Followers of The Lab @ DC may be familiar with one of our first projects, which was a collaboration with DC’s Metropolitan Police Department — MPD for short — to evaluate the impact of wearing a body-worn camera on many outcomes. Among those were our best existing measures of police-community relations — namely, complaints of police misconduct and the rate at which officers use physical force in interacting with a community member. In case you forgot, here's a reminder of the results: we found across those outcomes and others almost no measurable effect of using a body-worn camera in DC. Now, MPD still uses Body Worn Cameras, but we as a District think of them more as a vital source of public record for high profile events, and less as a tool to improve police-community relations as a result of that evaluation.
So, if we still believe there is room for improvement police-community relations in DC, the logical question is what’s next? To MPD’s credit, they've tried something new, and importantly, they chose to evaluate it in the most rigorous possible way. Here's a little bit about this new project:
We know that police officers and residents often have different expectations about policing, and they inform how they interact with one another. Acknowledging this difference and its role in shaping overall police-community relations, MPD sought to equip officers with detailed knowledge of the community. So, working with history professors from the University of the District of Columbia, MPD developed a new training program to be delivered to all personnel. The training includes rigorous classroom instruction on the history of the District as well as a tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
This special live episode of the Podcast @ DC was recorded in the spring of 2019. You will hear a panel discussion from the team that assembled this new program, including the professors from UDC, MPD’s training team, officers who participated in the program, and Lab fellow Anita Ravishankar who all worked together to ensure that the training was effective. You'll also hear from members of the community who want to know how this training might improve their lives as DC residents.
Panel moderator:
Heather Foster
Panelists:
Mr. Marvin (Ben) Haiman
Commander Ralph Ennis
Dr. Sharita Thompson
Dr. Bernard Demczuk
Officer Melvin Evans
Sergeant Ilah Wiggins
Anita Ravishankar
Music from https://filmmusic.io
"Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
