U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder acted decisively to bring federal attention to the racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., that ensued after the August 9 fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. The attorney general was the highest ranking federal official to visit Ferguson and hold meetings with Missouri state and municipal leaders, law enforcement officials, and local residents.
In late September, Holder followed up on earlier Ferguson-related actions by announcing a wide-ranging Justice Department research and community relations initiative to address the “discord, mistrust, and roiling tensions” between minority communities and local police forces around the country. With Holder subsequently declaring on September 25 his intention to resign from his position, the new initiative could prove to rank among the attorney general’s top legacies at the Justice Department.
“The events in Ferguson reminded us that we cannot allow tensions, which are present in so many neighborhoods across America … to go unresolved. … We have a unique opportunity based on what happened in Ferguson to ensure fairness, to eliminate bias, and to build community engagement,” Holder told an audience of Justice Department officials and news media representatives on September 18.
The newly-announced project, the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, will establish a program that has been described as a “game changer” and an unprecedented marriage of strategies for building trust between police and communities. Over the next three years, a consortium of scholars will lead the $4.75 million initiative to deploy “training, evidence-based strategies, policy development and research to combat distrust and hostility between law enforcement and the communities they serve” in five yet-to-be-determined sites.
The initiative will partner with and be advised by Justice Department agencies, such as the Office of Justice Programs, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, the Civil Rights Division and the Community Relations Service. Justice Department officials originally sought proposals for the National Initiative back in April.
The research team will be led by national law enforcement experts from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and includes scholars from Yale University law school, the Center for Policing Equity at UCLA, and the Urban Institute. They are managing the initiative to provide training to law enforcement and communities on bias reduction and procedural fairness and will apply evidence-based strategies in five pilot sites around the country.
“It’s a marriage between researchers, federal agencies, and municipal law enforcement that … we haven’t seen before and it’s incredibly exciting for all of us who’ve been doing this work for the last several decades,” said Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity.
