The National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice: Key Process and Outcome Evaluation Findings

This brief highlights key evaluation findings from the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, a six-city effort to promote more equitable, just, and respectful policing practices and improve relationships and trust between law enforcement and community members. The Initiative consisted of officer training, departmental policy changes, and a reconciliation process designed to repair police-community relationships by addressing the deep historical roots of distrust in the police among people of color and other marginalized populations. Findings show promise for the National Initiative model, suggesting that it was moderately successful in achieving its intended goals of training officers to be more equitable and respectful of community members and improving police practices and police-community relations. The full evaluation findings are presented in three additional publications: a brief describing changes in community sentiment in each site, a report on the content and implementation of activities for each jurisdiction, and an impact report examining the degree to which Initiative activities were associated with changes in crime rates, departmental practices, and police-community interactions. This brief was revised November 11, 2019, to correct an error in the statistical code used to create the concept scales. This error underestimated scale values for respondents who did not answer all survey questions for a concept, such as perceptions of police legitimacy. It was especially problematic when a respondent did not answer any questions for a concept: the summated value and the scale value were zero, which is outside the possible range of response options. To correct this problem, we have recalculated all the scales. We created a scale for a respondent only when they answered more than half the items about that concept. Then, we used the average of the valid responses rather than the average of the summated responses. These steps better ensure the scale for each respondent is measuring the intended concept. These changes altered several values in table 3 (“Scale Differences by Wave,” page 9) . One value changed significance: the decrease in the personal victimization experience scale is not significant. In a previous version, it was reported as p < 0.01.