Surprising Facts: Why Community Feedback is Essential
It is quite easy to enumerate the ways police departments can build relationships with their community: strengthen security, strictly implement rules and regulations, and strategize programs that seek to ensure the safety of citizens. An additional tool that can be utilized to evoke important information is soliciting feedback from community members. Surprisingly, many police departments do not conduct surveys often and do not recognize how community engagement tools, like Officer Survey, can play a vital role in community-based policing. Here, we gathered three reasons why community feedback is essential in establishing trust and respect between the community and law enforcement:
3 Reasons Why Community Feedback is Essential
- Building relationships early and addressing community concerns.
According to experts, most of the errors, ineffective decisions, and conflicts between law enforcement and the community members stem from a lack of trust and respect for each other. Gathering community feedback and creating an avenue for open dialogue promotes and strengthens feelings of mutual trust and respect between citizens and the police department. While it will never be possible to make everyone happy, it is vital to give community members the chance to express their concerns. Officer Survey allows departments to easily and efficiently collect and analyze this valuable information. Regardless of the type of feedback, you wish to obtain, Officer Survey’s customizable tools enable you to solicit any information that you desire.
2. Community members feel more empowered when they have a voice.
By involving citizens in the decision-making process, police departments can create more effective policies that fall in line with the needs and wants of that particular community. Community engagement tools like Officer Survey can create customizable surveys on any topic and enable citizens to provide instant feedback after every dispatch and interaction with the responding officer. New approaches such as this can highly boost community engagement – as this empowers community members to share their feedback on the department or individual officer’s performance.
3. Strengthens leadership.
A good leader is a good listener. Ironically, many leaders have been more accustomed to speaking than listening. While you have to develop a strong voice in the department and in the community, as a good leader active listening is a crucial skill to have. By listening to the community’s concerns, you can proactively generate possible solutions to arising problems and interactively look for possible ways to address them.
When the community members see that their concerns are actually taken into consideration and are being acted upon, over time, they will have the confidence to actively participate in community policing and regain their trust in law enforcement.
Community feedback plays a major role in building good relationships with the community. That is why police departments must empower the people to actively engage in a “police-community interaction survey”. This will not only harness trust and cooperation but will create a better environment – of peace and order and trust – in the community as well.
Try Officer Survey for free and see how you can start rebuilding trust with your community. Officer Survey works with several agencies across multiple states. Agencies using Officer Survey have seen a 95%+ community satisfaction rate. Schedule your free demo here.
