Description
The ability of a police department to act in a fair and just manner is vitally important to creating internal and external trust, which in turn increases the perception of legitimacy by those who work for the department and those the department serves. Law enforcement agencies across the US have faced increased scrutiny from the public in the last several years, with the events of 2020 exacerbating already simmering community relationships. The City of East Lansing, through a competitive bid process, selected CNA’s Center for Justice Research and Innovation to conduct an assessment of fair and impartial policing in the East Lansing Police Department (ELPD). This report details the findings and recommendations of this assessment of the ELPD. The assessment team used a variety of sources, including policies, training records, administrative data, employee surveys, and interviews with ELPD personnel to assess the department. Throughout this report we identify both strengths and weaknesses of the ELPD’s operations within the following areas: Organizational Justice and Culture[;] Community Relations, Interactions, and Perspectives[;] Training and Technology[;] Traffic Enforcement[;] Use of Force and Complaints[;] Early Intervention System[.] In this executive summary, we present a summary of the findings of our assessment and a summary of the key recommendations offered to the ELPD and the city. We encourage interested individuals to read the details in the body of this report, where they will find detailed the supporting evidence associated with our 72 findings and 92 recommendations. See Appendix E for the full list of findings and recommendations.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0)
