June 2, 2020
On June 1, 2020, President Barack Obama published a blog post titled “How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change,” sharing the link to a milestone community-based policing report and toolkit created last year by the Leadership Conference Education Fund—the education and research arm of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—and describing it as a “starting point” to an effective policing reform agenda tailored to different communities. Gibson Dunn partners and associates worked extensively on the report and toolkit.
Published on March 28, 2019, the 416-page report titled “New Era of Public Safety: A Guide to Fair, Safe, and Effective Community Policing” is designed to be a guide to best practices for public safety and policing in the 21st century, grounded in the core theme of community policing. As noted in the executive summary, “this report was developed to give individuals, communities, activists, advocacy organizations, law makers, and police departments the knowledge to carry out this important work.” The accompanying toolkit is “intended to empower communities to hold police departments accountable by working together to address problems and to find the best way forward to coproduce public safety.” The report and toolkit are available for download here and here.
Since late 2016, Gibson Dunn had been closely involved in researching and drafting this report, with over 160 associates conducting research into best practices and recommendations to reform policing in collaboration with community advocates and law enforcement experts, including the Policing Project at NYU School of Law; Ron Davis, former director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Scott Thomson, chief of the Camden County Police Department and president of the Police Executive Research Forum.
The Gibson Dunn team includes Marcellus McRae, Ben Wagner and Frances Waldmann