The Center for Policing Equity

Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff is the leading voice on race and policing. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity (CPE), and the inaugural Franklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Among the first scientists to demonstrate the relationship between implicit bias and deadly criminal justice outcomes, Dr. Goff’s work reshaped the national conversation about combatting racism in public safety. At CPE, Dr. Goff serves as a Principal Investigator of the National Justice Database, the largest collection of police behavioral data, and helped launch CPE’s COMPSTAT for Justice, the subject of his 2019 TED Talk. Dr. Goff’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Justice, the NAACP LDF, the Major City Chiefs Association, TED Audacious Project, and Google.org, among others. Dr. Goff is a frequent guest on television and witness in Congressional hearings.

The desire to feel safe is universally distributed. The ability to feel safe is not. CPE works to fix that. Collaborating with communities, governments, and public safety professionals, CPE aims both to reduce inequity and burden within law enforcement outcomes, and to provide communities with the information they need to decide what resources keep them safe. By leveraging data and behavioral science to identify where law enforcement is not meeting public expectations, we provide a roadmap for reinventing community wellness, with justice as a goal. Similarly, by identifying community needs that are not best met by a badge and a gun, we allow communities to make informed decisions about how to invest in their safety, including investments designed to prevent the violence that triggers a police response. To meet this historical moment, CPE will scale our services to empower communities seeking to reimagine how we ensure public safety.

According to the most recent data, one in five adults in the U.S. interacts with law enforcement annually. Of those encounters, 1 million result in the use of force. And if you are Black, you are 2-4 times more likely to have force used than if you are White. The recent protests in the aftermath of Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd highlight the need for boldly reimagining public safety. The shared goals of this moment are public safety that relies less on punishment; has more appropriate options for crises involving mental health, substance abuse, homelessness, and poverty; and gives communities more power to shape how they invest in the resources that reduce crime and violence. Despite our strident partisanship, these goals are widely shared and, apart from concerns over budget, enjoy support from major city law enforcement executives. The problem, then, is not one of political will—though the window for change is likely short. The problem is a dearth of know-how. Without a map for how to invest in vulnerable communities without risking increased violence, this moment risks squandering a rare political consensus and achieving little or, worse—producing backlash against community-centered approaches to public safety.

CPE leverages data and behavioral science to produce more equitable and less burdensome public safety. We do this, primarily, in two ways. First, our analyses of police behavior identify not only racial disparities in police outcomes such as stops or uses of force, but also distinguish between the portion of those disparities for which police are not likely responsible (e.g., crime or poverty) and the portion for which they likely are (e.g., their behaviors and policies). This allows our community and law enforcement partners to hold law enforcement accountable for driving down racial disparities and provides a constructive route to solve long-simmering concerns with racial bias. Second, our analyses of police deployments and usage allow communities to gain a better sense of how police spend time as well as what other services might be used to resolve crises in the absence of introducing a badge or a gun. Our goal is to provide cities with the analytics that can prevent them from slashing police budgets without a plan to combat violence or removing programs without metrics for how well they work. The demand is already extraordinary. So our work must be as well.

CPE’s work focuses on helping low-income majority Black, Native American, and Latinx communities in urban contexts. Our previous partnerships in 25+ cities and our current partnerships in dozens more allow us to help direct law enforcement to the types or locations of contact that are most ripe for reducing biased policing. Similarly, we are able to identify the types of calls for service (e.g., drug overdose) to which it might not be most appropriate to send someone with police training. Smaller jurisdictions also benefit by adopting recommendations to their local context. Still, it is clear that fixing these problems holds a larger benefit for our democracy. Humans measure the things that matter to them. We have failed to measure how the state administers violence in our most vulnerable communities. The pain of that failure spread across the nation for a full month. Our project, staffed by people from Ferguson, MO; Minneapolis; Philadelphia; and Denver, among other places, is a direct response to this neglect. By measuring justice and giving communities the tools to plan investments in safety, we are beginning the project of delivering on what the social contract owes to those most in need of its protections.

No community can thrive when they do not feel safe. And yet, in the most vulnerable communities across the United States—and across the globe—there exists an elevated fear that the people who respond to cries for help are sometimes more likely to injure than to protect. No one can feel safe when living with that reality. Our goal is to provide the tools to empower vulnerable communities to keep themselves safe and to hold public safety officials accountable to their values—promoting health, opportunity, and self-determination that do not exist when safety is precarious.

At Stanford University’s 2007 Policing Racial Bias Conference, then Denver Police Department Division Chief Tracie L. Keesee and I sparked a collaborative relationship.  

Division Chief Keesee and Chief Gerald Whitman asked me to answer a question they could not answer themselves: Do they train their officers to kill young Black men. The question haunted Keesee, who had been asked about it by a Black mother shortly after officers killed Paul Childs, a special needs teenager, in his own home. The kind of honesty that allowed Keesee to entertain this question became the basis for a project that became the Center for Policing Equity.  

This joint venture in Denver lead to changes in training, increased departmental transparency, and improvements in recruitment and retention. 

Tracie and I then attended the 2008 Major Cities Chiefs Conference, inviting interested departments to participate in this initiative. Departments in Houston, Las Vegas, Nashville, Newark, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Jose, Seattle, Toronto, and Virginia Beach became part of this new wave of research and policing.  

In 2008, we founded CPE, with a core mission to empower communities to produce more equitable and less burdensome public safety systems.

I am Black. I have been Black my whole life. I graduated high school with Mumia Abu Jamal’s youngest son and straddled worlds between Philadelphia and the suburbs. I have known fear directly at the hands of police and indirectly through the eyes of my godchildren, who learned too early that despite their goofy smiles and childish enthusiasm for Pokémon, armed men might fear them—and they could be murdered without consequence if these men were not filmed and the world did not march in their name.  

I believe in democracy. I know that it cannot function if one class of people are consistently prevented from participating. And I know enough of our nation’s history to understand that the first way to rob a people of the franchise is not at the polls, but before they are permitted to go to them. If policing is not an instrument that seeks to fulfill the state’s obligation to the social contract then it is an instrument of tyranny. And, because it has been the latter for far too long and far too many throughout our nation’s history, I know we will not be free until a different form of policing is possible.

CPE is the largest organization devoted to ending racism in policing in the world. This is a humble brag, since the space has been massively underinvested, but something we value nonetheless. Since our formal creation in 2008, CPE has worked with dozens of departments (our partners decide whether or not to disclose they have worked with us), and the demand has only grown. Since announcing our inclusion in the TED Audacious Project, we have heard from hundreds of departments interested in applying our evidence-led approach to reducing racial bias in policing. And, since Minneapolis and Los Angeles announced their desire for us to lead their efforts to reallocating resources around public safety, we have received hundreds more calls from cities and departments eager to do so responsibly.  

CPE is scientists, former law enforcement, policy specialists, community organizers, and operations specialists. We have led the largest efforts to reimagine public safety in the nation’s history, and we specialize not only in policing, but in centering communities and combatting racism. We were already in the process of scaling when we received the largest philanthropic commitment to police reform to date in 2019—though it was still less than half of what we needed to realize the scope we felt the country needed. With the strategic planning support offered by the Bridgespan Group, we are now positioned to transmute the nation’s appetite for change into policies and processes that give control of public safety back to the communities that need it so much.

Early in the days of CPE, I took a series of meetings with funders and U.S. Department of Justice officials to discuss the desire to create a national database of police behavior. Literally every funder laughed in my face before realizing I was serious. They said it had been tried. They said it was impossible. I cannot say I was undaunted by the unanimity of their disbelief. But I did remain unconvinced that a database of this kind was unnecessary. So I asked chiefs anyway. The result was that the Major Cities Chiefs Association endorsed the National Justice Database in advance of our application for National Science Foundation funding. To an institution, each person that laughed at the idea has now supported it financially. Importantly, I do not see the success of the database as vindication of my determination—or naïveté. Instead, I have invited all of those funders to see the journey as a necessary process, both of recognizing how imposing a task it was and in making it possible.

In 2018, Minneapolis was one of our success stories. We had worked with two chiefs across two mayors to change the department’s culture and helped to reduce use of force by 18% from 2016 to 2018, when we concluded our formal work. Then, on Memorial Day, 2020, all of that progress went up like tinder in a bonfire. Doing this work well requires understanding that every day will be a failure to meet your ultimate goal—and the determination to get up the next day to work harder. After watching the public lynching of George Floyd, we began outreach to our community partners in Minneapolis and nationally. The nation was ready to say out loud what so many in law enforcement have been saying for decades: We ask police to do too much and they cannot keep communities safe from the violence of poverty and state neglect. The “defund the police” campaign was born out of this urgency. The moment has given us license to focus our work more explicitly on identifying non-police resources that can keep communities safe while continue to provide communities with tools to hold police accountable.

The problems of race and policing are seen as hyper-partisan, devoid of good-faith actors, bereft of data, and lacking scalable solutions. We are uniquely well positioned to solve these issues. Policing Equity is a bridge between police departments and communities that alleviates the strain of partisanship and generational mistrust, winning support from police organizations (e.g., Major Cities Chiefs Association) and activists (e.g., PICO Network) alike. These relationships make possible our innovative work on the largest standardized dataset of police behavior in the world, covering about one third of the United States population. Leveraging the insights from behavioral science, we have a decade of evidence that science can reduce burdensome and disparate policing. Additionally, our recent collaboration with engineers at Google has allowed us to create software that supercharges our process, making us ready to scale the success that follows from communities and police working together.

   Racism is most commonly understood as a defect of hearts and minds. To reform hearts and minds requires education, a personal relationship, a religious experience, or a powerful encounter with art. According to this definition, the solution is salvation—difficult to accomplish individually. Harder at scale. If racism boils down to bigotry, our solution must be a sea-change in culture, something the American experiment is still struggling to accomplish in the 250 years since the nation declared itself to the world.    

  But, if you define racism in terms of behaviors instead of attitudes, it becomes more straightforward to measure. And once you can measure a problem, you can tap into one of the only universal rules of organizational success: If you have a goal, you should measure it and hold yourself accountable to that metric. Why can we not do this in policing?   

   It turns out, police departments already do.    

   Police already practice data-driven accountability for crime. Nearly every U.S. police department uses COMPSTAT, a process that—when used as intended—tracks crime data, identifies trends, and hold departments accountable to public safety concerns. It works either by directing resources or changing officer behavior once they arrive. So, if muggings blight one neighborhood, the department increases patrols. When homicides spike, they work with communities to stop the killings. When we define racism in terms of measurable behaviors, we can do the same thing. We can create a COMPSTAT for Justice.    

   By controlling for factors outside police control, we can highlight stops, arrests, and uses of force that are most burdensome and racially disparate, allowing departments to focus on reducing or eliminating them. Shifting the definition from attitudes to behaviors also creates a shared language between police and communities that lowers the temperature in conversations about race. Building trust allowed CPE to create the largest database of police behavioral data in the world; since 2012, we have collected data that covers roughly 1/3 of the U.S. by population. And, together, our partners have seen an average of 25% fewer arrests, 33% fewer use of force incidents, and 13% fewer officer-related injuries.

   Number of Direct Beneficiaries/Customers     

 2019 (Estimate)   55,378,094       2024 (Projection) 65,600,000   

   Number of Direct Beneficiaries = Residents served by Police Departments under MOU

  Here, the goal is justice, and we measure it by calculating the portion of racial disparities that policing produces. Having developed the right analyses and secured access to protected police data, we sped up our processes to make COMPSTAT for Justice mirror traditional COMPSTAT through our partnership with Google.        The result is that communities and law enforcement are able to see policing’s role in producing racially disparate outcomes in real time. By leveraging the cultural fluency of existing COMPSTAT programs, law enforcement has a powerful tool for changing both officers’ behavior and department culture. Moreover, by providing a concrete benchmark for improvement, COMPSTAT for Justice offers a shared language to reformers and traditionalists alike, making productive collaboration possible.

Reimagining what public safety will look like in the United States has few if any viable models.  Additionally, the process of defining how to increase trust, fairness, justice, and mutual respect between police departments and the communities they serve will differ for each community as their needs and resources vary city by city.

In order to address the barriers and challenges to reimagining public safety in America, we will offer a roadmap that grounds community decision-making in the need for evidence. This roadmap and subsequent “next steps” will help departments avoid the pitfalls of ideologically driven attempts to “defund” without a plan or the information to do so responsibly.

Black Lives Matter organizers and protesters cry out to reimagine public safety systems that have equity and dignity at their core. Their ability to change the public conversation around equity in policing opened the door to CPE, which is now stepping in to help frame the ways municipalities think about reapportioning their resources and provide solutions that communities want and Chiefs can get behind. Additionally, Leadership Conference takes both the work we do and the changes Black Lives Matter demands and advocates for community-centered policy solutions to equip communities and police departments with best practices and recommendations for adopting 21st century policing models.