This resource presents the Collective Healing Initiative, a program designed to restore and strengthen relationships between police departments and the communities they serve after high-profile acts of violence.
High-profile acts of violence strain the relationship between police departments and the communities they serve. NIJ and its agency partners are working on ways to mend these relationships and help each side heal. In response, the Office for Victims of Crime awarded a competitive grant to the International Association of Chiefs of Police to oversee the Collective Healing Initiative. The initiative uses community-informed strategies to improve ties between law enforcement agencies and the public prior to and in the wake of traumatic events. An NIJ-sponsored evaluability assessment of the initiative found that although the outcomes of the initiative’s five demonstration site agencies could be evaluated individually, they were too dissimilar to compare. The demonstration site agencies are located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Oakland, California; and Rapid City, South Dakota.