“As a community, we create a lot of space for fighting and pushing back, but not enough for connecting and healing.”
— Tarana Burke
Listen and Learn…
Who do I need to become to create a world where all can belong?
Join hosts and TrustLab founders Vince Jones-Dixon and Matt McNair, along with author Reverend Ben McBride, as they search for the answer using his book, “Trouble in the Water” as a lens.
Partners and Articles
Braver Angels
Americans on opposite sides of the political spectrum don’t only disagree on issues — they increasingly dislike one another. This growing partisan animosity is the crisis of our time and threatens our nation. Braver Angels exists to address this challenge.
Trauma-Informed Policing and Building Trust
At the heart of any healthy and productive relationship is trust. People instinctively understand this fact because humans are built and long for relationships. However, if their formative years were characterized by physical, emotional, or traumatic abuse, they can be robbed of the ability to trust others both at home and in the workplace.
The Public Wants Reform
New Polling Finds Extraordinary Bipartisan Support for Policing Reforms. Amid competing conventions, Democratic and Republican voters remain united behind calls for specific and structural changes to the criminal justice system.
A field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy
Despite decades of declining crime rates, longstanding tensions between police and the public continue to frustrate the formation of cooperative relationships necessary for the function of the police and the provision of public safety.
What Works in Policing?
Community policing is perhaps the best known and certainly the most widely adopted police innovation of the past three decades. Indeed, recent research suggests that close to 100 percent of larger agencies claim to have adopted community policing.
Highlights: Improving police culture in America
In the wake of many high-profile, officer-involved shootings—particularly involving Black Americans—civilians, the media, and politicians have become increasingly critical of American policing. While new policies and technologies have been aimed at addressing public concern, there remains a lot of work to be done to improve the experiences of police officers and police culture.
Police-Community Relationships
Police officials rely on the cooperation of community members to provide information about crime in their neighborhoods, and to work with the police to devise solutions to crime and disorder problems. Similarly community members’ willingness to trust the police depends on whether they believe that police actions reflect community values and incorporate the principles of procedural justice and legitimacy.
What Happens When We Don't Trust Law Enforcement?
Trust in law enforcement is essential for the belief in the legitimacy of law enforcement, or feeling an obligation to obey the law and defer to decisions made by legal authorities.
Talking About Issues Reduces Polarization
America in One Room (A1R) was a historic gathering of 500 American voters who participated in a nonpartisan discussion about major issues in the 2020 presidential election. The participants—our citizen-delegates—were carefully selected to form an accurate, representative sample of the entire American electorate in all its political, cultural, and demographic diversity.
Community-oriented policing improves attitudes toward police
A study of community policing in New Haven has found that positive, non-punitive contact with the public markedly improves attitudes and trust towards police.
Legitimacy Policing
Legitimacy policing describes a broad set of strategies that are focused on improving the “respect-worthiness” of the police. Legitimacy policing includes interventions conducted to improve community relations and perceptions of legitimacy, as well as help ensure that police are perceived as trustworthy and unbiased (or neutral) decisionmakers.
You can’t legislate culture — here’s how to really implement change
Across the country, state and local governments are currently debating the condition of policing and, in some cases, seriously considering police reform efforts aimed at increasing transparency and reducing incidents of policing misconduct.