Budgets and websites matter! An examination of police communication of community engagement in Southern California

Abstract

Failure of police departments to authentically engage community members in public safety efforts are often linked to the crime problem, racial injustice, police brutality, distrust between police and minority community members, and fear of crime (Dumas et al., 2021; Skogan, 2008), yet efforts at citizen engagement, mostly under the community policing philosophy, have taken various forms and yielded inconsistent results (Bradford et al., 2009; Gascón and Roussell, 2019; Lloyd and Foster, 2009; Lockey et al., 2019). As the United States reckons with a year of political unrest and widespread protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder, examining how police agencies communicate engagement with their constituencies takes on renewed importance. Southern California, an area with a long history of problematic police community relations and local efforts at community policing (Gascón and Roussell, 2019; Jones and Wiseman, 2001), offers one window to view this communication. This study uses police websites and budget documents in several Southern California cities to analyze the police department’s efforts to communicate with their constituencies. The history of demands for policing reform includes a common thread, the excessive use of force by police especially in minority communities that lead to a lack of trust from communities and the weakening of legitimacy for agencies. The President’s Task Force on