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.
What these results are showing is that the application of the PEACE OFFICER decals is changing the way communities and police departments see each other by shifting how officers are aware of themselves, and how the public sees them. This is proving to be demonstrable. In initial pilots, research indicates that the way officers and citizens viewed one another changed and that communities felt police encounters were better and more productive. So now that we are proving that we can positively impact the encounters that happen between police officers and the citizens in their communities, we are discovering that a huge amount of research already exists which suggests that introducing PEACE OFFICER into a community’s law enforcement identity is something that will work.
We have studied other research including Priming, Language-Augmented Cognition, Social Tuning, Procedural Justice, and Cognitive Resilience Training. All of these are established social science research areas the have studied what we just found out for ourselves—that we can use low-tech, high impact methods to reinforce positive values and lower the barriers between the community and the police.
Check out the research on how Police2Peace ® programs have created demonstrably positive changes in the way communities and police departments engage with one another.
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