 Good morning, and welcome. My name is Joe Hewitt. I'm the Vice President for Policy, Learning, and Strategy here at the United States Institute of Peace. For those unfamiliar with us, USIP is a national nonpartisan independent institute founded by Congress and dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical, and essential for US and global security. Part of our mission is to produce and support high-quality research with potential to improve policy and practice on issues on peace and security. And that's why we're here this morning. So thank you all for joining us for a presentation and discussion focused on the question, does community policing build trust in police and reduce crime? We're delighted to be joined this morning by members of a research team that have recently published the findings of a study based on coordinated field experiments in six countries. The research appears in the prestigious publication Science, a testament to the study's comprehensiveness and rigor. Spoiler alert, the headline conclusion is that, and I'll use the author's words here, increases in community policing practices led to no improvements in citizen police trust, no greater citizen cooperation with the police, and no reduction in crime in any of the six sites. But look, headlines don't tell the whole story. Beyond that headline, the study offers a raft of nuanced secondary findings that point to numerous opportunities for valuable learning and continued strengthening of community policing. So to help us sort through the study, we're joined by three of the study's 17 authors, including the lead investigator, Graham Blair. You're going to also hear from a panel of experts on community policing who bring an extraordinary depth of experience designing and implementing community policing interventions. They'll offer their own reflections on the study and its implications for future practice. So we'll introduce all of these people as we move along through this morning's program. There's a lot to say about this groundbreaking research, but we also promise not to leave you, the audience, out of the conversation. So we'll leave about 15 minutes at the end of the program for your questions, which you can submit through the webpage for this event. Just underneath the live stream video window is a dialogue box where you can submit your questions. I'll remind you again as we move along. So let's begin by turning to Graham Blair. Graham Blair is the lead investigator for the six country study. And he's going to start by offering some framing remarks, and then we'll slowly start to hear more from his colleagues. So Graham, take it away. Thanks so much, Joe. And good afternoon. I am Graham Blair. I'm an assistant professor of political science at UCLA. I'm really pleased to be here as the chair of the Community Policing Medicare Project, which I led with Fotini Christia at MIT and Jeremy Weinstein at Stanford, in which we worked with about 20 social scientists, including two you'll hear from next, as well as six police agencies in the Global South. And you'll hear from one of those partners in just a moment. So together, we tested the effects of community policing. And it's a set of practices, which I'll describe in just a moment, that are motivated by two major features of the world today. The first is that though some kinds of violence, like civil wars, have declined, homicides and organized crime have not. And violence and insecurity now affect many. By some estimates, one in four people are one billion people in the world. Many of the most prevalent policy solutions to reducing crime and building secure communities to address this issue start with the police. But the creation of modern policing has generated a set of problems of its own, highlighted in the last two years by the Black Lives Matter protests in the US and around the world, the Ansar's movement against police abuses in Nigeria, and policing protests earlier this year in Colombia, among others. Politicians have interfered with police for political gain. The police themselves have misused their coercive capabilities and killed innocents instead of protecting them. And the police have faced the challenge of maintaining the respect and trust of citizens, which is crucial to their work. So where does community policing sit in? It's a strategy for encouraging the public to act as partners with the police in preventing crime and promoting security based on the needs of their individual community. The use of community policing is diverse in the set of practices that are adopted by police agencies. There's no single definition of it. But there are four kind of common elements, which we drew from in developing locally appropriate increases in community policing practices together with our six police agency partners. So those elements are frequent local beat patrols in which particular officers are assigned to a beat to get to know community members and local businesses, learn about their concerns. The second is decentralized decision making in which decisions about how to allocate police effort are devolved to those local beats. The third is community engagement in which officers and their supervisors regularly meet with citizens in the community to share information about what the police are doing and also to elicit concerns from the community that might help to reduce crime. The final element is problem oriented policing, which is a set of problem solving strategies which are designed to take those concerns and transform them into police action to address them. So why would these changes affect citizen trust and crime, which are the two key outcomes that we want to address? We propose an information centered theory of change centered around the importance of information about past and future crimes that citizens have and can choose to share with the police. So local beat patrols and town hall meetings, those first two elements of community policing directly create more crime prevention tips that are shared with the police. They may also have effects on citizen trust by placing police and citizens in the same room to learn from each other. If that citizen trust is built, then that may also lead to more crime prevention tips. Those tips then need to be turned into responses by the police. So problem oriented policing and decentralized decision making are meant to take those concerns and turn them into changes in the way the police operate that should lower crime and decrease perceptions of insecurity. I want to highlight the important role here of citizen trust, which is a key outcome for us leading to lower crime. But I should also note that many practitioners are also more interested in the direct effects of community policing on trust itself, aside from the effects on crime. And we designed our study to be responsive to that sort of more direct theory of change. So where did community policing come from? Two widely reported success stories in Boston and Chicago are the motivation for the wide adoption of this. In Boston, what was called neighborhood policing responded to the crime wave in the 80s and 90s and included a same cop, same neighborhood philosophy of local beat patrols. The police attribute a major drop in crime to neighborhood policing. And in Chicago, the Chicago alternative policing strategy initiated in the early 90s included community meetings to surface concerns from the community and also problem solving strategies to address them. In both cases, they attribute a rise in citizen trust and policing and a reduction in crime to these programs. Motivated by those successes, community policing is now in wide use across the world. It's being used by police agencies on every continent. For example, in Nigeria, it's the central policy reform proposed by the government in response to the N-SARS movement last year over police brutality. And it's been a key response to policing protests even here in the US. So what we wanted to know was for a policy promoted based on success stories and evidence largely from the US, does it work in places like Nigeria and the Global South where it's being currently widely adopted? And we found what little evidence did exist to really not speak to that question. So we set out to develop our own in a six country study. So we worked in six extremely varied settings representative of the wide variety of contexts where community policing is implemented in the Global South, from Brazil and Colombia to Liberia and Uganda and Pakistan and in the Philippines. We'll talk about two of those in detail in just a second. So I'll hand it over to Dorothy in a moment to talk about what we did in Colombia and then Nico to talk about what we did in the Philippines. But overall, we worked in six contexts in the Global South. We used the randomized trial method which helps us to compare places that adopt increases in community policing practices to those that have status quo policing that was recognized by the Nobel Prize in Economics Committee last year. And we implemented a common community policing intervention that we tried in each of the six contexts. We then ran standardized surveys in each of the six places before and after community policing was adopted to try to assess the impact of those changed community policing practices. So Joe's already cut the suspense. Community policing does not deliver the results found in those early implementations in Boston and Chicago. So I'll come back in a few minutes and talk about the results in a little bit more detail but we thought we'd start with talking about really in depth the policing problem that we identified and what we did to try to address it. So I'll hand it over to Dorothy to kick that off. Great, thanks so much. My name is Dorothy Cronick. I'm an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. And together with Eric Arias, Rebecca Hansen and Tara Slough, I coordinated the study of community policing in Medellin, Colombia. So 30 years ago, Medellin was one of the most violent cities in the world with a very high homicide rate. When we started this project in 2016, that was no longer the case. The homicide rate had declined by almost 90% and actually the police there had already embraced many aspects of community policing. Yet despite that, a large proportion of residents of Medellin still expressed significant distrust in the police. And so our question going into this study and the question of our partners in the police was, can police community meetings, beat meetings, help build trust between officers and citizens? So this is Medellin and what we did in this study was take the police beats in the city and divide them into treatment and control groups. And in the treatment groups, we distributed these trifold flyers inviting people to town hall meetings with their local officers. These invitations were distributed door to door. And then the police held hundreds of these meetings in these treated neighborhoods. I wanted to show you some photos to give you a flavor of what these meetings were like. Some were larger, like this meeting with 28 people and began with a more formal presentation from officers. Others were smaller, more intimate. Some just with officers sitting around in a circle with a few citizens and having discussions. The tone and the sentiment of these meetings varied widely. So I wanna give you an example of what it was like to be at one of the more positive constructive meetings that were held. So in this meeting, the bottom line was not that the officers were portraying themselves as heroes who could solve all problems or that the community saw them that way, but rather that there was a kind of mutual recognition of what the police can and cannot do. So the police officer said, started the meeting by saying, you know, we can't promise heaven and earth, but here are some concrete steps that we as police officers are taking toward making this neighborhood better. And the people in attendance seem to recognize some of those steps. One attendee said, you know, when we see people who we know have committed crimes back on the street, we know it's not the fault of the police. It's the rest of the criminal justice system that you make arrests and then judges set these people free. Another person in attendance said, you know, it's up to us as citizens to report crimes. You know, we are all police officers. And that was the kind of spirit that I think a lot of the meetings or the officers were aspiring to in a lot of these meetings, but not all meetings were so successful. So in another meeting, the president of the neighborhood council was accusing the officers over and over of corruption, saying, you know, you look the other way when business owners pay you off. Some people call the police a kind of legalized armed gang. The fact that we have so many problems in this neighborhood with crime, with noise, with disturbances is because of police corruption. And the officers took their response was kind of this bad Apple narrative of, well, you know, not all officers are corrupt and let's not generalize about the police based on these incidents. But that message was not very well received by the people in attendance and the president of the neighborhood council later said privately to the research team, I just don't trust these officers, you know, especially that guy. And I think this is an example of a case in which, you know, this president of the neighborhood council is exactly the type of citizen that the police would want to get on board, that the police would want to have her trust and they just couldn't get there in this meeting. So overall, the reach of these police community meetings was very large. So the police held more than 500 meetings in 174 police beats over nine months. So about three meetings per beat, some were canceled due to security concerns. The average attendance was 18 citizens per meeting and the cumulative attendance then over these three meetings in each neighborhood was about 8% of all adults in these neighborhoods ended up attending at least one of these meetings. And 38% of residents said that they heard about, reported in the end line survey that they heard about one of these police community meetings. And so the implementation was actually quite extensive. Now, using surveys and administrative data from the police, we tried to assess, you know, this question, did these meetings work? Did police community meetings help build trust in Medellin? And I know Graham is gonna talk about the results. So I will stop here and turn it over to Nico. Thank you, Dorothy. My name is Nico Ravanilla and I am an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. And together with two other assistant professors, we implemented the Philippine arm of the study. And this was implemented in Sorsogon, which is one of the 81 provinces in the Philippines. It is mostly rural. It is subdivided into 15 municipalities, which are then subdivided into the smallest administrative unit of the Philippines, which is called barangays. And there are 541 barangays of which a subset was included in the experiment in the Philippines. The province is home to about 800,000 citizens with a barangay having an average of 800 to 1500 citizens. Now, in the Philippines, there are two types of government institutions that provide public safety. The main one is the Philippine National Police, which is responsible for the major crimes. So investigating and preventing major crimes, enforcing traffic laws, and combating insurgency. In the case of the province of Sorsogon, our study site, there are 850 officers that are distributed across the 15 municipalities. Apart from the formal police agency, there are also the barangay tenants. These are village-level semi-professional security officers responsible for minor crimes within the village. And these include public intoxication, family feuds, and so forth. So each village in the country are required to appoint 10 to 20 times the number of people in the province per village. Now the difference between PNP and barangay tenants are that the former are gun-wielding officers, but the latter don't have guns, but they carry around bamboo sticks to help them with the implementation of security policies. In terms of the problems related to policing, in Sorsogon, there are three main categories of public safety problems. So there are crimes, vehicle accidents, and insurgency. The major crimes include murder, assault, and the petty crimes include theft, public intoxication, and so forth. The vehicular accident is also one of the substantial threat to public safety as reported based on the blood reports of the police and also based on the survey of citizens that you see here on the right table. Now finally, Sorsogon is a hotspot for the activity by communist rebellion, but the NPA is what they're called. And that is going to be one of the considerations for the implementation of community policing in Sorsogon. Now, an important consideration and context feature for us is that when we implemented this program, this coincided with the implementation of the flagship drug war program by President Duterte in the Philippines. Now, whereas nationwide, the deaths related to the drug war range from about 6,000 to as high as 27,000, it was important for us to take into account the fact that in the context that we actually implemented the community policing program in Sorsogon province, these drug related deaths are essentially not occurring during the period that we implemented the program. There are a few cases before it was implemented and there was one drug related during the actual implementation, but the key thing for us was we worked with the PNP whose provincial police chief is a prominent reformer. So he was actually very much interested in a different approach to improving citizen trust that was moving away from the brutal drug war that was implemented elsewhere. Unfortunately, because of the perception of the drug war outside of the province, the citizen trust of citizens in Sorsogon province were essentially eroded. So we are working with a context where citizens trust is already really low to begin with. Now we worked with the Philippine National Police Provincial Office to implement the community engagement program in Sorsogon province and that basically involved a sequence intervention. The first stage was a community engagement program and then the second stage was the problem oriented policing. So the idea being we wanted to test out some of the sub components of community policing that Graham earlier outlined so we can understand the mechanisms through which community policing is actually working or not. In terms of randomization, we picked 298 safe barangays. So remember this is a context where there is an ongoing rebellion and so we wanted to make sure that our barangays, the villages that are study units of our study are the safe ones. And then these were then randomly assigned into three groups, 100 villages were assigned as a control group and then the arrests are assigned into the community policing treatment, one of which was implemented only by police officers and then the other one was implemented in partnership with the barangaytana which is called the LGU treatment here. Now the first part, the first phase was the community engagement program. So these are essentially an increase in the frequency of patrols. So the key thing about this is that this is hewn from a preexisting program called One Source Gone in which two to three officers would patrol and walk around villages two to three hours per week during the implementation of the program in which they engage in face-to-face interactions with the citizens. The idea being that they are going to explain to the citizens what the ongoing policies and programs of the police are and then also ask them about the concerns that they have in their community. In some cases, the police officers also conducted impromptu town hall style meetings in which they engage more broadly with the community of the treated villages but for the most part, it really is a face-to-face individual interaction including instances where they implemented a signature drive to invite citizens to be part of the fight against crime in Source Gone. Now after the CEP program, we conducted the midline survey to measure some of the shorter short-term impacts of a CEP and then after that, we implemented the problem-oriented policing. So similar to CEP, this is also based on a pre-existing program of the Philippine National Police at Source Gone province, although that pre-existing program was only implemented in a limited sense and not at the village level. So what we did was we worked with the police PNP to actually come up with a version of the program which is implemented at the village level in which a new team of problem-oriented policing officers were tasked to actually understand what are the ongoing problems of the village and what strategies can they come up with to actually address those issues. So the POP teams were in a random subset, included police officers, but across the board, it's basically a team composed of the village chief and some of these village tannos and then also some of the village council members that are in charge of peace and security at the village. So the set of meetings were held over a period of a few months and then each meeting had a specific theme culminating into the actual full implementation of whatever policies or programs they came up with to combat the issues that they have identified. In terms of the timeline, so we started implementing this project in early 2017, that's when we took baseline measures. And then between March and June 2017, that's when the community engagement program called Bonsor Sugon was implemented within the mid-line as I've mentioned and then subsequent to that, the Bonsor Sugon reloaded, it's what they called them, that's the problem-oriented policing. And then similar to the other study sites, we conducted this harmonized end-line survey to assess whether the CEP and combined with POP actually changed outcomes like citizen trust and crime levels based on administrative data, which Graham will report to us now. Thank you, Niko. So I'm gonna try to zoom back out from these two cases and talk about the six countries that we worked in, including Brazil, Liberia, Uganda, and Pakistan, as well as the two that have just been described. So the six sites are pretty diverse, half for democracies, half autocracies, it's wide variation in how corrupt they are from a high in Uganda to a low in Brazil. And they range from some of the poorest in the world in Liberia to the upper middle income range in Colombia and Brazil. So if community policing works or it doesn't in these places, we think it's instructive about whether it will work in other parts of the global south. So what we tested was locally appropriate increases in community policing practices. And by locally appropriate, I mean that they were selected by the police as the most effective set of tools that would increase the strength of community policing in their setting, given the set of practices that were already being used. What was locally appropriate varied, which reflects the diversity of these practices that are actually implemented in different settings. So in all cases, some form of town hall, citizen police meetings were held, in half, foot patrol frequency was increased, in half, citizen feedback mechanisms were introduced or promoted, such as hotlines, in half, watch forums of community watch groups, another forum of community engagement were created to formalize these informal groups. And these programs lasted between six and 17 months. We measured four key outcomes that come from that theory of change that I presented a few minutes ago. So first, in terms of crime and insecurity, we conducted a gold standard victimization survey of citizens and measured perceived insecurity as well. Our citizen survey measured perceptions of police capacity, responsiveness, and intentions towards citizens. We also did a survey of police officers on their perceptions of citizens and norms of behaviors. And we measured citizen cooperation in terms of tips and reports of police abuse. So our coordinated data collection across these six sites involved 17,000 citizen interviews, about 750 interviews of police officers, and we collected crime data over this period for about 700 neighborhoods, villages, and mountain gays. We took really seriously our ethical obligations, which due to our partnership with the police and work on a policing practice that's designed to increase contact between citizens and police, went well beyond standard academic ethics reviews. So we assessed the risks at a police unit level and at the level of the area in which we worked to try to minimize the risks to citizens and study areas and also to our research staff. Nico outlined some of those decisions in the Philippines, where we decided on the province to work in and also the areas within that province in consultation with the police and the military about where this would be safe and not affected by President Duterte's extrajudicial drug war. We also actively monitored risks during the project and set up red lines that would shut down the study if met. So we detail our thinking and some of the best practices that we think emerge from these six sites in our paper. Okay, so now quickly down to it, what did we find? We found no impact on crime, citizen trust or these attitudes of citizens or citizen cooperation sharing tips about past or future crimes. We did find some limited positive results on some citizen attitudes, but only in some contexts and I'll describe those in a moment. So I'll show you all the results together here. So to orient you to this graph on the x-axis here we have the impact of community policing running from negative to positive. So first I'm showing you the effects on crime victimization up here at the top. We see a small negative effect, but the statistical range or confidence interval includes some positive and some negative effects. So we can rule out large improvements in crime victimization and we can also rule out large backlashes or positive effects. Next I'm gonna show you the effects on our core measurement of trust of citizens and the police which is overall perceptions of the police. So here trust should go up if community policing is working. Again, that's not what we see. We see that there aren't improvements. The statistical range or confidence interval includes both the possibility of positive and negative effects. We see that there aren't improvements but there also isn't a backlash. When we look at all of the effects together on outcomes ranging from police abuse to crime reporting, perceived police intentions, norms of cooperation, community trust, we see that there aren't significant changes in our top level outcomes. So overall across our six contexts, community policing does not seem to lead to the changes that are expected by its proponents and from these initial success stories. We do find mixed evidence on citizen attitudes. So we find no change in our core trust outcome in any of the contexts, but we find an improvement in perceived police intentions in Liberia and Pakistan and also a small improvement in perceived police capacity in Columbia after introducing these community policing practices. So overall, why did community policing fall short? We conducted a qualitative investigation looking at data that we had collected from during the implementation and also by talking to each of our policing partners and we identified three mechanisms that may have held back the effectiveness of community policing. The first is that there was a lack of prioritization of community policing by police leadership. There was a rapid rotation of line officers and police leaders and there was in several cases, limited capacity to address community concerns. To give you a sense of rapid officer rotation, we calculated the rate of officers rotating which range from very quick on the order of one to two months up to 15 to 17 months. So when officers don't have a chance to get to know the community, interact with citizens and local business owners, then the felicitous effects of community policing may not be able to emerge. Some of our contexts are serving huge populations with few officers and few resources. So in Liberia, a $3,000 per officer budget is just 5% of the budget in Brazil, but it's serving, each officer is serving 950 people. So these varied, but there were significant capacity constraints either in terms of time or budget in each of the settings. So in terms of the policy implications, we identify three. The first is that structural reforms to the police may be needed for these incremental changes like community policing to yield the kinds of changes that we hope they will in terms of security or citizen trust. Second, efforts to improve citizen police relations that have shown to be effective in the rich literature for criminology in the global north may fall short in police agencies that don't have the resources to respond to community concerns that are raised in these types of practices. Finally, the rapid rotation of line officers or rank and file, beat cops and station leadership may interrupt any kind of police reform. Community policing in particular relies on citizens getting to know the police and vice versa as do many other kinds of reforms. When there's rapid rotation such as a month that local knowledge in those relationships can't be built. So where do we go next? We think that there are a number of types of reforms that might be paired with community policing to assess whether they can address some of these flaws. So one would be to try to change the incentives of leadership to better prioritize community policing. The second might be to embed officers in each community for longer periods of time. And a third is pairing community engagement tools with citizen accountability tools so that when citizens come to community meetings and share concerns and then come back the next month and see that they haven't been addressed, they have tools to hold police to account for those promises. So I just wanted to acknowledge our very large research team only a small part of which is here today. Our steering committee was myself, Wattini Christiane, Jeremy Weinstein and we had a team of many others from each country in addition to our police partners that worked with us. So I'll leave it there and hand it back to Sulfagar. Thank you, Graham. I'll briefly talk about our experience of how it went with our experience during this experiment. And so briefly, we started this, what was the motivation and what were our expectations going into this study about community policing? So briefly, in the end of 2016 and the start of 2017, we had a very serious case of serial killings in one of the districts which is Kasur in the range which I was heading, Shekhu Pura region where we did this. And it was a rape with killing, at least nine killings and it was a very notorious case of a little girl, Zana, getting killed. There was a complete breakdown in community police relationship. And because of that, we kind of realized that there is really a very serious need for us to go for community policing and try and build our relationship with the community. And during that, obviously we needed a better understanding of what kind of community policing steps do we need. And also we talked about problem-recentred policing. And the main expectation was that there would be a better relationship with the community and the trust would be enhanced. And obviously we were not really very concerned about the crime going down. The main concern was building trust with the community. So these were the kind of expectations and the kind of motivation for going into this experiment with the researchers. What was our experience like? So there were pluses and then there were kind of minuses. On the negative side, it was really difficult to implement it. And these issues have already been highlighted, but I think the air repetition, I think it's important to do that. 2018 was a year when elections were held in Pakistan. And so during those elections, it resulted in a wholesale kind of transfer of officers. And you've seen the average that Pakistan has the lowest, but it was kind of a one-off thing, which was that we're going into general elections and the election commission asked for wholesale transfers of officer, but nevertheless, that meant that the community policing officers were changed. The second dedicated resources were not there. So ad hoc posting of staff for town hall meetings. Similarly, issues with gathering data, all of these issues are there. One special issue, I think that we faced was follow-up on issues that were highlighted during town hall meetings. And especially with when we're talking about problem re-entered policing. So people would come up with issues that were not specifically police related. So there were some police related issues. So for example, they would highlight the cortex issues, they would highlight, if teasing issues, those kinds of things. But then they would also highlight municipal issues, which was not exactly police related. And they were out of our legal jurisdiction. And then a specific problem that we have in Pakistan, which is true in many common law jurisdictions, is the difference between cognizable and non-cognizable crimes, which means that there are certain categories of offenses where police cannot take action. So because of these issues, there was a serious follow-up issue. Even in problems where we, police could take action, the lack of resources, and the not having dedicated police officers would mean that follow-up was a serious problem. However, on the positive side, I'm happy to report the results were very encouraging. We had a very good officer training program. And I think that was probably one of the best in all six countries. And one interesting thing that we found, community perception of police intentions, that was, they went way up. And for us, I think that's a big positive. And then there was some enhanced levels of trust with regard to what police is doing. And one very important thing that we found out was that on the officer's level, there was a much more nuanced understanding of the issues that the community faces. So police officers are traditionally only focused on hardcore crime and insecurity or terrorism issues. But when they go out and meet the community in these town hall meetings, they get to know the concerns of the community. And if they can somehow maybe align their resources, maybe they're patrolling or their other strategies to be more aligned with the concerns of the community, I think that gives a big plus in terms of police perceptions in the eyes of the community. So we found that that was a very big plus in that sense. And that gave rise to positive perceptions. The reactions to findings, obviously I agree with the findings, but I think when we look at our local context, I think it's perhaps too bleak a picture that we, when we say there is no effect from our point of view, I think building trust with the communities perhaps much more of a desirable outcome than just reducing crime or insecurity. And I think in terms of police intentions and community outreach, I think this was a good effort. One very important area that was perhaps not touched in other contexts was gender-based intervention. So we had a separate arm which was gender-based and interestingly, all of the issues that we looked at, especially in the gender perspective, they're entirely different from the issues that were highlighted during the community meetings by the males. So I think that's an area that needs to be looked at further when we kind of go ahead with these kinds of things. How will we use these findings and integrate them in our work? I think we've already kind of done several small initiatives and pilots, some with the USIP also, which are, how do we take this forward? So I think the prerequisites as Graham pointed out of having permanent resources in place, I think that is the most important point to be looked at. So if we go forward with this, then you have to have community outreach offices, give them permanent resources, a formal mechanism of reporting. So you have a formal mechanism of reporting on crime or insecurity on police performance, but since this was not a part of that performance matrix, so I think that was perhaps one of the weak spots that we could improve. Now, how do we ensure follow-up action on reported issues, police-related, as well as municipal-related or non-police-related? So I think that's very important. And finally, make the evaluation of these efforts on community policing a part of formal organizational goals. I think with these prerequisites, I think it's still an important area where we can go forward. And I think Punjab Police at least would like to go ahead with that. And Joe, thank you. Lofacar, thank you. It's terrific to have a representative from a police department here to shed light from your perspective as you partnered with the researchers in this. But thank you to all the researchers. And Lofacar, you've given the audience a lot to digest here. And so once again, I'm gonna remind the audience that this is a good time to submit any questions that you have. We'll get to questions in the last 10 or 15 minutes or so. You can do that again on the event page just right underneath the live stream for the video. There's a dialogue box where you can submit a question. So let's turn now to our panel who have been waiting patiently. We have three really outstanding experts who have a lot of deep experience working, designing and implementing interventions, community policing interventions. Let me introduce all three of them. And as I do that, I'm gonna ask the researchers to turn off your video. Don't go anywhere, but turn off your video. And for our panelists to turn on their video and appear in the windows. And I'll introduce all three. I'll start with Ina Dion. She is a senior program officer here at the United States Institute of Peace. She's a senior program officer on justice and security dialogues. Sandra Pabon is a senior program director with the city, the citizen security dialogues, also here with the United States Institute of Peace. And then we are also joined by Kemi Okanyoto, who is the executive director of the Rule of Law and Empowerment Initiative, also known as Partners West Africa, Nigeria. So thanks to all of you for joining us. What I'd like to do is ask you some questions that will hopefully get you to reflect a little bit on the findings that we just heard about. And I'm gonna go in the order that I introduced you. So I'll start with Ina and then we'll go to Sandra and then we'll go to Kemi. Ina, so let me ask you this. Some of what we just heard highlighted that a lot of the challenges with the study identified police focused challenges. And what I'd like to get you to talk about a little bit based on your experience is to help us think through some of what those challenges could look like, structural or institutional challenges at the community and citizen level for community policing. What have you observed in your experience addressing those kinds of challenges at the community and citizen level? And what, tell us a little bit about your program, the Justice and Security Dialogues and some of the things that you do to help support that and improve that. Sure, thanks Joe. I mean, I think a good place to start answering that question is to maybe take a look at what's kind of an unfortunately common assumption which is that improving policing and particularly community policing should be driven by police or should be focused on working with police. I think, if you think about what the purposes of police are, they are intended to create conditions in which people can live in safety in which they can thrive, in which the interests that they want to be protected can be protected. Ideally in a way that they're happy with, it's the idea that they should be serving the public. And ultimately that they are accountable to the public, to these communities via different institutional and democratic structures. And where they're not serving the public, where there's frequently this corresponding breakdown in the relationship, what the problem is is often not kind of a technical problem or at least is certainly not limited to a technical problem with how well the police are interacting with people or how well they are performing their duties, how effective they are. It's at the root of it, I think, more of a political problem. Who's interests are the police serving? Who holds power in this relationship? And who gets to make decisions about how security is provided and what kinds of activities are taking place? So it's not kind of a lack of democratic accountability at the community level. So it's not to say that you can't working just with police make any progress, but I would say that if you agree with the premise that community policing is intended to transform this relationship in some fundamental way, it's very unlikely that starting to work only with police or sort of privileging police versus other kinds of actors would lead to this kind of transformation. And I think that's a part because it is in this case relative to the public, the police who hold this power. So when you're asking them where the public is asking them to make certain changes, they don't necessarily have to within the current power structure. If you want them to become more attuned to public demands, more responsive to public demands to maybe stop certain practices or change the way they interact with the public, what you're asking for is a shift in power from a situation where the police are making these decisions to a situation where the public is more strongly and more directly dictating what they do. And so for all of these reasons, I think one of the most essential components of any community policing work is working with maybe civil society, community leaders and with the public in general to help them figure out how they can more effectively and constructively make these kinds of demands of their security providers. This then also has the added benefit of being a really good source of political will. One of the things that was liked in the research as maybe missing in the success of these interventions because not only then are they able to more effectively make these demands of police, but often then those same kinds of tactics can be used to more effectively pressure, say politicians to also be giving that top-down pressure to police to change their behaviors. In terms of how we try to do it in our programming, it's a pretty complicated question and I don't think there's time to go through it in entirety, but maybe just to take one piece of it and draw a contrast between the way the intervention that was described in the research seems to play out versus how we try to approach it in what we're doing. And that's this use of public meetings. So I think both the researchers mentioned public meetings and these are a piece of what we're trying to do as well. What I think makes it very different, however, is the intention behind this public meeting, how it's structured, the purpose, the content, and then what support is being provided to whom around that. So in the case of our project, these public meetings are intended as a platform to build the relationship initially just through contact, but also as a means for communities to begin to demand greater accountability and to assert their own needs and their own demands. And very briefly, a lot of the way we try to do this is working with those community leaders to focus on what interests those in power have. So who is able to change the behavior of police? Who has that power? Who can influence those people? And what do they want that the community has? So really what leverage point could the community members or community leaders start working with to influence this change in behavior? And so helping them to think through, okay, we're at this point often as the research mentions, and I think this is played out in my experience, one of the pieces that the things that police want is information. It may be other kinds of things, it's very context specific, but working with them to think through, we have this bargaining chip, the police want this from us, we want whatever it is from them, and how do we work with that to kind of negotiate a situation that's more mutually agreeable? That's all really helpful. I suspect we're gonna come back to some of these issues as we continue the conversation, but before I turn to the next panelist, the authors talk about three different categories of structural change that are really important that probably are in some way or another prerequisites. I really wanna ask you about the necessity of adequate financial resources for implementing these kinds of programs. I know you're kind of on the front lines of implementing and designing these, can you talk a little bit about why that is so important and how that plays into effective community policing interventions? Sure. Well, I mean, I think maybe an easy place to start in response to this is just to address something that was also flagged in the research as maybe something that was missing, which was an adequate length of time. And here I can maybe say an example from our own work. So as I've described a little bit, I have worked on a set of projects at USIP that's being that improving security or improving human security by improving these relationships between security services and communities with the difference that we are maybe very focused on some of the structural changes, particularly the changes in the power relationship. And as part of that, part of our monitoring and evaluation of that, what we did was periodically survey around some of the same kinds of questions where the researchers were looking for impacts of change in public perceptions of police, change in things like trust, change in perceived fairness, et cetera. And did, like I said, periodically surveyed about 1,000 people into these communities. And what we saw was initially no change. Then after that, actually a drop in negative change in perceptions. And then not until about three years in did we finally see a consistent improvement in perceptions. And so all of that, and this was, I don't know if the drop was something we expected. I should also mention we wrote, these were some of the places we were working were places like Burkina Faso, Mali, where it's a very volatile security context and a lot of sort of external factors that might be expected to negatively impact perceptions, but that what we did expect, I think, was that it would take quite some time for these relationships to change because of the history, because of how long it takes to make any impact on that kind of thing, but also just because you're necessarily in a project starting to work with a smaller group and then waiting, police have contact with a relatively small group, even if you're putting them in contact with more, at least close contact and then waiting for that perception to kind of ripple outwards. More time then to go back to your question means more money and not only does it mean more money in the case of a lot of this kind of programming, which is donor funded means multiple renewals of funding. So I think the research, I think that they ran from six months to about 18 months and I'm not mistaken, 18 months is not an unusual time for a project cycle as well. Definitely not enough time to start to see the kinds of changes that you'd wanna see. And then when you start getting into multiple funding cycles, then increases the chances that you might actually not be able to attain or to sustain the program to the point of change. And I think one of the unfortunate things and maybe in the way the research is framed is that I hope not, but I do wonder if it's not maybe going to make it a bit harder to have that kind of sustained funding. And I think that if we look at the context in which most of this donor funding, community policing type programming is taking place, it's already, there may be different large categories of security sector programming, security sector funding. There's very roughly kinds of sort of hard security funding and that's things like providing tactical training to national counterparts in country, providing certain kinds of equipment. Those kinds of things get relatively more money, maybe don't undergo the same kind of scrutiny and are sort of easier or are soon to be necessary versus this whole other category of programs or kinds of interventions of which the structural changes, I think that the researchers are signaling as necessary are one part. And this big group that maybe undergoes a higher level of scrutiny and has less available funding, et cetera, often is associated or in my experience in this field falls into this big jumbled up category of community policing. Many of these interventions have very, very little in common with the pretty narrow definition of community policing that the researchers use, but because there's this headline and because policymakers often retain, they're busy, policymakers when funders are quite busy, maybe don't have time to dig into the research, I do worry a little bit that this headline, community policing does not work to build trust or reduce crime in the South, is going to make it a little more difficult to get sustained funding for all of those kinds of interventions regardless of how close a connection they might have with what's actually studied in this article. All right, thank you, Ina. It's one of the things that for a lot of us that have worked in fragile conflict affected states understand is that it takes a long time to achieve any of the positive outcomes that we achieve through general peace building investments and community policing is probably no different. So it's something we wanna keep as part of the conversation and funding commitments are likely gonna need to be longer and more sustained as you put it. Sandra, I wanna turn to you to talk about obviously Columbia. Dorothy's presentation focused a lot on mechanisms for addressing the really high levels of distrust that exists between the police and citizens in Columbia. I know you've done a lot of work in this area. We heard Dorothy talk about the intervention that was tested in Medellin. Tell us a little bit about from your experience, how do you nurture trust? How do you strengthen trust between police and citizens through getting them to engage in conversations around security and community policing? From your experience, what does that look like? Thank you, Joe, and good afternoon to everybody. Yeah, I'll start by saying that we really appreciate the geographic focus of the study. I think there's still a lot of need for evidence-based studies, at least in Latin America. The budgets continue to be very tight and trust levels with institutions, especially with police have hit a low, historically low point in the past two years. So I think this and more studies and all the work we're doing with vigorous methodologies is really needed. We're looking at also trying to understand here in Columbia and not only through our activity, but in general, how to promote incentives that really make authorities, police, or other justice and security providers to really work for the benefit of the communities, right? Because sometimes operations are still answering to operatives or administratively oriented constructions and not really the needs of the community. And that's where we start and that's how we address your question, Joe. And it's we're promoting responsiveness cycles that build on community policing experience that really goes beyond that. Our activity in Columbia is focused in 10 municipalities that were heavily influenced by fire guerrillas over 50 years. So these communities were really not in contact with the formal justice and security system and the actors and the rule of law cycles and principles. So we intervene with different phases. We first provide technical assistance to work together with communities and authorities to review and go over these pillars of democracy, rule of law principles and how the services are being provided, where we can prove, and then together with some interventions with the authorities, but also through transformative dialogues, we get to activate these responsiveness cycles. We believe in our hypothesis that once the communities understand that they are the clients of the security services, that they are empowered to claim or to demand for the services they need and the services that are really a priority for these communities and not necessarily at the central level or that are answering to national security priorities is where clients or communities really get involved. And this is how they get really interested in and participate. And this is not a forced or imposed relationship, but this is a constructive relation that builds again on the community needs and principles. And we believe this active participation will improve the relationship. And in the midterm, this will translate to improved trust and legitimacy. And we think really in the Institute here in Colombia that this change, this prioritization of local needs and priorities will shift the security paradigm in Colombia, right? It will help us move towards a citizen security policy and paradigm and the relationships between authorities of all the justice and security system and these communities. Again, we face the same challenges of time constraints and of course some budget constraints, but we're following these changes and these responsiveness reaction through monthly surveys with the community to see how these changes happen and the magnitude as they happen. That's fascinating how you develop and build something that's so complicated. I wanna get you to talk about something to link back to the study's findings. This relates to the three different possible structural changes that they see as being necessities. In Colombia of those three, leadership buy-in, the problem of short rotations for officers and leadership and then just the problem of financial resources. What's most urgent for, especially for addressing the issue of citizen distrust? What needs to be resolved first or most urgently? Well, there's a little bit of everything. I'm sorry, it's not a straightforward answer, but I would say in my perspective, there's really need for transformational shift, right? To really focus on center. Again, the needs of citizen security and not necessarily the national security policy that was the one that was operating for the past 50 years. So we really need to make this transformational shift. Also in these communities we're looking at, rotation is a big issue because officers are not only from the police, but across all this justice and security system. They sometimes feel these are areas where they are being punished. No, but because they get to go and serve there and these are really far remote areas where not all the state services are available. So it's again, not only, it also has to do with behavior and attitude, right? When they are working in these areas. So yeah, again, I would say for us, what's really key and what we are betting on is the transformation of relationships with the communities to understand them and to really understand the cultural dynamics that are there, which are really quite different in different geographic areas. Great, thank you. Kemi, I'd like to turn to you and pick up on something that Salfakar started to talk about. He said that one of the things that was difficult for effective community policing is that there were institutional constraints on the Pakistani police that prevented them from following up on certain kinds of allegations of certain kinds of crime. And my understanding is that that might include domestic abuse, some kinds of financial misconduct and maybe some other things. And so what I wonder about is whether or not you understand whether or not there are similar kinds of institutional constraints in Nigeria in the Nigerian context. And can you tell us a little bit if there are how those can be addressed to help to improve citizen trust in police and to help overall improve community policing? Thank you, Joe. There are similarities between Nigeria and Pakistan. So on the part of responding to complaints relating to sexual gender-based violence, there's the challenge of technical capacity. So you can even find a scenario where you have, even though with the best policies and some of the legal framework and some of the legal advocacy that has taken place where we have new laws and there are new policies in place, but the officers don't know the law. They do not understand the policies so they cannot utilize it. And where they do know the law and they do understand the policies, there are no infrastructures in place that allows them to carry out their duties effectively. So for example, the sexual assault referral centers that we have in country that have been, I would say being rolled out across the country is a model, I would say, that is supposed to be like a one-stop shop center. Let me use that to permit me to use that word where you have the police social services and other actors to assist in complaints relating to sexual gender-based violence. But beyond that's the sacks and where the sacks are. So most of the sacks are in the state capital. So most of, a lot of these complaints come from the rural areas, the outskirts. So by the time you look at the costs of getting the victim or the survivor to the sacks, who will bear the cost? Is it the police at the divisional level who doesn't have the budget to be able to even transport himself to conduct investigations would be the one to now bring the survivor to the city center? Or are you asking the survivor who most likely doesn't have that wherewithal to pay his or her own way to the city center? So these are some of the things that used to, when you have a citizen meets that kind of roadblock, it definitely affects the perception in which he or she would see the police. When it comes to corruption and financial impropriety, it's on different scales. So I'll choose to look at it from the level of the low level corruption. And that's the one that takes place between citizens, maybe at the police station level or maybe at roadblocks. And even though again, there have been mechanisms put in place by the police because you have the complaint response units, which is supposed to be like a complaint mechanism that citizens are supposed to be able to lodge complaints. But if you look at the ledger or the reports of the CRU, most of the complaints are from the big cities. Most of the complaints are from Lagos, they're from Abuja. You hardly would you find complaints from states where maybe the resources, they're not the technology spread is not as high as Lagos or Abuja. Or you have a scenario where who are the clusters of people also complaining. It's those that have access to the smartphones, that have access to the phone lines and have access to these mechanisms. How does it reach the grassroots? There is a disconnect there. And these are the major part of, they form a major population of people that are also, that constantly are being extorted, constantly being coming in conflict with the police and do not know the mechanisms in which to address it. So when you now talk community policing and you're talking town hall meetings and you're talking police meet your communities, quote, unquote, you now come to these people, they're not interested because what they see is those that have extorted them and those that have stopped, that have not taken their matter seriously when they're seven year old, they're 10 year old or their minors were defiled or ripped and they went to the police station and nothing was done about it. Thank you. Thank you, Kemi. Kemi, I wanna stay with you and I wanna try out a new question here and this is really for all three of the panelists here. And it is, when you think about the overall study and all of its conclusions, I recognize as practitioners, you don't wanna believe the overall headline and we've heard a bunch of reasons why. It's gonna take longer to see these kinds of results. A lot of you recognize of course that the structural conditions really are important and they really should be addressed as part of community policing. But here's my question for you. Given the rigor of the study and the comprehensiveness of it, is there something that you would take back some specific activity that's part of your program that you would now emphasize more as a result of the study or perhaps do less of as a result of the study? And, well, I'll leave the question at that because I'm gonna leave it simple. And Kemi, I'd like to start with you. Is there something you're gonna do more of as a result of this study or less of as a result of this study? And of course, you can say none of the above. Over to you. I think I'll look at it more at the operational level. And I mean, a lot of the, if I look at the way we have designed community policing programs that have been a part of in country, a lot of it has rested on the strategic level trying to get the political buy-in. And then spending less time at the operational level where the people need to do the job, you know? So I think for me, it's to look at how do you have that convergence, you know, the political buy-in as well as the operational buy-in, operational buy-in, so to say. And feeding that into existing structures. So when we build new structures, it takes time for the new structures to take root. So a lot of times, once we exit, everything basically just disappears. It's more difficult to work with the existing structures and re-focusing and re-strategizing the existing structures. But I think there's more benefit in working with the existing structures and tweaking it to fit context. Because I think that came out strongly in the findings of the research that it must be context-specific so that you could get the gains of what you're trying to achieve within a limited timeframe. And finally, yes, funding is important, right? But I'm one of the school of thoughts that do we just throw money at it? Or do we refocus or repurpose the resources that already exist? We do not look at the angle of repurposing or of existing resources. We just think we can throw new money into the pot without looking at reviewing our repurposing strategy. Thank you. Terrific, thank you. Sandra, I'm gonna go to you next. Something you might do more of as a result of the study or perhaps something you might do less of or none of the above, please. No, I think listening to Ram and reading the paper, the message that came across quite strongly for us again is to highlight the importance of the government buying and national and local authorities. Our project is dancing with a timing that can be challenging and also when there were opportunities since we're holding congressional presidential elections next year that fits into our final year of intervention. But local governments will stay for another two and a half years. So yeah, we are struggling to of course, working strongly and closer with local authorities. But again, one of our components at the end of the program is the development of public policy recommendation to national authorities. And well, it's gonna be challenging but also an opportunity to introduce some of these findings and recommendations into the new policy. You, thank you. Ina, over to you, more of, less of, what do you think? Yeah, I don't know that in the short term or in a very immediate way, it will have much of an impact on what I would say I would do more or less or the same amount of. And that's not because I have any disagreement with the findings or that. But I think because they fall very much in line with what I think was already understood in the field as best practice. So the need for adequate buying among leadership, the need for political will, consideration of interests, those kinds of things, that's been recognized for some time as very, very central to any kind of security sector reform, community policing reforms. And so that is already kind of at the heart of the programming that we're doing. And then in terms of maybe the things that the study would suggest not to do as much of those, particularly as implemented in the manner they were, are again already things that would not, I would never design a program that way. And so I don't think it will have much immediate impact on the way that the programming, maybe in the longer run if we're zooming out from that kind of immediate impact, what I would hope is that what it does say, and as I said, it kind of falls in line with a lot of established best practices in this field would add to that weight of evidence that these are the kinds of things that you shouldn't or maybe should be doing more of, because well, I will say that these are established best practices, I would not make the claim that they're implemented consistently or that they're always implemented very well. And I actually think that that might be maybe an interesting line of research or maybe a line of research that's maybe more immediately practically useful, at least from where I'm sitting is, what is preventing these recognized best practices from being implemented? How can we implement them better? And that set of questions. Great, thank you, Ina. It's just about quarter after one and I do want to make time for audience questions. So I invite those questions if you want to try to submit one, I'm going to start off with the first one here. And as I lay out this question, I'd like the researchers to flip on their cameras because I'd like them to join this conversation as well. I want to ask a question about something that has come up over and over again in this afternoon's conversation and you point to the researchers as being really important. And that is the amount of leadership buy-in that's necessary for these kinds of interventions to be successful. And I want to, so the premise of this question starts off like this. And we heard this a little bit, Kemi, I think was very articulate on this point. There are these larger structural issues that are very hard to change in some of these environments. The power dynamics, I think as Ina described are very hard to change. And I'll put it in my own words, political elites in a lot of these contexts benefit from the status quo and they don't necessarily benefit from change. And so there might be resistance to new kinds of reforms in policing, like community policing in a way that's qualitatively different in the global North. In fragile, affected environments, in other words, it's a bigger mountain to climb to achieve the kind of political leadership buy-in that we're talking about. So if you buy that premise, is the answer to try to figure out a way to do effective community policing without that buy-in because it's just too hard to do? Or are there ways that you can start to achieve it incrementally, such that community policing can be successful? So I don't know, the researchers have the benefit of looking at a lot of contexts and maybe can weigh in from that benefit. Our panel of practitioners may have looked at this from their own perspectives. So I'm gonna open the floor. Any one of you can sort of jump in right now and start that conversation around that question. May I jump in, Joe? Please, Dorothy. Great, thanks. So I guess the first thing I would say is that I actually don't share the premise that politicians in the global South or certainly in Columbia are somehow worse or have worse motivations than politicians in the United States. I don't think that's necessarily the right contrast to draw. And I would also say that in the Columbian case, buy-in actually was not, I think, the major barrier for all the reasons that Sandra was highlighting about the existing focus in this context on a kind of local connection between officers and citizens. There actually was a lot of buy-in and the project was implemented, I think, quite successfully in terms of the implementation and rollout, I think the barriers to the program having a big effect on the perceptions of the population in general or on people's behavior were other ones. And I think, you know, Sandra talked a little bit about kind of different or bigger or more fundamental changes that might have the kind of welfare enhancing effects that we're all interested in. And I think I would kind of think along those lines more than along the lines of this is a pathology specific to these contexts. Good, thank you. That's an important observation to make that there's variation in how much political buy-in there is across these places. Other comments on this particular question. Can I jump in a bit? I think I was just thinking about it and I said to myself, I think for us here, the different shades of buying. So you have, we've had different development partners coming to implement public safety security interventions aimed at building, strengthening, enhancing, call it whatever buzzword, community policing. So you have leadership within the police and then leadership within the political block having different ideas of what they think community policing is supposed to be. And when you have this kind of mixed basket you find chaos. I'm just really like that, you know. So for some of us, what we've tried to do is to try and bring out the basic fundamentals of what is community policing just as Graham had tried to do in the introductory part of this session. And then over the past how many years that we've implemented various forms of community policing project, trying to force the police and even the government to define what community policing is for Nigeria. And in the center of our police act 2020, it's the crafted in the police act 2020 that it is aimed at enhancing police citizen relationship and community policing keeps coming up and then we see different shades of different forms of how it's supposed to be, right? But the buying, so I can say, yes, we have buying at the political level right now, but at the strategic level within the police itself, I'm concerned that I'm not sure that they fully understand what it is. And then the quick rotation of the heads of police also makes it a bit difficult to institutionalize what the gains of community policing from civil society, from development partners and from some people in government. Thank you. Thank you. Sandra. Yeah, just very briefly, I would say, I think it would be really interesting if we can, it's not innovative, but if we can deepen the understanding of what, which are the incentives that would motivate this change. I agree with you, there are some resistance at different levels. Yeah, we see the reactions of authorities in local levels and the people that are often more in contact with communities tend to change faster and understand the benefits of a closer and better relationship with their communities. But of course there are layers of power that are very difficult to move or change. And I think we can explore a little bit more into which would be transformational incentives. I don't know, maybe we can wonder to which extent there might be some promotion points related to the way people are building this relationship, this truly fair and positive relationships with communities. I don't know, there might be many other ways, but I think it would be really interesting to focus a little bit more on those positive changes that can really generate an impact and really start promoting a better cycle. Good, thank you. I've got another couple of questions are coming through here that I think are really good and really important. This is a question for the research team. I'll preface it this way. There are apparently a lot of questions are coming through of this version from the audience and it's about the title in the science article. And so maybe you expect that at one point or another you'd have to talk about the title. The title for those of you who are in the audience and haven't seen it is community policing does not build citizen trust in police or reduce crime in the global South. The question is, doesn't that disguise the really far more interesting finding? And so the question from a lot of the audience members is to anybody on the research team, do you stand by the title and do you agree with that notion that the far more interesting one is the finding you offer about the structural conditions and their importance in enabling more effective community policing? So I'll throw that ball up and Nico, Dorothy, Graham, whoever wants to jump at it. Sure. I think that what we found about the structural reforms comes from long conversations with our police partners with the implementers on the research team and with basically trying to unpack what happened here which wasn't exactly what we expected. And so what we offer is our hypotheses about what went wrong. And I think some of those are things that we imagined beforehand. We certainly imagined that political buy-in was required. And in fact, we started out with quite substantial political buy-in in many of these sites that and what happened was that it eroded, not that it didn't start out as a set of interventions that were motivated by police interest in learning about whether their efforts to increase the strength of community policing practices would increase. And so I think what we found in terms of these constraints is really interesting and they're basically opportunities for future research to figure out whether the conditions that Ina and Sandra and Kemi have suggested might also be needed. I think there's an opportunity to figure out whether those are what's needed and whether that will transform the effectiveness of community policing. Nico, Dorothy, anything to add to that? Just quickly, I think we saw this causal question that we wanted to answer. And I think what we wanted for the title is to directly answer that question, which is does community policing actually change citizen attitudes or reduce crime? And we have provided an answer. Well, if I were to actually modify it, maybe if, you know, like this again, is up to the editorial decisions of the journal, but to me, I would add maybe like, and here's why at the end and to sort of qualify that there is in fact, this, you know, like this nuanced version of that answer. But to us, I think it was really important to answer that really central question that gets at the heart of community policing and its efficacy. Good. I don't know if that was a question for the researchers, but I don't know if the panelists have any observations to make about that headline finding. You know, time is a little short, so if you can be very succinct, I would welcome that. I can jump in. I mean, I think in response to what Nico was saying, I think where some of the difficulty that I've seen in how people have received it and has come in is in defining community policing the way that you did, which was at least in my reading of the article for practices, so public meetings, I'm probably not gonna remember all of them, call in lines, increased foot patrols, and I am forgetting the last one. And those implemented over a pretty limited period of time, maybe under, I won't get into all the other conditions, but I think maybe some of the disagreement with the title is that for most people working in this field does not cover the range of what community policing is or means or is how it's practically used. And because of the way it's defined, that headline ends up saying something to people that then is not backed up by the research findings because it's looking at such a little bit definition of community policing. Thank you. Anything else? We are coming right up on time now and maybe that it is time to first thank our researchers for joining us. This, I'll remind the audience and everybody else here, this is one of the most comprehensive studies on community policing. The researchers pointed out that there was a large evidence gap about the effectiveness of this kind of intervention. Certainly, we get with a multi-context with multi-context evidence. And so this begins to fill that gap, an important accomplishment that's gonna be a benefit to the field. Speaking for myself, my hope is that practitioners, policymakers, and other researchers take something concrete from this to continue to advance this important work. So my thanks to the researchers for joining us. Congratulations on the research and on moving it forward. It's an important achievement. Thank you also to Zulfacar, you are a partner with the research and I appreciate you spending time with us today. And then finally, thank you to the panelists. Thank you for your expertise and providing some perspective. I wanna thank the audience for joining us. Thank you for these terrific questions. Enjoy your afternoon, everybody. Take care.