Sound conduct by police improves community interactions, enhances communication, and promotes shared responsibility for addressing crime and disorder. Police departments can repair and strengthen community relationships by understanding and training officers on three key concepts: procedural justice, bias reduction, and racial reconciliation.

Community policing works where law enforcement agencies work closely and collaboratively with their communities. Building strong relationships, finding common ground across political lines, using social media to tell police stories, and building trust through transparency is central to this process.

Police departments have developed many community policing programs and events that bring police and com-munity members together to interact in positive ways; some of the longest-established include Police Athletic Leagues (PAL), National Night Out, and Coffee with a Cop.

A new study from researchers at Rutgers University–Newark, Yale University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology titled "A Field Experiment on Community Policing and Police Legitimacy," shows that positive, non-enforcement contact between uniformed police officers and community members can improve public perceptions of police.