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 a community policing 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 an alternative to policing which both police agencies and citizens would embrace. 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 police leaders 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 policy and programs for the purposes of cultural change, procedural change, operational change, and departmental alignment. All of these changes are rooted in 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 scientific approach contributes to normalizing what both police agencies and citizens want, which are safe, peaceful communities for themselves and their families.
A New Community Policing Framework
PEACE OFFICER is the next generation of community policing. Historically, community policing in the US can be traced back as far as the nineteenth century. Research released in the 1980s began a new wave of adoption, and it has since been sporadically implemented around the country. Police2Peace is reinvigorating the community policing movement by re-positioning policing as PEACE OFFICER. Our goal is national coherence around policing rooted in community engagement, transparency, accountability and reducing use of force.
Adopting the term PEACE OFFICER is the one thing that any department can do to organically stimulate change in every functional area, including recruiting, hiring, culture, training and reward systems. By diffusing the PEACE OFFICER initiative widely around the country through adoption by departments and communities, we can begin to shift police culture toward this new framework of community policing.
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 initiative provides for officers to do their jobs and for the community to get the policing they want. While some call to defund the police, we believe there is an alternative in which redefining, reimagining and advancing policing to include addressing funding of police agencies for better realignment with community needs can bring about the same result–one which citizens are seeking and one which police agencies can embrace.
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.
