FULL ARTICLE HERE

The National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, a 3-year, $4.75 million project funded by the Department of Justice, is designed to improve relationships between law enforcement and communities of color, including special populations, such as youth. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of six cities of the National Initiative, has proven particularly successful in its work with the Youth-Police Advisory Committee (PGHYPAC), an organization co-founded by Chief Cameron McLay of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police and students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. This organization promotes "reconciliation" between students (grades 6-12) and law enforcement representatives, involving participants from the Mayor's Office, District Attorney's Office, and US Attorney's Office. National Initiative Assists Pittsburgh and Minneapolis in Building Police-Community Trust.

Since its inception, the PGHYPAC has defined four "Closing the Gap" resolutions, identifying four critical "trust-building" areas impacting the relationship between youth and law enforcement in Pittsburgh: dialogue, cultural literacy, positive interaction, and youth with disabilities. Recently, as a testament to its existing success-and anticipated expansion-the PGHYPAC received a National Initiative research award, which will support current programs, assess their impact through research surveys of local youth, and ultimately organize a citywide meeting to share these results.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, another of the National Initiative’s pilot sites, has announced several changes to the Minneapolis Police Department’s (MPD) use-of-force policy to begin repairing the broken relationship between law enforcement and communities of color. Police Chief Janeé Harteau described the new policy as a “first step” toward earning those communities’ trust. The changes, privately shared with a small group of community members during the National Initiative’s first reconciliation meeting, were publicly announced alongside Mayor Betsy Hodges on August 8, 2016.

Based on recommendations made by President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing and the Police Executive Research Forum, the revised policy centers on “sanctity of life” measures designed to keep officers—and communities—safe from harm. Under the new policy, officers are required to both intervene and report if they witness improper use of force by their colleagues. De-escalation, a practice previously encouraged but not enforced, will also be formalized through training delivered to MPD’s current class of 32 police recruits.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, praising the MPD’s “promising changes,” called upon other law enforcement agencies to implement similar model policies for police-citizen encounters. “Valuing human life and prioritizing de-escalation could decrease negative and potentially fatal interactions with the public,” Executive Director Chuck Samuelson said. “We hope that all of the officers take these directives to heart and we begin to see a shift of officer behavior.” These policy changes, designed to address the divide between police and communities, are an example of the “trust-building” central to the work of the National Initiative. 

We at the National Initiative want to take a moment to express our deep sorrow at the tragic events of the past weeks. The concentration of these deaths and injuries of police and civilians has been especially wrenching for our staff, our colleagues, and our law enforcement and community partners.

Our nation again finds itself shaken by violence and faced with the unresolved division and trauma that too often define relationships between police and the public – particularly communities of color.

The National Initiative was launched nearly two years ago to address this division. In this painful moment, we are reminded of the necessity of the work we are doing together to enhance procedural justice, reduce implicit bias, and foster processes of police-community reconciliation.

We remain steadfast in our commitment to these practices and believe they hold real promise for creating safer communities, reducing the worst tensions between us, and ensuring protection and fair treatment for everyone. Our experience in each of our six pilot cities has shown that real progress is possible and that we have more common ground than many realize.

We thank all of our partners and supporters in Birmingham, Fort Worth, Gary, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Stockton and commend the work they are doing toward a better, safer future. Our hope is that this work offers strength and purpose during these difficult times.

This meeting was designed to move beyond the application of current findings and identify gaps in our current research that hold potential to contribute to future efforts to build police legitimacy. This final report from those discussions includes important new ideas from national leaders in procedural justice, implicit bias, and reconciliation. To read the entire report, please click here. 

The Department of Justice’s National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice has announced that on February 1, 2016 it will launch a three-day procedural justice training in its six pilot sites, a component of its plan to strengthen the relationship between the criminal justice system and the communities it serves and protects. The sites, which include Birmingham, AL; Fort Worth, TX; Gary, IN; Minneapolis, MN; Pittsburgh, PA; and Stockton, CA, sent officers to Chicago Police Department (CPD) to receive training on an innovative procedural justice curriculum during October of 2015. These officers will now deliver the curriculum to the rank-and-file of their departments in an effort to improve the quality of interaction with the public.

“The National Initiative is enormously excited to begin this important work. This procedural justice curriculum is the result of a collaboration between leading edge thinkers and practitioners in the areas of procedural justice and implicit bias,” said National Initiative Project Director Tracie Keesee. “We believe it holds great promise to transform police interactions with citizens and help rebuild trust in communities where it has been eroded.”

Procedural justice focuses on the way police and other legal authorities interact with the public and how the characteristics of those interactions shape the public’s views of the police, their willingness to obey the law, and actual crime rates. Mounting evidence shows that community perceptions of procedural justice can have a significant impact on public safety.

The initial training will last two days. The goal of the first unit of training will be to teach officers the concepts of procedural justice and how to incorporate those ideas into their daily routines, particularly during their interactions with the public. Included in this training is a unit on policing in historical perspective, which John Jay College's National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC) has identified as a critical step in the reconciliation process. The second unit of training will build upon the first, incorporating scenario-based exercises. The goal is to teach officers advanced techniques for applying procedural justice concepts in the field. The third unit of training, focusing on implicit bias, will take place later this summer.

The training is modeled on the procedural justice and police legitimacy curriculum developed by Yale Law School's Tom Tyler and Tracey Meares and members of CPD – a curriculum that has been administered to more than 11,000 Chicago officers over the last four years – with an implicit bias curriculum developed by Phillip Atiba Goff of the Center for Policing Equity and the Chicago trainers. In October of 2015, training officers from the six pilot sites traveled to Chicago and learned from Meares, Tyler, Goff, and the CPD training staff about these core concepts. David Kennedy of the NNSC presented on police-community reconciliation and how the concept intersects with procedural justice and implicit bias. The launch of this city-level procedural justice training, one of the concrete interventions developed for the National Initiative, is the first opportunity for officers to deliver this curriculum to their departments.

More can be learned about this training and the principles behind it at the National Initiative’s online clearinghouse, found at trustandjustice.org. The Department of Justice is also providing additional training and technical assistance to police departments and communities that are not pilot sites through the Office of Justice Program’s Diagnostic Center.

Procedural justice, one of the key pillars of the National Initiative, has been in the spotlight recently thanks to coverage of Judge Victoria Pratt’s court in Newark, New Jersey. Pratt, the chief judge of the Newark Municipal Court, is the featured profile in Tina Rosenberg’s long read at the Guardian on “the simple idea that could transform US criminal justice.” More recently, Melissa Harris Perry invited Pratt to her show on MSNBC to speak in depth about her approach.  

The article and interview describe the innovative approaches Pratt is using with defendants—key tenets of procedural justice and unique methods, like essay writing—to instill greater mutual respect in proceedings and achieve better outcomes for the people who enter the courtroom.
 
Moreover, as the article describes the developments in Newark, it also cites many National Initiative contributors from across the Hudson river, in New York, and beyond: The Center for Court Innovation’s procedural justice program in Red Hook (Brooklyn), Tom Tyler’s scholarship, and thoughts from Tracey Meares and David Kennedy.

These highlights illustrate some innovative ways representatives of the criminal justice system can improve procedural justice and build community trust across the nation.

Procedural Justice: Increasing Trust to Decrease Crime

By: Megan Quattlebaum, Associate Research Scholar in Law, Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law, Supervising Attorney, and Program Director of the Justice Collaboratory, Yale Law School

May 26, 2015

Police leaders watching the news unfold in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and North Charleston are doing a great deal of soul searching about how to repair strained relationships with the communities they protect. While problems so complex and longstanding will not have an easy solution, the concept of “procedural justice” is one police departments should take seriously.

A wealth of empirical evidence shows that when police are at their best—when they are neutral and unbiased; treat those with whom they interact with respect and dignity; and give folks a chance to explain their side of the story—they can actually bring out the qualities they want to see in their communities. People who are policed in this way are more likely to view the police as legitimate. And people who view the police as legitimate are more likely to obey the law, cooperate with authorities and engage positively in their communities.

This is the idea of procedural justice: how police interact with members of the public matters as much or more than the outcome of those interactions. Typically, the tools that police rely on most heavily to motivate compliance are what we would call “instrumental.” Historically, police often assume people follow the law and cooperate with the authorities largely because they fear the consequences of not doing so (arrest, a criminal charge, jail, etc.) and so those are the aspects of their work that they emphasize. But numerous empirical studies persuasively demonstrate that perceptions of legitimacy have a greater impact on people’s compliance with the law than their fear of formal sanctions.

The bad news is, if people experience an interaction with a police officer that suggests to them the police are untrustworthy, their ties with law and their sense of its legitimacy weaken, which may lead to a lack of cooperation with the police and more law breaking in the future. Put another way, unnecessarily aggressive policing brings out the worst in the people toward whom it is directed.

The factors that contribute most to people viewing a police stop as negative are whether the police threaten or use force arbitrarily, inconsistently or in ways that suggest a lack of professionalism or the existence of prejudice, or if police are humiliating or disrespectful. Notably, whether the stop results in an arrest is less important for purposes of perceived legitimacy than how that stop is carried out.3 Most police officers I talk to know this from experience: people can leave an interaction with a positive impression of the police even if they don’t get the result they wanted. Or they can leave without the ticket or arrest, but still be very upset and angry. It all depends on how they are treated.

Read the full article at OJP Diagnostic Center.

William J. Bratton Remarks at NOBLE William R. Bracey CEO Symposium, Friday, March 13, Atlanta, GA

Good morning.

For almost 50 years, I’ve been on a journey in American policing.

Fifty years of evolution, revolution—crisis and opportunity.

We’re here during a crisis moment in the journey. It’s a time of challenge, and it’s daunting, but it should be exciting, too—for everyone in this room.

We have a chance to change things.

To advance the profession we love.

To work with the people we protect and the people we lead.

The crisis is center-stage because of last summer’s and last fall’s events—specifically, police-involved incidents during which black citizens died in Staten Island, Ferguson, Dayton, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and other places—as well as the protests and unrest that followed.

These events precipitated the crisis, but they’re not the crisis itself.

The crisis isn’t systemic police brutality, which is no longer part of our profession.

And the crisis isn’t RACIST POLICE TERROR, as a protestor’s sign proclaimed.

No, the crisis is about an abiding unfairness, a durable dissatisfaction.

It’s about a great divide between police and some of the community in our most troubled, vulnerable neighborhoods.

Neighborhoods where poverty bites deepest, where jobs are most scarce, where schools are most challenged.

In my city, those neighborhoods are largely neighborhoods of color.

Maybe that’s the case in your cities, too—although it’s not everywhere, because disadvantage has many shades, and crime comes in many hues.

We belong to a noble profession, and this country’s freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear—rest upon the public safety we provide.

The best parts of America’s history would have been impossible without the fair application of law and order.

But as I said during a Black History Month event in Queens a few weeks ago, some of the worst parts of black history would have been impossible without a perverted, oppressive law and order, too.

Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, lynchings, blockbusting…

None of us did these things.

None of us were troopers on the bridge at Selma.

But it doesn’t matter that these things happened before many of us were even born.

What matters is that our history follows us like a second shadow.

We can never underestimate the impact these had…

The hate, and the injustice, and the lost opportunities—for all of us.

But where does this leave us, the police?

Because law and order should never be the tool of oppression, not today.

And while unfairness and inequality persist, we, as police, face a truth that some others would rather deny.

In our most vulnerable communities, the vulnerable are often victimized by their own.

In New York City, where half of our citizens are black and Hispanic, blacks and Hispanics commit 95% of our shootings.

And blacks and Hispanics represent 96% of our shooting VICTIMS.

This disparity exists across all violent crime, although it is not as stark.

But where does this leave us, the police?

We cannot forget what is behind us, nor the legacies still with us—but we cannot ignore the duty laid before us.

As police, that duty is two-fold:

As police, we must prevent crime and disorder.

As police, we must fix what we’ve done and what we continue to do wrong.

It’s ours to set right.

It’s the crisis, it’s the challenge, it’s the opportunity.

The good news in my city is that crime and disorder are lower than ever in modern memory.

That’s the case in America over the last 20 years, and in many of your communities—although not in all.

At the same time, the police profession is changing practices that did more to alienate those we serve than protect them.

Take, for example, stop, question, and frisk.

It’s a critical, necessary tool—but it was being overused.

In 2011, NYPD officers stopped nearly 700,000 people, with a 6% arrest rate.

Last year, we did 46,000 reasonable-suspicion stops, with an arrest rate two-and-a-half times higher.

The bad news is that in the communities where we’re most needed, our presence is still most fragile.

Last year, we conducted a first-of-its-kind, citywide survey.

It proved what we sensed: in the neighborhoods that call us most, where crime still hangs on tightest, where we deploy most often, people are least satisfied.

Whereas 70% of all New Yorkers said the NYPD’s relations with people in neighborhoods were positive, 54% of black men under 40 said neighborhood relations were negative.

Black men are more than twice as likely as other New Yorkers to rate the NYPD’s job performance as poor or very poor.

People who feel unsafe in their neighborhoods are far more likely to be dissatisfied, too—even when that feeling does not necessarily correlate to actual crime rates.

So crime’s down, and people, even in the toughest neighborhoods, are safer than ever.

And police are more restrained than ever, and we’ve dialed back on some of the most publicized practices that strained community relations.

But then came this summer and this fall.

Grand jury decisions in Ferguson and Staten Island sent people into the streets.

And for a while it seemed that all the work we had done—improved collaboration with community groups, new programs that explore alternatives to arrest, enhanced training that emphasizes conflict resolution and safety—it seemed all that would be obscured by protests and anger at the police.

Dissatisfaction was more pronounced than ever.

It took tragedy to quell the greatest excesses of this—the terrible assassination of two officers who were everything we’d want community cops to be.

In the wake of that, people took a moment to SEE each other—to see past their preconceptions.

At two of the largest funerals in our city’s history, thousands of mourning cops let people SEE them, united in grief and the knowledge that it could have been any one of them, yet always willing to put on their belts and their vests and keep their city safe.

And the people let the cops see THEM, as our communities shared the sorrow, and brought food and flowers to their precincts, and acknowledged the profound promise every cop makes when he or she swears the oath.

In my city, I will not squander that.

In this country, we cannot squander that.

Not while other officers go out every day, into harm’s way and the uncertainty of America’s streets.

Officers like Robert Wilson, who sacrificed everything for Philadelphia, who fought until the end, whose wake is today, with our good friend and great colleague Chuck Ramsey in attendance.

The assassinations of my officers, of Detectives Rafael Ramos and Joe Liu, they gave us breathing room—but the crisis of American policing is still out there.

Recent incidents on LA’s skid row, or in Madison, Wisconsin—or right here in Atlanta—prove it.

This crisis is greater than any our profession has faced since the height of the late 20th Century crime wave.

We surmounted that crisis by fundamentally transforming policing.

We undid decades of reactive policies and adopted accountability processes like Jack Maple’s CompStat.

We refocused on old lessons that had been pushed aside like Sir Robert Peel’s nine principles, which reminded us of our purpose: preventing crime and disorder.

We can do it again.

Twenty-five years ago, our public-safety crisis was about safety.

Today, our public-safety crisis is about the PUBLIC half of that equation.

Twenty-five years ago, we gave cops permission to be cops again.

Because crime was out of control, we made controlling crime—and disorder—our priority.

And we started measuring.

We measured commands and commanders and, ultimately, cops.

And we held them accountable.

As a profession we accepted our responsibility for reducing and preventing crime.

It’s true, many of our measures were enforcement-based, because enforcement was needed to prevent crime.

But we didn’t just measure success in arrests and response times.

We learned that we can’t arrest our way out of the crime problem.

The future could not be in handcuffs.

In New York, crime plummeted: 39% overall from 1993 to 1996, with murders falling by half.

Quality of life improved dramatically and disorder was brought under control.

And CompStat was scalable—when we put it into action in L.A., we saw the same results.

Other jurisdictions saw them, too.

But when I left L.A. and moved back to New York as a private citizen, I noticed something: the crime-prevention outcome—the results—was being confused with the enforcement inputs—the means.

When we designed CompStat, “more” was never the point.

“Safer” was the point.

And in New York, we’ve returned the system to its roots.

We care about results, not numbers.

It’s what the numbers represent that matters.

In 1994, what mattered was crime, and we needed numbers that represented crime, that got crime-control results.

In 2015, what matters is citizen satisfaction—and there’s the rub.

We often don’t have numbers that reflect that.

Without citizen-satisfaction numbers, we can’t hold commanders, much less officers, accountable for it.

“You can expect what you inspect,” as the late, great Jack Maple used to say.

But we’ve never been able to inspect the community’s satisfaction with our service.

Until now.

Mobile digital technology can be the accelerator.

These days, the majority of 911 calls are made with a cellphone.

And most complainants give cellphones as contacts.

Imagine a system that sends automatic text messages containing very short citizen-satisfaction surveys to every 911 caller—and every complainant, and domestic-incident reporter, and accident reporter, and every service recipient who provides a cellphone number or email address—within 24 hours.

Such a system will let us start listening—in a way we never have.

Because just as we needed to SEE each other after the sacrifice of Detectives Ramos and Liu, we need to HEAR each other, too.

We’ll be able to HEAR how citizens FEEL—about their neighborhoods, about their police—and we won’t be limited to crime-rate proxies about their sense of safety.

This system will go beyond the one-time, citywide survey we conducted, which was so instructive and provided such an important baseline.

This system will be real time, continual, and pegged not only to commands but to specific officers.

THIS is how we bridge the divide.

We LISTEN to the community.

We absorb the feedback.

And we make every police-citizen interaction an act of collaboration.

We make the community active partners.

And by linking survey results to commands and specific officers, we teach commanders and cops to make citizen satisfaction a priority.

Evaluate a cop according to response time, and he’ll wait to pick up Jobs or put himself on scene before he rolls up.

Evaluate a cop according to enforcement, and she’ll dial back her discretion, and use admonitions more and more sparingly.

The trick is to evaluate multi-dimensionally.

We can measure cops according to enforcement AND citizen satisfaction AND correcting conditions.

Most officers, when we give them expectations, they’ll meet them.

We don’t abandon crime-fighting: it’s the core of what we do.

But we can do more than fight crime: we can provide PUBLIC SAFETY.

This is our chance.

This is the crisis of a generation in our profession.

We can confront the things we need to do better.

It’s ours to set right.

We have the opportunity to try and make our communities safer AND fairer.

And if we get it right—the fairer part, especially, because we already do the safer part very well—that’s a legacy.

But to accomplish this, to create the change, we must embrace it.

To paraphrase the Indian civil rights leader Gandhi, “To create change we must become the change.”

The police profession and us, its leaders, can’t lose this opportunity to continue the journey of change that we have been on.

Now the real work begins.

Let’s not repeat history, let’s make it.

Let’s lead it.

When Chief James Fealy arrived in High Point, N.C., in 2003, he found parts of the city awash in drugs and dealers. But rather than relying on traditional suppression and interdiction approaches to fight the problem, Fealy — who had worked narcotics for more than a quarter of a century in the Austin (Texas) Police Department — spearheaded a new, potentially transformative strategy. Its roots were in the now-familiar “focused deterrence” approach, which addresses particular problems — in this case drug markets — by putting identified offenders on notice that their community wants them to stop, that help is available and that particular criminal actions will bring heightened law enforcement attention. The High Point initiative, however, added the unprecedented — and initially terrifying — element of truth-telling about racial conflict. The result of these conversations in High Point was twofold: a plan for doing strategic interventions to close drug markets and the beginning of a reconciliation process between law enforcement and the community. 

Read more.

Recently, the United States Department of Justice announced a groundbreaking undertaking to take on, squarely and directly, one of the most damaging social problems facing the nation. The National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice is designed to make real and rapid progress on the strained and often broken relationship between many communities -- especially, alienated communities of color -- and law enforcement. It is time, and past time. The National Initiative was not prompted by Ferguson and the seething anger and unrest that has followed on Michael Brown's killing -- as I write this, the governor of Missouri is standing up the National Guard in advance of whatever decision the grand jury may make -- but Ferguson has, in one of those rare national moments, given name and shape to a long-standing, deeply serious, and so far deeply resistant tear in the national fabric.

In the world of crime and violence, and in the American neighborhoods -- especially the poor black neighborhoods -- where crime and violence remain issues of serious, daily concern, there is seeming reason to celebrate. Crime is down: New York City is edging down toward western European levels of violence and is on track for fewer than 300 homicides this year, something nobody could have imagined in 1990, when the count neared 2300. Cities like New Orleans, Oakland, and Chicago -- long poster children for out-of-control violence -- are all moving in the right direction. The virulent urban drug markets that defined the crack epidemic are gone or in decline; new drug problems, like meth and resurgent heroin, are thankfully not bringing with them the same levels of violence and chaos. A new politics of crime may even be emerging, with voices on both right and left finding common ground on the propositions that the nation is locking too many people up -- America has five percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of its prisoners -- at far too much human and financial cost, and for far too little public safety return.

But the neighborhoods -- especially those same poor black neighborhoods -- are not celebrating. For much of the last decade, black male homicide victimization was going up, not down. As the nation's homicide rate comes down toward 4:100,000 each year, young black men in hard-hit neighborhoods are dying at over 500:100,000 annually. Those same neighborhoods have borne the brunt of the incarceration glut: nationally, a young black man who does not finish high school has a nearly 70 percent chance of going to prison. Many of them have also borne the brunt of increasingly intrusive policing, characterized by ever-higher levels of stop and frisk and other aggressive tactics. Whatever the intent of this policing, many in the neighborhoods experience it as hostile and deeply offensive. "I think the police don't like black people," one young black man told Rutgers ethnographer Rod Brunson. "You know like all the crooked cops always be in the ghettos, where all the black people at and they try to get as many black people off the street as they can." In many of these neighborhoods, there is a simmering anger that leads to "stop snitching," and a conviction -- deeply rooted America's vile history of slavery, the black codes, "separate but equal," and all the rest, and captured in Michelle Alexander's breakthrough bestseller The New Jim Crow -- that the current American criminal justice system represents a malicious, deliberate attack on African-Americans by a conspiratorial government. And there are, most awfully and most starkly, the unarmed young men shot by the police. It is difficult for those not immersed in these issues to realize the depth of the anger and alienation felt by many in these communities; one said to me not long ago, "Why should we work with the police when they kill us any time they want, and nothing ever happens?" As I make my way across these neighborhoods nationally, and work with their citizens and those who police them, there is one thing I hear in every single place: we could be Ferguson, today, this afternoon, tomorrow.

The usual explanation for all this is simple: racism. Most of our attempts to deal with it have presumed that to eradicate it we must eradicate racism. That hasn't gotten us very far. In fact, as new ways of thinking and acting have emerged, it begins to seem possible that branding the problem as racism is in some large part why we haven't gotten very far. While nobody with any sense would deny the reality of racism, it is increasingly clear that people and institutions can act in ways that look, smell, and taste like racism; play into narratives and understandings framed by racism; and produce results that might just as well have been produced by racism: all without actually being racist. And since that's true, there may be easier and more direct ways to get at that behavior and those outcomes. The DOJ National Initiative is designed to build on and expand three of the most well-grounded and promising of these new understandings.

Procedural justice is the idea that what matters most to people in their encounters with the criminal justice system and its agents is not simply whether they act legally but, in a nutshell, whether they act respectfully, and how those encounters feel on the receiving end. The officer who stops you and pats you down may have the legal grounding to do so: but if he swears at you while doing it, doesn't bother to explain that he's looking for the guns that are wreaking such havoc in the neighborhood, and plays into your conviction that "the police don't like black people," then you're going to leave more alienated than you arrived. High levels of procedural justice are linked with what scholars call "legitimacy" -- the perception in the eyes of the public that the authorities are acting fairly and with good intentions. As legitimacy goes up, compliance with the law goes up; as it goes down, compliance goes down, and crime goes up. In the most stressed neighborhoods, low levels of legitimacy are clearly linked to high levels of violence. We're used to saying that such neighborhoods are dangerous and that they don't trust the police, but it's increasingly clear that we should be saying that they're dangerous in part because they don't trust the police: people take care of problems themselves when they should be calling 911. And procedural justice can be taught: in police academies, in in-service workshops, to judges and prosecutors. Immediate behavioral changes, with real impact, can result. One Chicago Police Department course, developed with the support of Yale professors and National Initiative partners Tom Tyler and Tracey Meares, asks seasoned officers what already angry residents see when they look across the yellow tape at homicide scenes. "They see us laughing," the suddenly chastened officers say. That's what first responders -- police officers, firefighters, EMTs, ER docs -- do on the front lines; it's a way of dealing with the horror and trauma the job brings. But in the crucible that is police work in alienated neighborhoods, the message is clear: stop laughing.

Implicit bias is the psychological phenomenon that results from the mental shortcuts and associations life tattoos into all of our psyches. Spend a good part of your day dealing with angry young black men, go home and watch TV shows that feature angry young black men, and spend your working life with fellow officers who think all the young black men in the neighborhood are angry: and on the day that you face a young black man on the street and it's the terrible, irretrievable shoot/don't shoot moment, odds are you'll react differently than if you hadn't done those things. But implicit biases can be revealed through testing and simulations; once identified can be countered through education, training, and other simulations; and the unbalanced behavior they foster can be brought back into balance. UCLA professor and National Initiative principal Phillip Atiba Goff, through his Center for Policing Equity, has made a mission of bringing the idea and treatment of implicit bias into the mainstream of policing. He has lined up scores of police departments nationally that have embraced the idea that they are inevitably driven by implicit bias and are determined to figure out how to undo it. He's working both through training, as in shooting situations, and on policy: for example, that one protection against tragic mistakes is that whoever is most energized and thus vulnerable to bias-driven errors, such as the person leading a pursuit, should not be the person making any use-of-force decisions. And he's making fascinating -- and actionable -- discoveries, such as that a tendency toward bad shootings seems to be driven a lot less by racism than by a vulnerability to perceived threats to officers' manhood.

Finally, reconciliation is a recognition that however toxic today's relationships may be, and however vile and irrational the other side's behavior may seem, there is almost always some real kernel of reason and rationality behind it. Police may be inexpressibly offended when communities call them racist, but the fact is that for hundreds of years black Americans were policed under a legal system that was formally, frankly racist, and since then frequently haven't been treated all that well. Communities may be inexpressibly offended when police treat them as if they're complicit in crime and violence, but when "stop snitching" norms dominate and nobody will out the killer everybody knows, it's understandable that police should view that as tolerance rather than as anger and fear. It can be very powerful to foster a process in which each side can say to the other, we have made mistakes and we are part of what has gone wrong, but we reject that now and would like to go forward together. Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy is modeling it for his peers nationally. "I understand the historical divide between police and communities of color -- it's rooted in the history of this country," he says.

The most visible arm of government is a police force, and the institutionalized governmental programs that promoted racist policies that were enforced by police departments in this country are part of the African-American history in this country. And we have to recognize it because recognition is the first step towards finding a cure towards what is ailing us.

My work in community violence and drug market prevention has modeled this process on the neighborhood level, and has found a remarkable willingness on the part of both authorities and communities to face past facts, admit error, commit to working together in a different way going forward, and then make real progress. Figuring out how to take that work to scale -- across neighborhoods, across a city, across cities -- is the next challenge.

The DOJ's National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice is designed to catalyze exactly that kind of potentially transformative development. It will gather existing wisdom and interventions in procedural justice, implicit bias, and reconciliation; drive the development of new practice; focus applied work in five yet-to-be-named cities across the country; evaluate impact; and make the underlying ideas and interventions available publicly and to anybody who wants them. The focus will be on a range of constituencies that need and deserve better relationships with law enforcement, including Latino communities; victims of crime, including domestic violence and sexual assault; youth; and the LGBQTI community. The express hope is that these concepts can drive real, tangible progress. We believe they can. That is partly because of the power of these ideas, which we have seen play out in practice. But it is also because, in our work across the nation, we see readiness: on the part of both law enforcement and communities. Both sides know something has to change. Both are tired -- not just of crime and violence, but of being stuck in old, tired, fractious relationships. There is a will to do better, and now there may be a way.

David M. Kennedy is a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the director of the National Network for Safe Communities (www.nnscommunities.org). He will direct, in partnership with the Department of Justice and colleagues at UCLA, Yale, and the Urban Institute, the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice. His most recent book is Don't Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America. The views expressed here are his own.