involved were proud.    

Technical Issues.  Thoroughly investigating technical issues during the planning process is essential to avoid obstacles.  Budgeting for any technology necessary for traffic or pedestrian stop data collection can be challenging.  Changes in functionality and price can occur quickly and result in delays caused by having to rewrite budgets, obtain administrative approval, and other factors.  Several of the grantees realized during their initiatives that the technological tools they selected were inappropriate for the task or had limitations for which they were not prepared.   
 
It is important to test procedures and all other aspects of the new collection system before starting to collect data to work out the kinks and allow time for officers to become accustomed to using the new technology.  Audits can be useful to ensure that the data collection procedures are followed and that the data are accurate.   
   
Determining the proper benchmark for comparison to collected traffic stop data was a major challenge for all grantees.  Each agency considered competing methodologies and often sought advice from external research consultants before deciding on a benchmarking methodology.     
 
Working with Consultants.  Frequent communication between the police and research contractors or other vendors enabled the departments to answer questions quickly, ensure that the report addressed all necessary issues, and increase the chances that all parties will be happy with the report.  The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department worked with the agency’s consultant in an iterative process to make sure that all of the agency’s questions were answered and that the report was clear for a law enforcement and public audience.    
 

 
 
Section 3. The Challenges of Addressing Racial Profiling: Common Themes Across Strategy Areas 
 
Many lessons have been learned through the Promoting Cooperative Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling (PCSSRP) program about the ways in which law enforcement agencies can address racial profiling.  To help clarify these lessons, this section identifies common themes that emerged as PCSSRP grantees implemented various kinds of programs designed to reduce racial profiling.  Some issues and challenges that sites grappled with overlap with issues endemic to organizational change and may be familiar to readers.  This section elaborates on the experiences most pertinent to the goal of reducing racial profiling,  discusses challenges that remain to be addressed, and offers recommendations for future efforts to reduce racial profiling based on the experiences of the PCSRRP grantees. 
    
 Table 1 is a concise summary of the benefits, limitation, and caveats of each strategy for reducing racial profiling.  It includes information on accountability, recruitment and hiring, minority engagement, training, and technology and data collection.  Technology and data collection are combined because of the overlap between them.  The technology projects focused on ways to facilitate data collection, and the data collection initiatives required the development or enhancement of an agency’s technology.  As a result, these grantees encountered the same types of issues.    
 
 
 
  

Table 1: Benefits, Limitations, and Caveats of Strategies for Reducing Racial Profiling.  
 
 	Benefits 	Limitations and Caveats 
Accountability (Early Intervention System [EIS]) 	
• Creates systems that allow for increased supervisory monitoring of officer conduct related to traffic and pedestrian stops. 
• Allows monitoring of officers’ activity across assignments.  
• Data from system can help guide agency policies, trainings, and responses to community concerns. 
• Broadens agency focus beyond racial profiling to address multiple accountability and supervisory issues. 
• Monitoring may reduce citizen complaints and agency liability. 
	
• Well-designed EIS systems require higher levels of technology capacity and commitment of resources.  
• Off-the-shelf products may not facilitate monitoring of traffic and/or pedestrian stops. 
• Agencies must carefully determine thresholds for alerts and intervention. 
• The value of an EIS system is limited unless agencies are willing to use information to identify and address organizational as well as individual officer explanations for troubling patterns. 

Recruitment and Hiring 	
• Creative strategies are necessary to increase agency diversity and better reflect community demographics.  

• Increasing diversity of officers and employees can convey a sense of equity in agency practices and enhance community trust in organization. 
• Diversity in hiring also creates opportunity for positive culture change within the agency. 
	
• Recruiting minority communities holding less-positive perceptions about law enforcement may be challenging. 
• Increasing personnel racial and gender diversity does not automatically lead to the cultural changes necessary to prevent racial profiling. 
• Increased recruitment and hiring of diverse pools of candidates does not ensure comfort and retention of minority groups in an agency.  

Minority Engagement 	
• Well-designed programs can help reduce negative public perceptions of the police, particularly by minority group members. 
• Can facilitate more sensitive and empathetic responses of law enforcement to particular community challenges. 
• May increases public willingness to comply with officers’ instructions during stops and increase their willingness to report crimes and work with the police to solve public safety problems. 
	
• Engagement strategies need to be long-term, ongoing efforts to be effective.  
• Engagement needs to involve meaningful opportunities for input and partnership; poorly designed programs may exacerbate existing tensions and create new ones. 
• Community trust depends on officer willingness to engage the community and demonstrate change visible to the community. 

Training 	
• Provides tools to teach specific skills related to traffic and pedestrian stops and addresses problematic behavior in a systematic way. 
• Offers opportunities to express organizational priorities concerning racial profiling and biased-based policing, reinforce these priorities, and work toward changing organizational processes. 
• Offers a forum for the public to share experiences with law enforcement. 
	
• Addressing racial profiling in training is challenging and can be confrontational; training curriculum and facilitators/instructors must be chosen carefully. 
• Additional post-training monitoring may be needed to ensure that  officers engage in behavior promoted by training. 

 
Technology 
and  
Data Collection 	
• Well-designed systems make collecting data faster and easier for officers in the field. 
• Appropriately reported data can increase transparency to the public. 
• Well-designed data collection and analysis can provide agencies with empirical data on stop patterns to identify specific areas of concern and forge organizational responses.  
• Data can help identify specific officers who may be engaged in disparate stop practices to target for intervention or assistance. 

 	
• Implementing traffic stop data collection technology requires training, information technology expertise, and resources. 
• Traffic stop data collection technology works best when it is integrated with other existing data systems in agency. 
• Technology to facilitate data collection is only a tool; proper data analysis is necessary for solutions. 
• Agencies must determine benchmarks against which stops will be compared. 
• Traffic stop data analysis requires specialized knowledge and may necessitate assistance from outside research consultants. 
• Ultimately, analysis may identify disparities but often does not definitively identify whether racial profiling is actually occurring. 

 

Common Themes Across Strategy Areas
 
While each of the six selected strategies in the PCSRRP program have been useful for addressing a number of integrity- and accountability-related problems within organizations, it was unclear at the outset of this project how well they would address the challenge of racial profiling specifically.  It is not possible to measure whether specific programs reduced or prevented racial profiling entirely; however, what we do know from the review of these PCSRRP grantee experiences is that numerous lessons can be learned about the best practices for adopting and implementing programs to address racial profiling.
   
When reviewing the lessons identified by the grantee sites, we observed that while the specific focus may shift depending on the strategy, most lessons appear to fall under four themes: 1. Organizational buy-in, 2. Community involvement, 3. Managing technology and planning issues, and 4. Keeping the project’s focus.  These themes are not mutually exclusive, but they provide broad categories that may form a useful framework for agencies to consider when developing similar strategies to address racial profiling.  What follows is a discussion of  the four themes, focusing on the ways they affect initiatives targeting racial profiling.  Table 2 following these discussions breaks down the themes across strategy areas, with specific examples from the grantees’ projects.    
 
1.  Organizational Buy-In.
 
When developing and implementing programs geared toward addressing and reducing racial profiling, issues of organizational buy-in are critical.  The issue of racial profiling is highly volatile with officers and with members of the community.  The experiences of the grantees indicate that the support and active participation of line officers and union leadership are important factors affecting the success of these initiatives.  For data collection and technology projects, the agency’s information technology (IT) staff can also be critical partners in the process.
 
Although the involvement of rank-and-file officers is important to most agency initiatives, the highly charged nature of racial profiling raises the stakes.  The utility of initiatives may be diminished significantly when line officers are not supporting the endeavor.  All strategies seeking to reduce or prevent racial profiling must embrace the legitimate uses of discretion by police officers.  As research has shown, at the interface between officers and members of the public, perceptions of how fairly the police handle the situation are even more important to the resulting level of satisfaction than the actual outcomes of the interaction.  When officers will not acknowledge the perception that racial profiling may be occurring, none of these strategies is likely to be effective.
 
Efforts to obtain buy-in should focus on two levels—internally within the agency and externally with the community constituencies who are the focus of the initiative.  Inside the organization, command staff and project teams should strive to obtain support for both the goal of reducing racial profiling and the perception that racial profiling occurs, as well as the manner in which this goal is pursued.  Agencies can emphasize the benefits for officers of addressing racial profiling: working to increase trust and cooperation between the agency and the public can enhance officer safety during stops as well as to increase the likelihood that, more generally, community members will provide police with information, the lifeblood of an investigation.  Showing unequivocal top-down support for the initiative may also work to emphasize the worthiness of the goal. 
      
Even if they approve of the goal, officers may be wary of the manner in which it is pursued.  The disconnect between the goals and perspectives of management and workers has been well-documented in many kinds of organizations; however, given the volatility of emotions surrounding the issue of racial profiling, aligning the culture of the line officers with this organizational priority may be particularly challenging.  If there is a high level of distrust between the rank and file and command staff, line officers may be suspicious of the motives driving the initiative and worry about what it will mean for their careers.  Will they be more easily subject to discipline?  Will their workload increase dramatically?  To persuade line officers to embrace the initiative, the experiences of the grantees strongly suggests that involving these officers and their representatives in all stages of development and implementation is vital.  Giving line officers meaningful opportunities to contribute and help guide the process may make the process feel less suspect and will allow them a voice if they believe certain project elements are not in their best interest.  If done well, this strategy may assuage feelings that the initiative is politically motivated rather than designed to address an important issue of professionalism and effectiveness.  It is also incumbent on supervisors and managers to demonstrate how a program will likely benefit individual officers or at least will not have a negative effect on them.
   
On initiatives requiring new sophisticated technology or enhancements of existing technological tools, bringing members of the IT unit to the table can be extremely beneficial.  These personnel can offer their expertise on a very complex subject.  IT staff may know what other agencies experienced when implementing various kinds of technology, what systems will work best with the agency’s current infrastructure, and the challenges likely to be encountered.  Their involvement offers the potential for enormous savings in time and money, as well as avoiding problems that can hinder the project’s momentum. 
 
2.  Community Involvement. 
 
Like organizational buy-in, community involvement is a common issue that becomes increasingly salient when addressing racial profiling.  In our system of democracy, a law enforcement agency’s legitimacy depends in large part on its ability to persuade public stakeholders that it is working in their interest, a particularly important point in this context because racial profiling often is a problem of perception.  In fact, as mentioned earlier, research has found that satisfaction with the police is not related to the actual outcome of the traffic stop.  Drivers’ perceptions of how fairly and respectfully they are treated by an officer during the stop is more important to their assessment of the stop.  An agency with a reputation for stopping minorities unfairly may find that minority drivers have difficulty getting beyond perceptions of the unfairness of the stop even if the officer is acting appropriately and respectfully. 
  
Involving the community when addressing the issue of racial profiling is particularly important because the most common police-public contact is traffic stops.  Efforts to improve public perceptions of officer behavior during traffic stops, therefore, are vital to an agency’s legitimacy.  How this translates to an officer’s daily responsibilities is that, without public support, the police are less effective.  Community members will be less inclined to provide law enforcement with information, which is essential particularly for agencies implementing community policing. 
  
 A major challenge is the often contentious relationship between the police and various community constituencies.  These groups may have fixed negative opinions of each other that can be relatively impervious to contradictory information or evidence.  As Farrell et al. (2000) note, “Police and community discussion of the racial profiling controversy often resembles a frozen account; the same anecdotes are repeated on both sides, with only slight variations as to the factual details…Without an effort to reduce the rhetoric between opposing parties, data on traffic stops may become another tool used by either side when it is most politically expedient.”   One powerful way of interrupting these narratives is to offer community members meaningful opportunities to influence agency policy and procedure.
   
The grantee agencies used numerous strategies to solicit input from their communities and to involve them fundamentally in the development and implementation of their initiatives.  Histories of antagonism simply will not disappear once an agency decides it is ready to work with that community.  In some cases, just getting community members to engage with the police at all may take substantial work.  Investing the time to bring these groups to the table can help demonstrate that the agency is serious about involving them and forging relationships that may extend beyond the parameters of the immediate initiative.  Agencies should try to involve the public in every stage of development and implementation, rather than at a single point, and give them real opportunities to influence the process and goals, perhaps through membership on a steering committee or task force.  Like some grantees, agencies may be able to use their initiatives as an opportunity to develop more regular contact with community groups.
   
Agencies can show a willingness to learn about the values held by targeted communities.  For instance, agencies that understand that minority communities may not identify with the traditional reasons for seeking a career in law enforcement can craft a message that taps into the ideas and goals that are important to them.  Advertising in targeted media produced in groups’ native languages and reaching out to respected community leaders may also benefit efforts to demonstrate good faith.  Other gestures like holding meetings outside of government buildings and accommodating community members’ schedules when organizing meetings or events possess positive symbolic value.
   
In addition to improving perceptions of inclusion and equity, inviting members of immigrant communities can help the department understand the expectations that people may be bringing from their countries of origin and teach members of these communities how to respond to an officer during a traffic stop.     
 
3.  Managing Technology and Planning Issues.
 
Planning and management issues, particularly around technology when it was involved, were important to the sites’ implementation of racial profiling reduction programs.  These concerns can be more clearly conceptualized as falling under the umbrella of the two themes discussed above: organizational buy-in and community involvement.  If technology that is central to an initiative fails, it can undermine confidence in the initiative itself.  If people, both inside the agency and in the community, feel left out of the process, bridging conflict becomes more difficult.  To avoid these pitfalls, effective planning and project management are a necessity; indeed, fundamental. 
  
New technology is extremely useful for addressing community concerns about racial profiling.  Answering community members’ questions in a way that demonstrates that the agency is taking their concerns seriously requires most agencies to collect and manage new data.  Such initiatives demand sophisticated tools, many of which will be new to the agency.  Obtaining useful data, whether on traffic stops or officer activities, can be a complex endeavor.  Agencies will need to clearly understand their objectives and what methods and technology will best allow them to meet these objectives.  Traffic stop data collection projects are perhaps the most complicated strategy technologically, but these issues are no less important when implementing an early intervention system or launching an enhanced interactive web site.
   
The grantees discovered just how difficult technology can be.  Determining exactly what the agency’s needs are and how to integrate new forms of technology seamlessly can be challenging.  But if these steps are not taken, the agency is more likely to purchase a system or hire a vendor that does not fit its needs.  Testing the hardware, software, and the process of collecting and managing the data are important steps to take before formally launching a data collection program.  For example, if a newly implemented early intervention system starts generating alerts for people who haven’t crossed any thresholds, any efforts by the agency to promote the system internally may be undermined.
   
In addition to technical issues, there are concerns about how it will be used.  Ensuring sufficient privacy of information can help make personnel more accepting of agency efforts.  Community members may feel more affinity for data collection efforts and technological tools if the agency takes steps to provide clear reasons for their use and satisfactory explanations for what happens to the information collected.  Testing the systems used and efforts to make new tools as user-friendly as possible also appeared to increase the likelihood that the initiative would be implemented successfully.  Taking steps to understand the level of time and resources needed will prevent delays as well as communicate to both agency personnel and the community that the issue is being addressed seriously.  And although the main goal may be to gather information that enables a dialog, the efforts an agency puts into getting to this point will not go unnoticed by the community.
   
On a less technical note, effective planning and management have the potential to enhance the benefits of an initiative and can help agencies avoid unnecessary pitfalls.  For example, one grantee found that having focus group facilitators who are knowledgeable about the issue of racial profiling improved the quality of the information gleaned from the groups.  Another agency realized that the cadet program was suffering because it did not communicate program standards clearly enough with the school administrators responsible for referring students to the program.  Checking on how the law applies to data privacy can help an agency avoid having to rethink a system that failed to account for this issue.  Although mistakes can never be avoided entirely, careful planning and flexibility can mitigate the consequences.   
 
  
4.  Keeping the Project’s Focus.
 
The strategies implemented by the grantees are complex endeavors requiring the coordination of many different resources. Agencies can encounter several obstacles when implementing one of these strategies while staying focused on the end goal of addressing and, if found to be occurring, reducing racial profiling during traffic and pedestrian stops. 
   
One obstacle is the distraction of mission creep, where the project loses sight of the goal when the parameters of the project are expanded too far.  Community forums, for example, can be less effective if the communities most concerned by perceptions or experiences of racial profiling are not targeted.  Discussions could be allowed to drift to other topics that are important to the public but not germane to racial profiling per se.  This is not to say that these issues should not be discussed.  But agencies need to be adept at steering the conversation back to the subject of racial profiling. 
    
It is important to recognize that implementing a project successfully does not equal project success.  While certainly a necessary step toward achieving the desire outcome, simply measuring traffic stops or increasing an agency’s diversity does not automatically reduce racial profiling.  Initiatives that are somewhat removed from the process of measuring traffic stop disparities are even more prone to lose sight of the goal, because agencies will need to engage in additional efforts, namely data collection, to learn whether new recruitment, training, community engagement, or internal accountability programs have affected the nature of traffic enforcement.  But even data collection programs can get off track if they merely culminate in a report issued to the community with no additional dialog with the public, no changes to policy and procedure, no alterations to training, and no follow-up efforts.  Agencies should view these initiatives as long-term investments that cannot stand alone.   
   
Table 2 breaks down each strategy by these four areas and provides examples of how grantees addressed them.   

  
  

Table  2.  Lessons Learned from the Field: Strategies for Reducing Racial Profiling.  
 	Accountability 
(EIS) 	Recruitment and Hiring 	Minority Engagement 
Organizational Buy-In 	
• Demonstrating that the EIS is not intended for formal discipline may improve officers’ attitudes toward the system. 

 
• Minimizing the number and types of people who could view the information through layered security as Denver did, can prevent inappropriate access and help to address some concerns. 

 
• Preparing first-line supervisors to engage in mentoring and coaching and how to interpret data generated from the EIS accurately and consistently can be important to the strategy’s success. 

 	
• Training and re-educating the entire agency on its role within the community and the collaborative effect of working together with the public may assist in reaching consensus, signifying a united approach. 

 	
• As was done in Rochester, conducting an internal review of minority employees’ perceptions of agency race relations may help not only obtain vital information concerning how to engage particular communities, but demonstrate to officers that their input is valued as the effort moves forward. 

 
• Giving officers with a can help prevent perceptions of one-sidedness; in New Haven, the police held dialogs between community members and law enforcement where the community could relate experiences and police could educate community members on the realities of police work. 

 
Community Involvement 	
• Community involvement at every stage allows for a different perspective, such as inviting the community to discuss the ideal characteristics of officers and information dissemination, as St. Paul did. 

 
 	
• As each agency implementing this strategy understood, recruiting a diverse workforce requires marketing efforts specific to the communities being targeted. 

 
• Indianapolis directly engaged faith leaders in the African-American community to demonstrate the agency’s commitment to their diversity goals; such relationships can promote partnership beyond combating racial profiling. 

 
• When addressing community members who may not have previously considered the benefits of a career in law enforcement, focusing on leadership, problem solving, and community service may do more to promote positive images than primarily discussing apprehending criminals; Jersey City focused on the “human side” of law enforcement while Indianapolis centered their campaign on “everyday heroes.” 

 	
• Citizens may feel uncomfortable discussing their feelings and perceptions in front of police officers; holding and facilitating meetings on neutral ground can assist in mitigating this apprehension. 

 
• As in Buffalo, individuals recruited by an agency to discuss racial profiling may want to talk about other issues facing the community; without losing focus, agencies should try to strike a balance in opening discussion to topics important to the community.       

 
• Focusing events around the interests of minority youth will provide a perspective not often heard but vital to community-police relations; the Buffalo police offered an entertainment-based opportunity for youths to interact with police and for both groups to engage in serious discussion, as well. 

 
• If trust is established, event participants may give first-hand explanations of personal experiences, including cultural norms and expectations for recently arrived groups; this information can enhance understanding of behavior during traffic and pedestrian stops.  

 
Managing Technology and Planning Issues 	
• It is essential to test and validate the data from the various components of the system.  If officers are incorrectly identified based on inaccurate data, the process may be seen as unfair and may never recover. 

 
• An EIS collects large amounts of data on individual officers, much of which can be considered confidential; agencies considering implementing an EIS should check the status or legality of the data collected, especially concerning the public record. 

 	
• Several grantees noted that, for a successful recruitment of a diverse workforce  it is important to do more than simply recruit to help people succeed in getting into the department. Mentoring recruits through the written, oral, and physical agility exams increases the likelihood of their success. 

 	
• It is important that those who lead focus groups or study circles understand the issue of racial profiling; this will help participants  appreciate the broader implications of racial profiling and will provoke conversation .

 
• The Rochester police learned that the success of cadet program partly involved clearly communicating expectations both to and from participants from the start 

 
Keeping Focus 	
• Through the use of technology, it is possible to do too many things at once and lose the original purpose of the system, in this case reducing racial profiling. 

 
• Most agencies experience some difficulties in determining thresholds of reliable indicators of biased based policing. Focusing on your agency’s specific mission and goals should help the successful identification of appropriate thresholds and the creation of intervention strategies to address misbehaviors. 

 	
• This kind of program takes a substantial amount of time to get off the ground, requiring at least 2 years to recruit, screen, tutor, test, select, train, and place officers.   

 
• Successful implementation doesn’t necessarily lead to reductions in racial profiling. Once the officers have had time in the field, agencies should evaluate whether hiring a more diverse workforce had an effect on racial profiling     
	
• Without a focus on a specific area or group, resources and timely information can be lost because individuals do not see general issues of police community relations as immediately relevant to their lives.  

 

  

 
 
 	Training 	Technology and 
Data Collection 
 	Organizational Buy-In 	
• Phoenix conducted structured interviews with officers to obtain their views on various issues related to racial profiling. 

 
• Each grantee conducting training provided opportunities for both sworn officers and community members to be involved. This gives both groups the chance to offer their perceptions as well as to listen to the other group’s perspectives. 

 	
• As in Redlands, involving patrol throughout the entire process can decrease officers’ apprehension about new technology and suspicions about how it will be used by management  

 
• To ensure internal buy-in,  Charlotte-Mecklenburg drafted a data collection policy and project plan outline in conjunction with officers of all ranks. 

 
• The agency’s information technology staff may be able to offer guidance in selecting a vendor and already may be working well with a particular vendor.  Involving them from the start can be extremely helpful.   

 
 	Community Involvement 	
• Including community stakeholders in an advisory capacity throughout the development and presentation of the training will assure credibility and legitimacy for what is ultimately delivered.  Metro Nashville conducted focus groups with community members and involved them directly in training. 

 	
• As the experiences of Tacoma, Redlands, and Dothan show, engaging the community in fundamental ways—through steering committees or task forces—shows the community that the agency is taking the issue of racial profiling seriously, incorporates important perspectives in the process, and helps to publicize the agency’s efforts. 

 
 	Managing Technology and Planning Issues 	
• Holding training sessions in neutral locations rather than government buildings can help make the community participants feel more comfortable interacting with law enforcement.  This is what Metro Nashville did during the Perspectives on Profiling training involving both community members and law enforcement.   
	
• By being up front and honest with officers when a problem with the technology arises and responding quickly, they may be more likely to support the endeavor instead of deciding it is a waste of time. 

 
• The contract process can be cumbersome for all parties and can delay up the analysis phase of the project considerably. Plan accordingly.  

 
• Methodically testing procedures before implementing technology and data collection can help test all aspects of the new collection system, work out the kinks, and allow time for officers to become accustomed to using the new technology.  Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Kansas City used a phase-in approach, implementing the technology in one district and fixing problems before rolling it out in other districts.  

 
• Being involved to an extent in the preparation of the final report will enable the department to answer questions quickly, ensure that the report addresses all necessary issues, and increase the chances that all parties will be happy with the final product.  

 
 	Keeping Focus 	
• Training can be effective only if it is part of a more comprehensive approach to eliminating racial profiling, is complemented by direct supervision of the behavior of officers, has programs to deal with officers identified as having problems, and continues community engagement to identify current concerns.   

 	
• Including room for modification in the project timeline can be useful when navigating the budget and contract processes.  The project should be viewed as a long-term process—rather than as merely producing an analysis report—that must have support from all levels of the agency and from the community.  

 
 


Understanding if Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling Are Working
  
Although this evaluation was not intended to measure the direct impact of these programs on the incidence of racial profiling, the following are a few comments about how agencies may begin to evaluate the effectiveness of various strategies for reducing racial profiling.
  
One thing that becomes clear through this analysis is that, although sites may have implemented their initiative successfully, even establishing trusting relationships with community constituencies or diversifying their workforces, outcome evaluations that follow such programs over a longer course are needed to see whether racial profiling was  occurring and, if so, whether it was actually reduced.  At the outset, departments should think about any evaluation strategy as trying to measure 1) whether racial and ethnic traffic stop disparities change following the implementation of a strategy, and 2) whether community perceptions of racial profiling decline in a particular jurisdiction following program implementation.  These questions require agencies to collect data on traffic stops and community perception and to monitor those results over time.
   
Through the review of PCSRRP grantees it appears likely that multiple strategies may need to be implemented together or in some sequential order to address the issue of racial profiling most effectively.  Many of the agencies that were most successful at making change adopted multiple strategies or created holistic approaches to the problem; for example, the introduction of data collection as a tool was often accompanied by training about the issue of racial profiling. More work is needed to understand if these strategies should be used in a particular order, such as should an agency make recruitment and hiring changes before engaging the minority community.  In addition, more research is necessary to identify whether implementing programs together or in particular sequences are more or less successful at reducing both the practices and perceptions of racial profiling.  It is critical for agencies to continue sharing information and best practices as they replicate the strategies outlined in this report and build new, locally driven response to concerns about racial profiling. 
 
  
 
References 
 

The Internet references cited in this publication were valid as of September 2007.  Given that URLs and web sites are in constant flux, neither the author(s) nor the COPS Office can vouch for their current validity.


American Civil Liberties Union. “ACLU questions scope of ‘Intelligence Fusion Center’ in Massachusetts.” Press release, May 11, 2005. 
 
Attorney General’s Conference on Strengthening Police-Community Relationships. Report on the Proceedings, Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 1999. 
 
Buerger, M. “A Tale of Two Targets: Limitations of Community Anticrime Actions.” Crime and Delinquency  40 (1994)(3): 411–436. 
 
Chan, J.B.L.  “The Technological Game: How Information Technology Is Transforming Police Practice, Criminal Justice 1 (2001) (2): 139–159. 
 
Chermak, S., E. McGarrell, and  J. Gruenewald.  “Media Coverage of Police Misconduct and Attitudes Toward Police.” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management  29 (2006)(2): 261–281.  
 
Cordner, G. “Community Policing: Elements and Effects,” in Community Policing, G.P. Alpert and A.R. Piquero, eds. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 2000. 
 
Decker, L.K. and R.G.  Huckabee. “Raising the Age and Education Requirements for Police Officers.” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management 25 (2002) (4): 789–802. 
 
Farrell, A.,  J. Rumminger, and J. McDevitt.  New Challenges in Confronting Racial Profiling in the 21st Century.  Learning from Research and Practice, New York: Gideon Project, Open Society Foundation, 2005. 
 
Fridell, L. By the Numbers:  A Guide for Analyzing Race Data from Vehicle Stops. Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum, 2005.   
 
Fridell, L., R. Lunney, D. Diamond, and B. Kubu. Racially Biased Policing: A Principled Response.  Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum, 2001. 
 
Gaffigan, S. and P. McDonald. Police Integrity: Public Service with Honor, Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice and Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, 1997. 
 
Gascón, G. and M. Schaefer. Bringing Diversity to Hiring and Recruiting Practices. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice, 2001.  


Harris K. and W. Romesburg. Law Enforcement Tech Guide. How to plan, purchase and manage technology (successfully!). Washington, D.C.: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, 2002.
 
Hickman, M.J.  State and Local Law Enforcement Training Academies, 2002. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, 2005. 
 
International Association of Chiefs of Police. The Future of Women in Policing:  Mandates for Action. Washington, D.C., 1998. 
 
Klockers, C.B. “The Rhetoric of Community Policing,” in Thinking about Police, C.B. Klockers and S.D. Mastrofski, eds. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1998 
 
Kratcoski, P.C. “Police Education and Training in a Global Society: Guest Editor’s Introduction.” Police Practice and Research, 5 (2004)(2), 103–105 
 
McDevitt, J., A. Farrell, J. Doyle, and S. Cronin. “A Survey of the Role of Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Leadership of the Boston Police Department.”  Amicus brief: Cotter v. City of Boston, U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit, 2002. 
 
Milgram, D.  “Recruiting Women to Policing: Practical Strategies That Work. The Police Chief, April 2002, pp.23–29.  http://www.womenpolice.com/html/the_police_chief_magazine_rec.html  
 
Moore, M.H.  “Problem Solving and Community Policing,” in Community Policing, G.P. Alpert and A.R.  Piquero, eds. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 2000.  
 
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Palmiotto, M.J., M.L. Birzer, and N.P. Unnithan. “Training in Community Policing: A Suggested Curriculum.” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, 23 (2000)(1): 8–21. 


Platt, T., J. Frappier,  R. Gerda, R. Schauffler, L. Trujillo, L. Cooper, E. Currie, and S. Harring. The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove:  An Analysis of the U.S. Police, 3rd ed. San Francisco, California: Synthesis Publications, 1982. 
 
Raganella, A.J. and M.D. White. “Race, Gender, and Motivation for Becoming a Police Officer: Implications for Building a Representative Police Department.” Journal of Criminal Justice, 32(2004)(6): 501–513. 
 
Ramirez, D., J. McDevitt, and A. Farrell.  A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems: Promising Practices and Lessons Learned.  Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 2000. 
   
Reitzel, J. and A.R. Piquero. “Does It Exist? Studying Citizens’ Attitudes of Racial Profiling. Police Quarterly, 9 (2006)(2): 161–183. 
 
Shusta, R.M., D.R. Levine, P.R. Harris, and H.Z. Wong. Multicultural Law Enforcement: Strategies for Peacekeeping in a Diverse Society. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1995. 
 
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Walker, S.  The New World of Police Accountability. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2005. 
 
Weitzer, R. and S. Tuch. Rethinking Minority Attitudes Toward the Police. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, 2004.   
 
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Case Study Participants

Personnel, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses listed here were valid as of June 2007.  Neither the author(s) nor the COPS Office can vouch for their current validity.

Accountability
 
Arlington Police Department 
620 W. Division Street
Arlington, TX 76011 
Lieutenant Jeff Petty 
817.459.5625 
pettyj@ci.arlington.tx.us

Denver Police Department 
1331 Cherokee Street
Denver, CO 80204 
Lieutenant Rhoda Jones 
720.913.6013 
jonesr@ci.denver.co.us 

St. Paul Police Department 
367 Grove Street 
St. Paul, MN 55101 
Amy Brown 
651.266.5507 
amy.brown@ci.stpaul.mn.us

Recruitment 

Indianapolis Police Department 
50 North Alabama Street
Indianapolis, IN 46204 
Liz Allison 
317.327.3452 
a3663@indygov.org
 
Jersey City Police Department 
8 Erie Street 
Jersey City, NJ 07302 
Sergeant Jaclyn Baljko 
201.547.4736 
jbaljko@jcnj.org
 
Lansing Police Department 
120 West Michigan Avenue 
Lansing, MI 48933 
Lieutenant Bruce Ferguson 
517.483.4682 
bferguson@ci.lansing.mi.us
 
Minority Engagement
 
Buffalo Police Department 
74 Franklin Street 
Buffalo, NY 14202 
Maureen Oakley 
716.851.4444 
maoakley@bpd.ci.buffalo.ny.us
 
New Haven Police Department 
1 Union Avenue 
New Haven, CT 06519 
Chief Francisco Ortiz 
203.946.6333
 
Rochester Police Department 
185 Exchange Boulevard
Rochester, NY 14614 
Michael Bialaszewski 
585.428.7141 
mike.bialaszewski@cityofrochester.gov
 
Using Technology
 
Austin Police Department 
P.O. Box 689001
Austin, TX 78768-9001 
Yuki Miyamoto 
512.974.5853 
yuki.miyamoto@ci.austin.tx.us
 
Redlands Police Department 
30 Cajon Street 
Redlands, CA 92373 
Captain Tom Fitzmaurice 
909.798.7613 
tfitzmaurice@redlandspolice.org
 
Tacoma Police Department 
3701 South Pine Street 
Tacoma, WA 98409 
Sergeant Dennis Kieffer 
253.591.5583 
dkieffer@cityoftacoma.org
Training
Brookline Police Department 
350 Washington Street 
Brookline, MA 02445 
Officer David O’Lauglin 
617.730.2409 
davidolaughlin@usa.net
 
Metropolitan Nashville Police Department 
200 James Robertson Parkway
Nashville, TN 37201 
Lieutenant Jim Stephens 
615.880.2850 
jstephens@police.nashville.org
 
Phoenix Police Department 
620 W. Washington Street 
Phoenix, AZ 85003 
Sharyn Zlotnick 
602.534.2036 
sharyn.zlotnick@phoenix.gov
 
Data Collection

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department 
601 East Trade Street 
Charlotte, NC 28202 
John Couchell 
704.336.8782 
jchouchell@cmpd.org
 
Dothan Police Department 
210 N. Saint Andrews Street
Dothan, AL 36303 
Captain Jim Smith 
334.793.0419
 
Kansas City Police Department 
1125 Locust Street
Kansas City, Missouri 64106 
Captain Diane Mozzicato 
816.234.5459 
dmozzicato@kcpd.org
 
Oakland Police Department 
455 Seventh Avenue 
Oakland, California 94607 
Candace Jessie 
510.238.7140 
cjessie@oaklandnet.com