The state of Connecticut is investing in a new training program, to be developed by The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School (YLS), which will provide local law enforcement with techniques for improving relations and building trust within the communities they serve.
The program, called CONNECT, will begin in 2027. It is part of a state effort that began with legislation passed in 2020, which aimed, in part, to strengthen police accountability in the state through the development of a community engagement training program for police.
"We believe that this curriculum will be a model for all other states looking to increase legitimacy, trust, and effectiveness for law enforcement," said Caroline Nobo, The Justice Collaboratory's executive director.
The Justice Collaboratory (JC) is a research center at YLS that brings together scholars from across the disciplines at Yale and elsewhere to work toward an evidence-informed justice system, with a major focus on police reform. Its co-founder, Tom R. Tyler, has been recognized internationally for his research on how people interact with and perceive legal authorities.
The center is developing the training program in partnership with the Council of State Governments Justice Center, a nonprofit organization that provides state governments with policy and research expertise for developing strategies that increase public safety and strengthen communities.
The curriculum will be based on the three pillars of the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, a program that the JC participated in and which concluded in 2019.
These pillars are:
- Enhancing procedural justice, or the way police interact with the public, and understanding how those interactions affect the public's views of police and the justice system;
- Reducing implicit bias, the unconscious assumptions and associations police might make about certain groups of people, and examining how that affects their interactions;
- Fostering reconciliation, to allow open engagement between law enforcement and minority communities to discuss historical tensions and grievances that contribute to mutual mistrust.
"These pillars are intended to guide police in how they go about engaging with the public," Jorge Camacho, the JC's policy director and co-leader of CONNECT, said. "If the community sees you doing your job from a crime-control perspective but sees you doing it in a way that still disrespects the community itself, then you're never going to improve relations."
Cassandra Ramdath, a research scholar in law and research director of the JC, will also lead CONNECT; she is a criminologist by training who has conducted considerable criminal justice research with a focus on systems reform. Improving day-to-day interactions between police and community residents is critical to building trust, she said. "More humanity is needed in these interactions."
For this program, community input will be sought and incorporated as the curriculum is developed, she said. And community members will be invited to sit on discussion panels during the reconciliation portion of the training.
Police departments in and around New Haven, Bridgeport, and Hartford - roughly 35 units in all - will be the first ones eligible to participate.
Participation is not mandatory, but Camacho said the JC and the Council of State Governments Justice Center will be actively reaching out to police officials to explain how CONNECT will work.
Their long-term hope, he added, is that the program becomes successful enough that it will become part of the basic training curriculum administered by the state's Police Officer Standards and Training Council.
