Proactive Alliance

Proactive Alliance addresses two challenges of community policing: building meaningful collaboration and empowering officers to become change agents in pursuit of the "co-production" of public safety. These challenges seem insurmountable in the current environment of low community trust in police and a perceived lack of police legitimacy. This problem is pervasive across the United States, especially in light of recent tragic events such as the murder of George Floyd. 

The tenor of police culture contributes to this problem in that collaboration, critical thought, and empathy are not encouraged or rewarded. Further, police are historically insulated in terms of their training content, tending to recycle ideas that are generated within law enforcement, rather than look outside their profession for multidisciplinary solutions. Often, police officers and executive staff do not know the  current research in adjacent fields, like criminology or social work, and are not aware of the evidence-based solutions this research provides.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, police are not taught to be aware of or manage the power differential that exists between themselves and the community. This lack of understanding only widens the lack of trust and fear in community. 

Proactive Alliance (PA) provides perspectives and practical solutions adapted from counseling psychology to teach police how to engage appropriately with individuals in the community with empathy and respect in the pursuit of collaboration. PA is meant to dovetail with evidenced-based solutions, specifically community oriented policing (COP) and problem oriented policing (POP), to boost or empower these methods. 

PA provides police a tool kit of solutions for successful interactions with individuals who are reticent to engage with police, are fearful of law enforcement, or want to challenge their authority. PA illustrates ways to find an "exit ramp" in power struggle situations, focusing on the physical and emotional safety of both police officers and citizens.

Specific, measurable positive impacts include increased positive contacts with police including increased calls for service,  police considering relationship-building interactions as valuable, and positive feedback from community members indicating that they collaborated in problem solving efforts.

The Proactive Alliance policing approach integrates policing methods with adapted concepts from evidence-based counseling psychology created by a licensed professional counselor and a police officer. This collaborative approach is a prevention model based on building individual relationships with the community in a variety of settings and using the humanity of the police officer as their most valuable instrument. Although forging collaborative relationships has been suggested and encouraged to most police departments, exactly how to develop and improve existing skills to achieve this goal has been uncertain. Building a productive relationship requires effective communication and empathy, but must also incorporate collaboration.  When a crisis does occur, the relationship acts as a problem-solving medium, giving the officer more options than enforcement alone, including the ability to draw from the community for the most effective solution. 

We are somewhere between prototype and pilot. We have completed the PA concept and training curriculum and are currently providing PA training in several jurisdictions in Northern Virginia (including Fairfax and Loudoun counties) as continuing education for experienced police officers. Although this has been extremely helpful to the growth of our product and identification of the needs of police and the community, we are aiming to pilot an agency-wide adoption of PA to truly gauge its level of effectiveness on a broader scale. 

We have also trained academy instructors in the Austin, Texas police department and received extremely positive and constructive feedback on our concept and presentation. However, we met roadblocks with executive staff when trying to negotiate next steps. We want to have PA become a part of the core curriculum of police academies, so police are learning these perspectives and techniques from the beginning of their careers.