Case Study LA: Local police reform requires better relationships between police and communities, not initiatives “from the outside”

While South Bay activists continue to lobby for the discredited "Defund the Police" movement, LA may provide some useful lessons with its Community Safety Partnership. Founded in 2011, this partnership promotes healthier relations between police and their communities. Though police are often centralized in the reform conversation, “[b]oth sides” must be engaged, and change must emerge from within—not outside—police departments and communities." Joel Fox reports from the Southland.

Litigants said they learned from their experience suing the LAPD that change can’t come from the outside. That’s why they teamed up with LAPD chiefs Bill Bratton and Charlie Beck to work within the police department. They created the Community Safety Partnership, which promotes better relations between the police and the communities they serve.

Rice {one of the litigants} said working with the police was essential because the first civil right is safety and to achieve that goal the police have to be engaged as protectors in all communities.

Police must be sincere in pushing community policing and community members have to show trust in the program. It’s not a one-way street. Both sides of the divide have to engage.

Community policing would seem to satisfy members of the minority community who have indicated they don’t want fewer police, as the defund the police advocates demand, but a police force in which they can trust to achieve justice.

This article originally appeared in Fox & Hounds Daily.

Read the whole thing here.

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