California Partnership for Safe Communities

The California Partnership for Safe Communities (Partnership) is a technical assistance provider to organizations working in criminal justice. The Partnership's mission is to demonstrate that cities can be made safe while improving outcomes for people at highest risk of violence by building trust between the justice system—primarily the police—and affected communities. As part of its work, the Partnership is the primary provider of assistance to police departments in California in delivering trainings in procedural justice and implicit bias. The grant funds a combination of high-quality, locally-tailored legitimacy trainings and policy reform efforts within police departments. The training has been developed in collaboration with Stanford University’s Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions (SPARQ) Center, which will evaluate the project by testing changes in officer sentiments, in part using language detected in body-worn camera data. The project and evaluation add to Foundation-supported evidence on procedural justice trainings, first pioneered in Chicago, and allow department-collected data to be analyzed to determine what works in improving police-citizen trust.