The Center for Policing Equity is expanding beyond its wealth of on-the-ground technical assistance offerings to launch a robust learning environment for stakeholders engaged in redesigning public safety to be more just, equitable, and community-centered.

NEW YORK, Sept. 22, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Today, in direct response to feedback from its community partners, the Center for Policing Equity (CPE) launched the first of its offerings in a new learning environment designed to support stakeholders seeking to build more equitable public safety systems. These interactive resources will complement CPE’s existing, locality-specific tools, bringing a holistic approach to redesigning these systems to better serve everyone.

The white papers in the Redesigning Public Safety Resource Series will provide in-depth insight and analysis regarding Traffic Safety, Mental Health Emergencies, K-12 School Safety, and Substance Use; the first of these, “Redesigning Public Safety: Traffic Safety,” is now available. The publication of each white paper will be followed by a webinar structured to facilitate constructive discussion and support community-based actions geared toward transformative change.

“In the last 14 years, CPE has collaborated with communities and law enforcement agencies in some 60 localities to reduce racially disparate policing outcomes and increase equity in their public safety systems,” said Max Markham, CPE Vice President, Policy & Community Engagement. “We are excited to announce a new set of tools focused on direct community engagement work that will provide stakeholders with a comprehensive overview of approaches, measures, and methods that are most effective in doing this work.”

As with all of CPE’s work, this programmatic expansion was designed to uplift the efforts of vulnerable communities, particularly Black and Brown communities, in confronting racial disparities in policing. The Traffic Safety white paper and its companion webinar will examine various approaches to making roads safer and outline how widely-used enforcement methods provide an insufficient response to the crisis of rising traffic fatalities and actively endanger drivers subjected to racial profiling.

Black and Brown stakeholders, in particular, are well aware of the gross disparities in current traffic regulation enforcement. Many localities have identified the issue as key to improving equity in policing outcomes and are working toward a broader vision of what constitutes road safety, including limiting pretextual stops; eliminating some forms of financial enforcement that effectively use debt as punishment; establishing alternatives to armed enforcement; and exploring “traffic calming” engineering to build more user-friendly roadways.

The Traffic Safety white paper and a companion brief are available at: policingequity.org/traffic-safety.

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The Center for Policing Equity‘s (CPE’s) North Star is protecting, empowering, and supporting vulnerable communities—particularly Black and Brown communities—to redesign their public safety systems. CPE provides leaders with data, stories, and relationships to facilitate change that’s bold, innovative, and lasting. We do science to promote justice.

Our work is founded on the understanding that racism is not simply an expression of individually defective hearts and minds, but is best understood as behaviors that can be observed, measured, and monitored. CPE gathers and analyzes data on such behaviors within public safety systems and uses those data to help communities achieve safer policing outcomes for their public servants, their institutions, and themselves.

Making policing less racist, deadly, and omnipresent may mean: equipping community leaders with data tools to demand better policing; uplifting the work of longtime community organizers; or identifying those public safety tasks for which police are not trained and helping communities reimagine how to meet those challenges.

This work is also the basis of CPE’s National Justice Database, the largest collection of police behavioral data in the world. Yale-affiliated and funded by the National Science Foundation; this database allows CPE to provide others with a clearer picture of the approaches, measures, and methods that work best in redesigning public safety to better keep vulnerable communities safe.

Founded in 2008, CPE is a 501c3 non-profit.

SOURCE Center for Policing Equity