Our workshops are all interactive and participative. Our classroom sessions involve “polling” activities with anonymous clickers we use to create our menu of topics to address. Our ‘magic number” of participants is typically thirty (30).
These Policing With Our Community© (PWOC) workshops also have Group Speak exercises where participants, in groups, take a closer look at one of their chosen topics and describe it in local terms. Each group reports out to the entire group where we poll them again about the most important of the issues that need to be addressed by their communities and local law enforcement organization. We conduct the very same PWOC workshop for community and law enforcement groups. We provide a report to the community and the department with our findings from every workshop we conduct.
In our Community Speak sessions, we partner community stakeholders with officers or deputies who work in their neighborhoods. We utilize the results of their PWOC sessions to create an engaged strategic plan for their new partnership.
We describe our workshops as being the blueprint that moves community policing toward community engagement in a more intentional platform which includes the community and the neighborhood into a much more collaborative partnership in three specific areas: Crime Prevention and Emergency Management, Crime Reduction and Crime Intervention and Police Accountability. We help to build a set of key performance indicators to measure progress and success
We build on the citizen-based efforts established in our community policing efforts. The police-community partnerships of today and tomorrow must be more intentional and focused on joint problem solving among equal voices at the table. This takes serious work with devoted stakeholders from both the law enforcement and citizen communities.
Most of our workshops are centered around a core set of resources participants are familiar with or are readily available from public sources as well as our “library” so workshop materials can be accessed and hopefully read before the actual workshop.
We also conduct an expanding portfolio of “specialty” workshops for community organizations. We want citizens to better understand police field activities. Here, we take a deeper dive into specific law enforcement topics such as police polices, use of force (a simulator-based workshop), police advisory and review boards, training, etc.
Among our favorite audiences are collegiate criminal justice students, especially those considering careers in law enforcement. We always hope to recruit a few.
These specialty workshops are also recommended to community engagement efforts “downstream” as the strategic planning process moves toward their initial set of strategies.
Similarly, outside of the community engagement process, we conduct training for law enforcement agencies. These are typically more like mini retreats where we discuss specific aspects of community engagement or contemplated organizational changes and their expected outcomes.
We also conduct career development workshops for law enforcement supervisors, managers, and command staffs. We have current and former law enforcement managers and executives who are well versed in effective, professional police performance by both operational and professional standards personnel. We always hope we are also passing along career guidance for those who are, or one day will be, sitting in one of the big chairs.
We provide a place for all of the voices to be heard. Whether it’s in the police agency or in the community, there has to be a place where the voices can be effective in charting the course of our public safety – something we all have a stake in.
