![]() ![]() ![]() Real time monitoring can help you spot and address potential implementation issues early on. Establish procedures for early implementation feedback.Inviting ownership allows departments to tailor efforts to the department and encourages buy-in by highlighting the policy as internally sourced. Create project and training materials internally.This joint approach can promote a greater sense of ownership and commitment to change. Having officers and police leadership participate in the creation and implementation of any policy may alleviate potential disconnects in perceptions about the policy. Include officers in policy development and implementation.Promoting officer buy-in is critical to effective implementation. Apply implementation lessons from the project An organizational assessment can work double duty to give departments insight on if and how to proceed with multiple priorities. The results will help departments determine their capacity to implement a new policy, whether to implement the policy, and how to implement it. Conduct an organizational assessment to guide implementationĪn organizational assessment assesses staffing, workload, and other policy changes underway or planned. Because targeting the policy may avoid case categories or offenses where rates already are very high, it can limit officer frustration and promote buy-in. Or they might want to apply a broader policy to a targeted category of offenses where citation rates have “room” to improve, consistent with public safety. Using results from the needs assessment, departments may wish to target specific offenses that typically result in arrest but could be addressed by citation. Conduct a needs assessment & develop a targeted policyĪ needs assessment identifies existing citation rates as well as the volume of encounters to help target case categories or offenses where a policy can have the greatest impact. The COVID-19 pandemic and periods of social unrest occurred during the time of the project, impacting police practices and bandwidth for implementation.īased on the findings in the report, we offer four core recommendations to police departments that may want to implement or continue using citation in lieu of arrest.Challenges with implementation, including lack of completion of documentation, limit our ability to fully evaluate the policy’s impact.Several important qualifications and limitations apply to the findings, including: We did not find evidence of net widening, but in three sites found that Black people were overrepresented in encounters that resulted in misdemeanor charges. As context, we also assessed encounters as a whole – both whether they increased over time (“net-widening”) and changes in their racial/ethnic composition.On average, officers saved 90+ minutes per encounter when opting to cite versus arrest.No racial/ethnic subgroup saw an increase in citation rates, and differences across races did not change. ![]() However, we also found that citation rates for the most common misdemeanor encounters – traffic offenses – were high before implementation, creating a ceiling on the policy’s potential impact. Citation rates did not increase following implementation.Sites experienced implementation challenges, including limited patrol officer buy-in.You can read about the full evaluation findings in the final report here. On December 1, 2020, the sites began implementing the model policy. Implementation in Diverse Pilot SitesĪfter an application period, four demographically and geographically diverse pilot sites were chosen: Apex, Elizabeth City, Wilmington, and Winston-Salem police departments. It recommended use of a citation in misdemeanor encounters except when the law required arrest, there was statutory support for imposition of secured bond, or exigent circumstances existed. The model policy was developed under the guidance of the project’s police chief members, and it provided that officers had discretion to cite, arrest, or decline to charge. The research team included Policy Research Associates and North Carolina State University. It was executed by the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police in partnership with the UNC School of Government Criminal Justice Innovation Lab. The Citation Project involved development, implementation, and evaluation of a model citation in lieu of arrest policy. This post summarizes the report and those recommendations. Are you thinking about implementing a citation in lieu of arrest policy? Have you been implementing a policy and want to improve it? The UNC School of Government Criminal Justice Innovation Lab recently released a final report for the Citation Project, which included four recommendations for those interested in this work. ![]()
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