AbstractEarly intervention (EI) systems are widely considered a best practice for promoting police accountability and addressing officer performance. However, they can take many different forms, and we have much to learn about how those forms work in practice. In the fall of 2013, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded The John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety and its partners from The University of Central Florida, The University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and The Urban Institute to undertake a study of EI systems, Early Intervention Systems: The State of the Art. The project was designed to better inform police practitioners, policy-makers, and academics about the best practices of early intervention. The first phase of the project involved a national survey of agencies that operate EI systems. The agency survey was designed to provide data on the structural characteristics of EI systems, including practices related to identification (performance metrics examined as potential indicators of misconduct and thresholds applied), selection, intervention, and post-intervention monitoring. The second phase of the project provides for a more intensive description and analysis of several agencies’ EI systems. Agencies were selected based, in part, on the structural characteristics of their EI systems, such that different types of systems will be examined. The case studies described how each of the EI systems functions and estimate the magnitude of the impacts of the interventions on the performance of the officers who are subject to intervention.
Police Early Intervention Systems: The State of the Art
NCJ Number
310787
Date Published
November 2025
Length
55 pages
Abstract