Page 36 - PCPA Fall 2024 Bulletin Magazine

HOW POLICE-COMMUNITY INTERACTION SURVEYS BUILD TRUST AND IMPROVE SERVICE
How Police-Community
Interaction Surveys Build Trust
and Improve Service
Mutual trust between law enforcement and the community is the foundation
for effective policing. It’s a partnership. Without an effective method of
interacting with citizens and gathering feedback, law enforcement agencies
miss out on the opportunity to improve service and build community trust.
Importance of citizen feedback
Citizen feedback helps you better understand community
needs, validate your positive impact, and create a stronger
bond between the department and the community.
Even if your agency documents and analyzes interactions
via CAD systems and MDTs, the data is limited to facts and
the respective officer’s point of view. Without a community
feedback mechanism, you miss the citizen’s perspective.
If the interaction was positive,
you missed the chance to
encourage the officer and
raise morale. If the interaction
was negative, you missed the
opportunity for improvement or
corrective action.
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Public meetings or town halls
Community advisory boards
Focus groups
Paper mail-in surveys
Monitoring social media
Online feedback forms
PA CHIEFS OF POLICE ASSOCIATION
Challenges with common citizen
feedback systems
Many agencies use manual and/or traditional tools to
collect citizen feedback:
Unfortunately, these traditional approaches are often
ignored by citizens, time-consuming to set up and
manage for staff, and frequently focus on just complaints.
Fortunately, there are automated tools that can help law
enforcement agencies inform citizens and gather positive
feedback without adding to their workload.
Automated police-community
interaction surveys
These surveys are automatically sent to the citizens you
choose: people who recently interacted with your agency
and who match the CAD and RMS data of your choosing.
Sent directly via mobile text, these surveys don’t require
citizens to click on links or visit a website. Because you’re
meeting citizens where they are, right on their mobile
devices, these police-community interaction surveys
enjoy a much higher response rate.
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