STOCKTON — Police Chief Eric Jones credited outreach efforts by his department along with input and cooperation from the community for a favorable evaluation by the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice.

The largest and most comprehensive effort ever taken to tackle police-community trust and mistrust in the United States released findings on Thursday through the Urban Institute that showed the Stockton Police Department has improved considerably in all seven categories measured in the project: procedural justice, police department legitimacy, police bias, community-focused policing, perceptions of the law, relatability of police and willingness to partner with the police. The conclusions were based, in part, on feedback from surveys conducted in October 2015 and September 2017, in which 400 surveys were completed, about a 23 percent response rate.

The other cities that took part in the national initiative were Birmingham, Alabama; Gary, Indiana; Forth Worth, Texas; Minneapolis; and Pittsburgh.

“In particular, residents’ perceptions of and experiences with their local police department, police-community relationships and neighborhood conditions improved considerably in Minneapolis and Stockton,” the report stated.

Jesse Jannetta, a senior fellow with the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., said, “Stockton has done some very high-level work in this area.”

Jones said Stockton was selected for the national initiative because trust and crime issues have existed here for decades, and, “we had a willingness to do some things differently, to look at developing policy based on community input, and they felt we had the willingness and capacity to do so.”

The national initiative sought to promote more equitable, just and respectful policies in improving relationships between law enforcement and community members. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs launched the national initiative, which consisted of officer training, departmental policy changes and community engagement designed to repair and strengthen police-community relationships by addressing deep historical roots of distrust in the police among people of color and other marginalized populations.

“We didn’t know what the results were going to be,” Jones said. “We do know that the results are very positive by moving in each category in a better direction, not just for the amount of trust that the community had in police, but also in officers’ perception of themselves and their interaction with the community.”

Training officers in the concepts of procedural justice and implicit bias was a foundational component of the national initiative. Between December 2015 and April 2018, every sworn officer in the six police departments participated in three full days of training that covered conceptual procedural justice, tactical procedural justice and implicit bias. A new reconciliation process was developed that consists of five components, including fact-finding and sustained listening.

Stockton PD conducted more than 100 listening sessions, more than any of the test site cities, in areas where there is the most mistrust, which generally are high crime areas.

Policy changes within Stockton PD during the national initiative implementation period included, but were not limited to, mandated annual officers’ mental health training, added procedural justice language to general order on how canines are deployed (May 2016) and policy on release of body camera footage (July 2017).

“It’s very promising,” Jones said. “We do know these results are not what we ultimately want. We want to continue to improve. We know we have a lot of work to do.

“We’re not done. We’re just getting started.”

Contact reporter Bob Highfill at (209) 546-8277 or jhighfill@recordnet.com. Follow him on Twitter @bobhighfill.