Across the United States, including in San Diego where the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice (Kroc IPJ) launched the Building Trust Partnership (BTP), relationships between communities and law enforcement are strained and plagued by mistrust. To build relationships and restore trust between police and communities while confronting difficult, emotionally and politically charged issues, religious leaders must engage with both sides and remain neutral, even when speaking to one may be interpreted as violating the trust of the other.
Our assumption at the outset of the BTP was that faith leaders would be drawn from and deeply rooted in the community and would therefore already have the backing and trust of its members. Police, perceiving these religious leaders as aligned with the community, and perhaps even as antipolice, would view these individuals and their actions with skepticism. In order for clergy to play a pivotal role in bringing police and community members together to build trust in such a context, the project would need to establish or strengthen the relationships of some religious leaders with police but could rely on the resilience of their credentials within the community.
What we have found instead since initiating the BTP is the extent to which faith leaders have had to continually weigh the effects of their actions on relationships in the other direction — with the community.
For law enforcement, working with faith leaders is a well-established strategy to strengthen connections with the community and build support for their policing efforts.
Attached, please find the University of San Diego's Kroc Institute Hall of Peace and Justice newsletter, Kroc Insight, with their post, Look Both Ways: Religious Leaders and the Challenge of Engaging Community and Police.
Comments (0)