The oakland police department (OPD) proposes to implement the procedural justice/community police trust project

The City of Oakland, California, through its Police Department (OPD), has been awarded a $646,000 Project Grant by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) to implement the Procedural Justice/Community Police Trust Project. The 2-year grant, effective from September 1, 2023 to August 31, 2025, will support OPD's efforts to enhance police-community relations and trust through a series of reconciliation workshops.

The project aims to repair historical tensions and foster trust between OPD and marginalized communities by facilitating candid dialogues about racial biases and harms. Key activities will include establishing trust-building partnerships, conducting community listening sessions, and developing sustainable policies and practices to reduce violence and improve public safety outcomes. The grant funding will enable OPD to expand its existing Procedural Justice training curriculum and implement the new Reconciliation component, which focuses on acknowledging harm, facilitating dialogue, and strengthening police-community collaboration.

As part of its violence reduction strategy, ceasefire oakland, OPD implemented a series of procedural justice (PJ) trainings over the last 8 years designed to improve police officer behavior, public safety, and community police trust. PJ I - introduction to procedural justice and police legitimacy, focused on how interactions between police officers and members of the public impact community members views of the police and their willingness to comply with the law and partner on crime prevention practices. PJ II - implicit bias, focused on how unconscious biases may shape opds interactions with members of the public and result in racially disparate outcomes even when those interactions are not overtly racist. OPD wants to develop PJ III - reconciliation, that focuses on how candid conversations about law enforcements complicity in historic and present-day racial tensions and harms can repair relationships and foster trust between OPD and the communities IT serves. The purpose is to design a community/OPD workshop that begins to repair and strengthen police-community relationships by addressing the deep historical roots of distrust in the police among people of color and other marginalized populations. Project activities will consist of lead facilitators from the community and police who shall work with the ceasefire partnership to create trust building workshops as outlined in the national initiative for building community-police trust. The facilitators will execute the principles of reconciliation including fact-finding, which will inform the reconciliation process, acknowledgement of harm, sustained listening: reconciliation listening sessions, and narrative collection and dissemination. These improved relationships should manifest into more positive police-community interactions that lead to a reduction in crime. The project is expected to improve interactions between police and the public. The goal is to start to change thecommunities views of police, increase their willingness to comply with the law and partner on crime prevention practices, crime rates and improve community/public safety in oakland.each focused listening session is designed to establish trust between law enforcement and communities to enable them to work together to consider policies, practices, and normsboth within law enforcement and within communitiesto reduce violence and harm and improve public safety outcomes.