To be effective, law enforcement officers need to understand the diverse communities they serve and know how to appropriately converse with those community members during both routine interactions and emotionally charged situations. To help officers, leaders, and agencies improve community-police relations, the IACP created the Bridging Perspectives: Critical Conversations for Students and Police university curriculum. This 15-week course is designed to bring university students and law enforcement into a shared space where they can engage in facilitated dialogue to learn from one another and improve trust. Through this transformative educational session, both groups will enhance their knowledge of the cultural frameworks that influenced—and continue to influence—historical and current relationships between communities and law enforcement.

Benefits for Executives and Officers

“What’s past is prologue.”
—William Shakespeare

Participating in effective critical conversations is a skill, like any other, that officers and leaders can learn in order to work more successfully in their communities. By engaging in deliberate conversations, students and officers will be challenged to listen and understand other perspectives on how media, social platforms, and societal trends shape and frame views on subjects such as the history of policing, current events, and various cultures. These skills and connections can help law enforcement agencies improve their relationship and credibility with communities and potentially inspire a new generation to consider careers in the justice system.

The course is built around three core objectives for the students and police.

• Use tools to constructively engage in difficult conversations.

• Build a mutual understanding of everyone’s different perspectives and narratives on community and police issues, especially as it relates to policing in our local communities.

• Build a vision for a shared future with stronger community-police relationships.

Bridging Perspectives is designed to be highly adaptable. Professors and facilitators can customize the lessons, readings, and discussion topics for their respective communities and cultural environments. This customization can help agencies develop cadres of officers who know the specific historical context in which they police and how their work affects various communities in different ways. For example, if a city has large communities with specific demographics (e.g., religion, race, or identity), the discussions can focus on key events or common public safety concerns based on those community members’ communal and personal past experiences. This process deepens the institutional knowledge, cultural competency, and understanding of the role law enforcement holds in shaping society. This increased understanding of the historical context can also increase the community’s perceptions of police legitimacy and procedural justice.

How It Works

Critical conversation skills and historical context cannot be taught or fully grasped in a one-day course. These are not easy conversations to have or skills to develop, which is why the Bridging Perspectives curriculum emphasizes sustained engagement between the same officers and students, coordinated by a trusted facilitator or educator. The course curriculum includes 15 three-hour modules to cover a full university or college semester. These modules can be used in their entirety as a full course or individually to supplement an existing course. The curriculum guidebook includes facilitation guides with course objectives, talking points, PowerPoint slides, activities, assignments, and readings. All of which are customizable to accommodate diverse deliveries of the material.

This process deepens the institutional knowledge, cultural competency, and understanding of the role law enforcement holds in shaping society.

The full course starts with acclimating students and officers to being in the same space and then learning about critical conversations. This initial phase allows officers and students to develop the tangible and specific listening and communication skills necessary for the conversations that happen in earnest toward the middle of the semester. This foundation is vital—participants can get to know each other and build trust before diving into the more difficult conversations surrounding historical context, community and police perceptions, high-profile incidents, media narratives, and current community-police relations.
The curriculum encourages participants and educators to use experiential learning in hands-on and nontraditional settings. For example, students may go on ride-alongs with police officers, and officers may join students at a place that is meaningful to the students, a historical site, or museum. Course facilitators will determine what is appropriate for the students, taking the local context into consideration. This allows participants to better understand the cultural norms and environments of one another. The processes of developing critical conversation skills, increasing knowledge around historical and current context and perceptions, and learning to identify with each other are used toward the end of the class when the teacher asks participants to help create a vision for what community-police relations should look like and what action steps people and agencies can take.

The last part of the class focuses on “consensus mapping,” in which participants further identify the specific needs of their community, city, and agency—in light of the broader context in which they operate—and how they can achieve this vision given the resources available to them individually and collectively.

Moving Forward

As the law enforcement profession and communities grow and evolve, it is increasingly important that all stakeholders communicate in a constructive way and understand how our convergent history affects us today. By involving university students, the Bridging Perspectives course reaches future community and law enforcement leaders to help prepare them for a cooperative, engaged approach to public safety as they move on in their lives and careers.

This customizable university curriculum toolkit is available now. George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, will host the first pilot course in the fall of this year, with additional pilot sites coming on for the spring 2020 semester. IACP staff are available to assist higher education staff and law enforcement leaders and to discuss how this course can be implemented and tailored to meet their needs and interests.

Based on interest in the university level of this curriculum, the IACP is currently developing a toolkit with similar content adapted to the high school level. This new toolkit, coming in 2020, will include stand-alone modules that can be used independently or comprehensively in classrooms, after-school programs, and community-based settings.🛡

Please cite as:

Jennifer Styles and Joseph Marcus, “Bridging Perspectives and Building Relationships with University Students,” IACP@Work, Police Chief 86, no. 8 (August 2019): 72–74.