Police-Community Relations in Cincinnati

Abstract

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit research organization providing objective analysis and effective solutions that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors around the world. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. R ® is a registered trademark. © Copyright 2005 City of CincinnatiAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the City of Cincinnati. The research described in this report was conducted within RAND Infrastructure, Safety, and Environment (ISE), a division of the RAND Corporation, for the City of Cincinnati.iii PrefaceIn 2002, the Cincinnati Police Department entered into a collaborative agreement with other parties in Cincinnati. The collaborative agreement binds the signatories (referred to as "the parties") to a series of reforms and initiatives intended to reduce social strife in the city. This report is the result of a section in the decree that pledges the parties to evaluate whether the agreement is achieving its goals. The RAND Corporation will conduct this evaluation over a five-year period, from June 2004 to the latter part of 2008. This is the first annual report required under the collaborative evaluation. This study will interest Cincinnati residents and public officials. This report may also prove useful to residents and officials in other jurisdictions where similar reform efforts are underway. The City of Cincinnati funded this project on behalf of the parties to the collaborative agreement. Recent RAND works that may be of interest to readers of this report include the following:• Oakland, California (Ridgeway and Riley, 2004). The RAND Safety and Justice ProgramThis research was conducted under the auspices of the Safety and Justice Program within RAND's Infrastructure, Safety, and Environment Division. The mission of Infrastructure, Safety, and Environment is to improve the development, operation, use, and protection of society's essential man-made and natural assets and to enhance the related social assets of safety and security of individuals in transit and in their workplaces and community. Safety and Justice Program research addresses occupational safety, transportation safety, food safety, and public safety-including violence, policing, corrections, substance abuse, and public integrity.Questions or comments about this report should be sent to the project leader, Jack Riley (Jack_Riley@rand.org). Information about the Safety and Justice Program is available online (www.rand.org/ise/safety). Inquiries about research projects should be made to Andrew Morral, Director (Andrew_Morral@rand.org). Summary IntroductionIn 2002, the Cincinnati Police Department (CPD), the Fraternal Order of Police, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) entered into a collaborative agreement. This agreement pledges the signatories to ...

Police-Community Relations in Cincinnati

“…These results are largely consistent with the findings in our earlier reports (Riley et al, 2005;Ridgeway et al, 2006;Schell et al, 2007). As noted in earlier reports, these findings cannot answer whether racial bias does or does not exist, but they do help explain why black Cincinnati residents perceive that it does, which may lead to a more negative attitude in future interactions with the police.…”

“…The finalized set of measures and coding instructions, a codebook, was developed after a review of the study goals, an intensive review of the scientific literature, and an empirical examination of the content that could be discerned from the recordings. A fuller discussion of the development of these instruments is contained in the year 1 report (Riley et al, 2005). The actual content and quality of the recordings presented real limitations on what measures could be reliably extracted from these interactions.…”

“…Regardless of whether the stop was in the day or night, ended in a warning or an arrest, or was by a man or a woman, the quality of each person's communication tended to rise or sink to the level of the other. See Riley et al (2005) for more detail on the predictors of communication quality.…”

Police-Community Relations in Cincinnati: Year Two Evaluation Report

“…The year-one 1 report (Riley et al, 2005) reported on all of the tasks under the contract's initial year. Those tasks were to analyze Cincinnati crime and staff deployment patterns to survey the community on its satisfaction with police services to analyze motorist stop data to analyze audio and video records from motorist stops to assess CPD staffing patterns to assess CPD problem-solving processes to survey citizens who have interacted with the police to survey officers and citizens involved in complaints to survey officers to obtain their opinions about their work and the community.…”

Revisiting the potential of community empowerment within UK neighbourhood policing meetings

“…It has also been suggested that where these types of multi-agency partnerships utilise community panels, there may be problems linked to the selection of voluntary community members as well as the capacity of these members to mobilise, represent and report back to their constituencies (Barnes 2008). Riley et al (2005) found that while practices and the ability to gain influence varied, formal panels where voluntary and community representatives were trained in problem-oriented policing (POP) technologies had the most likelihood of gaining community influence.…”