Constitutional Policing
February 2015 
Voiceover: Beat Intro
00:00	
This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing 
topics facing our nation.
Nazmia Comrie
00:08	
Hello and welcome. My name is Nazmia Comrie and on behalf of the COPS Office, I’d like to introduce 
you to Deputy Chief Mike Bray of the Sacramento Police Department. Deputy Chief Mike Bray is here 
today to discuss Constitutional policing. 
Deputy Chief Bray, the mission statement and organizational values of the Sacramento Police 
Department are very community focused. How has your department created trust and collaboration 
between community residents and police officers?
Deputy Chief Mike Bray
00:33	
I think by focusing on a couple of things, one being transparency and two being trust. We’ve taken 
advantage of social media by broadcasting our information, our goings on of the police department, 
and we’ve done it wholeheartedly. We push out tons and tons of information to let the community, 
let our city, know what we’re doing. We push out not only crime information but the things that we do 
wrong and admitting fault and letting people know that sometimes we do stumble, but we’re very 
forthcoming with information. And we also take advantage of good things that our officers, our 
employees, do for the community and constantly letting the community know that we’re not just out 
to arrest and incarcerate. We’re trying to get away from that model. So we’re pushing out information 
constantly. We have thousands—over 20,000—Twitter followers, which is a pretty good size for an 
agency of less than 700 police officers. So we have a solid following with Twitter. We have about 20,000 
Facebook followers and we’ve taken advantage of LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, just about 
everything, to get information out and be as transparent as possible. 
And not only on social media but also when we have crimes or incidents going on in the city, we get 
out in front of the camera on a personal level. I get information out quickly. People aren’t sitting 
around wondering what happened and begging us for information and asking questions. So we try to 
take an offensive approach, getting out and letting people know information that is going on quickly, 
and so I think that’s important. We’ve also connected with our neighborhoods in a dramatic fashion 
the last year and a half. With the economic downturn in California, we were forced to lay off a lot of 
officers, a lot of employees. Part of that was our connection with our neighborhood watch. We had 
folks that run those and that, unfortunately, was a program that was cut. Last year we reconnected in 
trying to build back our neighborhood watch again to reach out to the community and let them know 
what we were doing. We connected with nextdoor.com which is quickly hooking up with lots of 
departments across the country. When we started last summer, we had 1200 existing nextdoor.com 
users in our city. We did a massive push throughout the entire city and now we have over 23,000 
households that are connected to nextdoor.com and that represents almost 90 percent of the 
neighborhoods within our city. So again, it’s pushing out information, connecting with neighborhoods 
on a personal level and on a social media level and that’s been very helpful for us. 
We’ve also established what we call our cops and clergy program to get to the trust part of the 
question. And that is reaching out to all the faith-based leaders, or as many faith based leaders as we 
can in our city, and trying to establish trust because unfortunately law enforcement, especially in 
communities of color, has been distrusted for decades. And so we recognize that and we’re trying to 
build that up. And this was done a couple of years ago, and we’re continuing to push the program, and 
it’s been very successful. We’ve connected with over 25 faith-based leaders within our city that all lead 
churches in communities of color. And again being very transparent, this is who were are, this is what 
we do, and this is why we do the things that we do and explaining our process to these pastors and 
these church leaders. We also bring them into our organization, and they come out, and faith-based 
leaders ride with our officers every other Friday night and they go out and they knock on doors and 
talk to people. And it represents a united front as to who we are, what we do, and the fact that we are 
connecting with communities of color through the faith-based leaders, who are generally recognized 
as trusted figures in their community. And so it’s been extremely helpful for us. 
We’ve also established—or, we developed—a cops and clergy academy. And so we did a 10-week 
program to bring in more faith-based leaders. And so we had 35 pastors complete our 10-week 
program, and they loved it. Again, they asked a lot of hard questions and we provided a lot of answers. 
But again, it opened eyes and opened the doors for both sides. So it’s been very helpful for them to 
see what we do and for us to connect with the community and helping connect. So it’s been very 
beneficial for us and it’s also going to, we hope, lead to down the path for recruitment and being a 
recruitment tool they can connect with their community to, again, explain what we do and why we do 
it and the fact that police officers and law enforcement in general are not bad. We’re not here to just 
to arrest and incarcerate people. 
Nazmia
04:54
Thank you. In what ways do reinforce your officer training and education to be reflective of the values 
of the community you serve?
Mike
05:02
If I can back up to the first question. Sorry. I have one last thing. 
Nazmia
05:04
Oh yes. Sorry. 
Mike
05:05
We’ve also established we’re going to a geographic policing model. And historically, we have rotated 
officers or allowed officers to sign up annually to the areas that they work. So they can pick the part of 
town, the shift, the days off based on seniority, and it’s been done for decades that they would 
rotate. So we what we have done is established a geographic policing model to put officers, sergeants, 
and lieutenants in specific geographic areas for two years now. And the whole concept is to push 
down the decision making to the supervisor/middle management level and allow officers to connect 
and have a deeper connection with their community for a two years period of time. And the idea is 
that they will connect with the business community, the schools, neighborhood watch, youth groups, 
things of this nature; to, again, form stronger connections. Again, the geographic policing model. 
Nazmia
05:57
In what ways do reinforce your officer training and education to be reflective of the values of the 
community you serve?
Mike
6:02
Our formalized training starts in our academy. With the economic downturn we lost a lot of officers. So 
now, we’re in a big hiring mode, so a good portion of our department is new and young. So they’re 
coming through our academy and we start our cultural diversity training, our cultural sensitivity 
training, in our academy. We also do what’s called a cultural immersion project which we copied 
from— I believe it was Austin, Texas—and we’ve been doing it five or six years now. We get a group 
of academy students. All of our academy recruits are divided up into groups, and they are tasked with 
going out in the community and finding diverse groups within the community, spending the day 
interviewing folks, exchanging ideas, learning about their culture, their faith, their culture, things that 
are important to them, and then coming back and doing projects and reporting back to our academy 
class. It’s been very successful in helping our folks gain a deeper understanding of our community. 
We also do cultural sensitivity and diversity training every couple years with our patrol staff. While we 
do it now, we could always do better. We could always get more training, more exposure to different 
cultures within our city. We’ve also established our core principles and our core values we hold 
important, and that’s professionalism and partnerships and prevention and intervention. And we’ve 
woven these principles into our academy training, our field training, our employee evaluations, and 
holding folks accountable and taking ownership of the protection of their communities that they’re 
assigned to. Again, we’re trying to move away from the arrest and incarcerate model over to valuing 
the importance of an absence of crime. And so we’re not looking for statistics on citations and things 
like an arrest. We’re looking for people who make meaningful connections in the community and 
providing prevention/intervention strategies. And we value and evaluate those things. 
Nazmia
07:54
Great. What role does tolerance for different people, culture, or viewpoint play in Constitutional 
policing?
Mike
08:01
It’s huge. We need to value everybody in our community. We need to understand who they are, 
where they’re coming from, what challenges that they face, and explain to them the way the 
Constitution is drafted and how we operate, how it’s the formation and the bedrock of what we do as 
police officers and make sure that they understand and take the time to establish some lines of 
communication and explain to people what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and not just go for the 
parole-probation-take people to jail model. Again, getting away from that, and taking the time to let 
people know we need to follow the law to enforce the law. 
Nazmia
08:41
Finally, in the wake of Ferguson, Missouri, how is policing being redefined?
Mike
08:46
As tragic as that incident is, there’s going to be a lot of good coming out of it. It’s highlighting some 
critical areas within law enforcement across the nation that are areas that we can do better. First and 
foremost, diversifying our organizations. It highlighted that fact that—the incident in Ferguson 
illuminated the fact that most law enforcement agencies are not reflective of their community 
percentage wise. We don’t have enough African-American employees and officers, or Asians, or 
Hispanics. And we need to do a better job of diversifying our organizations and recruiting people to 
mirror the communities that we serve, and that will go a long way of establishing trust. So I know most 
all agencies have made a concerted effort for decades to try and diversify. But we need to do better. 
We need to be more creative and to reach these qualified candidates and bring them into our 
organizations, and I think that will help establish some trust. It will help further trust within our 
communities. 
I think it also highlighted how transparent organizations are. And I touched on this earlier that it’s 
critical that we be transparent—we get out information as quickly as possible because the longer we 
sit on details of incidents, especially high profile incidents, it creates significant mistrust within our 
communities, and we need to get information out—good, bad, or indifferent, it needs to be out, and 
we need to let people know what we did, why we did it, and without jeopardizing the investigation, 
we need to get out the facts as quickly as we can to let people know what we’re doing. 
Ferguson also highlighted the issues that they had with dealing with large groups of people, mass 
arrests, civil disobedience. And so I think there’s going to be a re-examining of strategies and tactics 
and equipment and how we deal with groups of people who are committed to civil disobedience and 
demonstrating and the fact that we need to allow people to be able to express their first amendment 
rights and freedom of speech and we need to be able to allow them to do that but still maintain order 
and civility within the communities that we police. 
Nazmia
10:48
Thank you for your time and expertise today. 
Voiceover: Beat Exit
10:51	
The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. The COPS 
Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, 
developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems.
Voiceover: Disclaimer
11:08
The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official 
position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, 
products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. 
Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.