The Human Rights Division of the Bogotá Police is working to develop an ongoing relationship of trust between residents and the police. Through data and participatory working groups, the Bogotá Police and civil society organizations identified patterns of discrimination in law enforcement and designed new engagement strategies to rebuild trust. This included an expedited process for communicating with and involving communities affected by specific incidents.
Legitimacy and trust are important for all city functions, but they are particularly essential (and fragile) in the context of public safety and the government’s use of force. If residents feel alienated and oppressed as a result of misconduct by individual police officers and/or systematic patterns of discrimination, opportunities for collaboration to prevent, detect, and address crime and disorder become limited.
How’d They Do It?
Efforts to reform and rehabilitate Bogota’s police force have spanned several mayors and have included greater institutional oversight, sharing crime statistics with the public, revision of the police code of conduct, and community policing that reaches out specifically to estranged communities.
Building on those initiatives, the Human Rights Division set up a number of participatory working groups to identify trust gaps and create strategies for rebuilding police legitimacy. The effort was endorsed by police leadership and supported by non-governmental organizations. It began with an analysis of lawsuits and other complaints filed against the police, to identify patterns of discrimination, particularly around the use of force. These findings fed into engagement efforts at both the local and national level:
- Police created an expedited process for bringing stakeholders together to address sensitive incidents in an integrated, rapid way;
- Local police officers were designated as ‘citizen participation managers’ and tasked with engaging directly with residents to re-establish a perception of police officers as members of the community;
- There have been discussions on how to better engage Afro-descendent, indigenous and deaf communities, including efforts to show the police force’s own diversity and train officers in sign language; and
- Nationally, an ‘urgent case’ working group brought together the Ministry of Culture, Attorney General, Ombudsman and the National Police to examine and improve how the National Police and local communities relate to one another.