Law enforcement leaders
Traffic stops, while not always improving driver and pedestrian safety, must be reduced to decrease the criminalization of community members and racial and economic disparities. Alternative traffic-safety strategies focusing on high-risk behaviors, including automated tools and civilian-led traffic-safety enforcement. Alternative strategies should be rigorously evaluated to determine their effectiveness in reducing disparate impact and negative police-community…
MORE ▸Wherever possible, agencies should voluntarily send data to federal data collection systems designed to better inform law enforcement agencies and communities and offer critical, comprehensive, and data-driven evidence to improve the effectiveness and transparency of policing activities. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) collects voluntarily reported data on officer use of force and…
MORE ▸Every law enforcement agency should issue an annual report and include data on key activities, traffic and pedestrian stops and arrests, and document any impact and outcomes, including disparate impacts to the community. The report should describe actions taken to address disparities and be included with all funding requests.
MORE ▸To maximize the understanding of regional, state, and national public safety as well as policing trends, data must be in a consistent format. Funding partners and researchers to make data consistent and unifying and merging data sets to allow comparison with other data sources will help maximize the value of policing data.
MORE ▸To increase transparency, a comprehensive plan should be developed for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating data, at the incident level, on traffic stops, pedestrian stops, crime incidents, arrests, use of force events, and community complaints. The plan, with input from the community, should include: Performance measures: Agency-wide and unit-specific performance measures that consider input from the…
MORE ▸Additional research is needed to develop strategies that mitigate the potential negative impacts of school-based law enforcement officers on academic achievement, discipline, violence prevention, crime reduction, and police-youth relations. Placement of officers in schools below the high school level should be based on evidence of criminal threats involving the school and should be reviewed annually…
MORE ▸The role of school-based officers should be clearly defined and limited to addressing serious crimes and threats involving students or the school itself. Officer involvement in non-criminal or public safety emergency matters on school grounds should be avoided, as they are best handled outside of the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
MORE ▸Strategies, policies, and stop activity data should be reported to the community. Community input should be solicited and, where appropriate, incorporated into policies and procedures regarding the use of pedestrian stops as a public safety strategy.
MORE ▸Strategies to monitor the racial and ethnic impact of pedestrian stops must be developed and implemented to prevent disparate outcomes. The behavior and actions of officers during pedestrian stops should be routinely observed and audited, and officers should periodically review body-worn camera footage and the bases and outcomes of the stops to ensure that their…
MORE ▸Goals, policies, and strategies for pedestrian stops must be established with community input, clearly articulated, and tied to larger goals that place the highest value on police-community relations and respect for individuals.
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