Peace & Police

Lowering the barriers between the community and the police

March 22, 2020 by Lisa Broderick Leave a Comment

Police2Peace was started as an idea: what if we could help departments develop community engagement and lower the barriers between police and the community? Police2Peace - Protecting The Peace In Our Communities.

Police2Peace was started two years ago as an idea: what if we could help departments develop community engagement by lowering the barriers between police and the community? Now, in 2019, we have done just that with multiple departments around the country. Beginning with the Redlands police in 2017 and the Richland county sheriff, we have expanded our departments to include many more police departments, as well as developing community outreach. And what we’ve done with these departments is to develop what we call a “metrics” driven program, meaning that we actually produce research results with every department we work with.

Discovering Police2Peace

February 28, 2020 by Lisa Broderick

In this interview, host Don Hutchison asks me about my work. And what I am most excited by the work I am doing as executive director of Police2Peace, a national nonpartisan charity I founded about 2 years ago, Police2Peace offers low-tech, high impact ways to help community engagement and lower barriers between police and the community. We first started doing this through the PEACE OFFICER identity program, where we visibly put decals with the words PEACE OFFICER on police vehicles. More recently, we have begun offering programs for police departments and communities to help change minds and open hearts to how we can all live in peace.

When Peace Officer is in the Name, the Dynamic Changes

December 27, 2019 by Lisa Broderick

Reconsider Podcast: What’s In a Name? Would a Cop By Any Other Not Protect as Well? Police2Peace - Protecting The Peace In Our Communities.

In this podcast, I spoke with hosts Xander and Erik to try to unpack the tensions surrounding police and our communities. First, just because it’s a really big issue doesn’t mean that nothing can be done about it. But the complexities of the issue extend not just to what we see in the media, but to entire communities who feel underserved. They’re unhappy with the way they’re being policed. They feel that every time there’s an incident involving the police, the community, the city, or the police department only react afterward. They were hoping that body cams would work, but sometimes that equipment isn’t working. People are hoping to be believed that they are being heard in their expression of ill-ease with how they’re being policed.

Pushing Boundaries: Portland, Oregon’s Red Door Project

November 23, 2019 by Lisa Broderick

In May of this year, an innovative experiment took place at Portland, Oregon’s August Wilson Red Door Theater. Producers Kevin Jones and Lesli Mones, set out to change the racial ecology of Portland through the arts by putting on two plays back to back, one from the perspective of people of color, and the other from the perspective of the police. The play due called “Cop Out” and “Hands Up” was a way for them to forge a path of accountability and healing for people of color and the police. Originally only planning to produce five or six shows, the performances were so popular that they had to extend that and even turn some people away.