Policing With Our Community© is our foundation workshop. This is the very same workshop that we conduct with citizens. We find that officers and deputies are familiar with the 21st Century Policing Report but have not read or studied it. We poll participants with the same questions that we ask citizens and are never surprised at their similarities.
In the engagement process, we try to hold a PWOC Workshop for the command staff with a few municipal and community leaders. This is largely to have them understand our process and provide an overview of the subject matter that we will discuss. Ultimately, they will assist the strategic planning and decision process and ensure accountability for program accomplishments.
If the department agrees, we like to conduct two workshops with sworn members from the same sector, district, or precinct. We then conduct two workshops with community members from the same sector, district, or precinct. All participants are asked to read the Executive Summary of the President’s Task Force Report on 21st Century Policing.
From these workshops, we invite fifteen department members and fifteen community members to a Community Speak workshop where we set the stage for a collaborative strategic process to “operationalize” their vision of community engagement. Participants use The President’s Task Force Report, Implementation Guide.
For departments seeking community engagement training outside of the engagement process, we offer a set of training workshops just for department members. The first four-hour workshop is the PWOC workshop that we use in the engagement process.
We outline the difference between community policing and community engagement through our standard interactive format of polling participants, conducting group activities based on their collective choices and discussing the results of their group exercises.
Our law enforcement workshops are designed for three workgroups:
These groupings are flexible and designated differently based on department size and job responsibilities.
We meet our participants where they are and ask them to reflect on their specific roles and responsibilities in the adoption of an operationalized community engagement strategy for their department.
All participants are asked to pre-read the Executive Summary of the President’s Task Force Report on 21st Century Policing.The primary topics are chosen by the participants during our opening polling session from the “pillars” outlined in the Task Force Report.
In groups, our participants define the pillars in local terms and answer the question, “What does this pillar mean to you?”
The second four-hour workshop is centered on The President’s Task Force Report, Implementation Guide. Participants, in groups, create lists of activities department members, in their respective ranks, should be performing and documenting.
For officers and field supervisors, we make them part of the strategic planning process and ask them about the ways in which their patrol resources might be more effective and efficient. We talk to them about ways in which we might “off-load” tasks which might be performed in other ways based on their recommendations.
We also ask them to focus on their repeat calls for service and ways in which some resolution might be introduced that would reduce or eliminate the need for the police.
In community policing efforts, most agencies assigned community-based tasks to specialized units assigned to headquarters, completely bypassing the officers who actually worked in the neighborhoods and communities, where these relationships community and the police are most important. Meanwhile, the patrol officers were relegated to responding to an endless stream of radio calls that could be handled in some different fashion. We also believe it’s important for patrol personnel to be familiar with community, neighborhood and social service resources that can help families in crisis.
Following our standard PWOC four-hour workshop, the Supervisor/Manager Workshop is focused on the monitoring and evaluation of community engagement field activities they suggest be adopted by the department. In addition to a look at the Task Force Implementation Guide, we introduce field commanders to the concept of Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention. Our conversation is supported by quick-read documents from our “Workshop Reading Resources” found on the Contact Page of our website. We match specific source documents for this workshop based on our participants’ responses in the polling session.
The strategies for crime reduction and intervention have been developed out of our improved crime and intelligence analysis methodologies and the adoption of science and evidence-based policing strategies. Unfortunately, a significant amount of this learning has be provided to investigative and career criminal personnel. Much of this grounding should be shared with neighborhood and community officers and supervisors.
Patrol supervisors and managers are in a position to assist these processes by devising and assigning directed patrol activities that support these efforts when adopted by the department.
These patrol bosses also have a responsibility to establish and support meaningful review and documentation of the results of directed patrol activities, ensuring results are fed back to the crime analysis function and exemplary performance is documented and rewarded.
In the community engagement effort, patrol supervision has to do more than merely monitoring the number of calls for service and signing reports.
The Manager/Command Staff PWOC Workshop begins with the same four-hour review we conduct for all other groups. We find more familiarity among participants with the source material than all other groups, so we assign their groups with different and more far-reaching tasks. We ask them to focus on the key performance indicators that might be used to measure individual, unit, and department effectiveness in the “pillars” they examine. We usually have to give them a little more time to tackle these issues. To help them focus their work, we suggest several “pre-reads.” The first is Building Communities of Trust.
The second workshop is equally challenging. The adoption of a CVIPI model of policing is likely to require some alteration in the department structure. There will be new responsibilities for patrol officers when the non-emergency call for service workload is modified to divert calls. The supervision and management of more directed patrols is already changing the landscape. Our pre-read is The CVIPI Checklist.
The community and department views of accountability and transparency will dictate new responsibilities for field commanders and a focus on the districts and sectors they service in new collaborative ways. These changes will also affect specialized units that have historically worked “city-wide.” We already see significant changes in the Professional Standards function that we must align with our Risk Management agenda. Our last pre-reads are: Place Network Investigations (PNI) Summary and Operation Ceasefire and the Safe Community Partnership.
We were told in the 1970’s “Any minor change and improvement in the patrol function will have more far-reaching effect than any significant change made in a specialized unit.” *
*Prescriptive Package, Improving Patrol Productivity Volume I, Routine Patrol, LEAA, 1977.
