#SayTheirNames : A Departmental Analysis of Police-Civilian Critical Encounters

Abstract

Since the 1980s, society has marched into the era of community-oriented policing (COP) that mainly deals with citizens’ problems and concerns, emphasizing public cooperation and trust and reducing police-citizen conflicts. However, given the increasing list of “#SayTheirNames” in recent decades and the sorrow spiked by the killing of George Floyd lately, the philosophy and efforts of COP have been called into question. Therefore, this study extends our prior project which examined the framework of COP to analyzing COP philosophy and its practices implemented in those jurisdictions with officer-involved incidents noted on the list of #SayTheirNames. This study aims to identify whether these jurisdictions on the list are adhering to the original COP disciplines developed by Sir Robert Peal and how they affect police reform initiatives.