Workshop on Measuring Community Sentiment About the Police

Relations between the police and the community they serve, particularly in disadvantaged neighborhoods, are not good in many parts of the US.  While many police departments are sincerely committed to improving those relationships, a major obstacle to achieving this objective is data. Police departments do not have good systems for monitoring community sentiment, particularly at the level of the neighborhood. There are many reasons for this but one is very basic—presently there are no good systems for practically assembling such data at a cost that is affordable to a police department.

The purpose of the workshop, which took place in July 2017, was to bring together a small group for a two-day workshop to brainstorm on how social media, web-based surveys, and conventional surveys might be used to assemble valid data on community sentiment in an economic and practical fashion.