“The National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice is designed to improve relationships and increase trust between communities and the criminal justice system. It also aims to advance the public and scholarly understandings of the issues contributing to those relationships. In September 2014, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice has awarded the National Network for Safe Communities, through John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a three-year, $4.75 million grant to launch a National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice.  The National Initiative is led by Professor David Kennedy, with Dr. Tracie Keesee as project manager, and John Jay College President Jeremy Travis, Professor Tracey Meares and Dr. Tom Tyler of Yale Law School, Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff of UCLA, and Dr. Nancy La Vigne and Dr. Jocelyn Fontaine of the Urban Institute are principal partners. The National Initiative will highlight three areas that hold great promise for concrete, rapid progress:

• Reconciliation facilitates frank conversations between communities and law enforcement that allow them to address historic tensions, grievances, and misconceptions between them and reset relationships.
• Procedural justice focuses on how the characteristics of law enforcement interactions with the public shape the public’s views of the police, their willingness to obey the law, and actual crime rates.
• Implicit bias focuses on how largely unconscious psychological processes can shape authorities’ actions and lead to racially disparate outcomes even where actual racism is not present.”