THE LAW ENFORCEMENT RESOURCE CENTER

The Center on Policing’s law enforcement educational and resource center is designed to aid law enforcement agencies conduct reviews of and revisions to their outdated policies and training. While these model policies utilize modern “best practices” to serve equally diverse communities, they cannot exist in a vacuum. Instead, model policies must contain both the appropriate operational tactics and incorporate community feedback on an individual level to accommodate wants and needs of specific communities across the nation. This combination of national expertise and tailored local response allows for the development of policies that create safer communities, increase effectiveness and efficiency, and improve the relationships between the police and their diverse communities. 

The goal of the Center on Policing’s Law Enforcement Resource Center is to assist individual police departments by ensuring that the most modern and best-practice-based policies, training, and practices are in place within their agencies and that there is a process for community engagement at every step of this process. By helping local, county, and state public safety agencies in this reform process, the Center on Policing seeks to improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of law enforcement efforts and improve the relationships between the police communities they serve. Through education and technical assistance, technology, and research, the Center can help the police and the community coproduce public safety together. 

RESEARCH

The Center on Policing’s research is meant to have a direct and meaningful impact on public safety agencies throughout the state of New Jersey and across the nation. This includes finding evidence-based best practices that can be implemented in police operations, violence reduction, problem-solving, community policing, and the development of criminal justice policies. Our findings directly help public safety professionals and agencies more effectively protect and serve their communities.

The Center on Policing also engages in action research to identify public safety problems and works with teams of different law enforcement, academic, and community partners to use reflective problem-solving strategies. These “communities of practice” improve how these partners identify, respond to, and solve problems. 

DATA ANALYSIS

In addition to information sharing between law and enforcement and public safety entities, the Center on Policing facilitates the identification and analysis of public safety data to guide the selection of evidence-based best practices to inform policy and practice in the field. To this end, the Center engages with public safety agencies to improve their information management systems. Information management encompasses the processes, functions, standards, and technologies that enable high-quality information to be created, stored, communicated, valued, and used effectively and securely to support an organization’s strategic goals. The Center assists departments in inventorying and revising their data collection methods, assessing their data management frameworks,  recommending improvements, and guiding their data analytic processes in order to produce meaningful and actionable results. Data-driven management is also essential for modern policing. The ability to identify important data indicators and analyze these data is critical in early intervention systems. Early intervention systems (EIS) are an important new police accountability tool. An EIS is a computerized database of police officer performance indicators, including but not limited to uses of force, citizen complaints, arrests, traffic stops, officer discipline records, use of sick leave, and others. These systems can, in turn, can identify officers, policies, or practices in need of retraining or revision before the occurrence of critical incidents.