Promoting Officer Integrity Through Early Engagements and Procedural Justice

The current project will consist of an experimental evaluation of a training program aimed at promoting the use of procedural justice by officers in the Seattle Police Department. The innovation of the proposed training program is twofold. First, insights from criminology and statistics will be applied to develop a new kind of Early Intervention System called a High Risk Circumstance (HRC) model to identify officers working in behavioral hot spots. The HRC model will be calibrated using geographically identified, incident-level data collected by the Seattle Police Department. Estimated parameters from the HRC model will be used to identify officers with a higher predicted risk of being involved in a potentially problematic encounter, based upon observed data on their actual citizen encounters in two week intervals over the course of six months. Based on the empirically demonstrated success of hot spots policing, the HRC model will be used to identify officers with a high predicted probability of being involved in a problematic encounter, rather than intervening after the encounter occurs. Using the control and experimental/engagement groups, the impact of that procedural justice training will be evaluated on a number of outcomes such as officer safety, use of force, citizen complaints, the number and composition of arrests made by the officers, as well as the use of warnings and citations as dispositions, rather than arrests. ca/ncf