Police2Peace ® is a solutions-driven organization providing police agencies with alternatives to the ways they deliver public safety, while helping communities reimagine how they would like policing to be. By drawing from what it means to be a PEACE OFFICER, departments and communities have an alternative they can use for better engagement, creating new channels of communication, building public trust and co-producing public safety.
“We wanted our community to realize that we were more than just law enforcement—we were peace officers.”
Sheriff Leon Lott
Our national non-profit was formed with the idea that there could be a trusted bridge between police departments and their communities. What does that look like? It’s where departments and community members are getting along, officers and citizens are treating one another with respect, departments are co-producing public safety with the community and are working to reduce use of force.
To operationalize this on a national level, we work with cities and departments around the country to deliver programs for the purposes of cultural change, procedural change, operational change, and departmental alignment. All of these changes are rooted in the ethos of PEACE OFFICER as the big, overarching, next generation idea for policing. Click here for a list of these programs.
We begin by giving each department and community the opportunity for self-review of how citizens view the department and its officers, how the officers view the citizens, and how the officers view themselves and their department. Request a self-review.
In departments and communities around the country, research indicates that the way officers and citizens view themselves and one another can change over time and with certain interventions, for example resulting in a shift in officers’ views of their jobs. In studies, before the PEACE OFFICER wording is introduced, officers report seeing themselves and being seen as tamping down problems that develop; after the introduction of the wording they report seeing their roles as creating peace in the community. Community members report similar shifts in their views of officers as peacekeepers, lowering fear, generating more trust, and greater willingness to reach out to officers when there is an issue.
The programs draw on established social science work including Priming, Language-Augmented Cognition, Social Tuning, Procedural Justice, and Cognitive Resilience Training. Each of these techniques contributes to changing hearts and minds through fostering compassion and building greater public trust.
Benefits to Departments and Communities
The benefits to departments and communities are far-reaching for both officers and community members. For departments, the Police2Peace ® programs can make officers’ jobs easier, improve officer wellness, ease recruitment, reduce stress, and create more satisfaction. For communities, the programs stimulate collaboration between the police and citizens. The department, city, state, and federal government incur no expense whatsoever for the programs, research and the release of the resulting studies.
Proven Results for a Change
With growing media coverage of police-citizen encounters, departments and communities around the country feel they need an alternative to the way policing is being delivered. The PEACE OFFICER solution transforms perceived problems into a collaborative effort for greater peace and security. Greater collaboration between citizens and officers lowers mistrust and creates more willingness for citizens to reach out to officers when there is an issue. This has the result of changing the mindset of officers and citizens from “us versus them” to one of collaboration and lasting change for both the department and the community.
Police2Peace ® Research Study: Richland County, South Carolina | Click To Download
Police2Peace ® is a non-profit corporation granted public charity status by the IRS. All donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.
