Kaizen Analytix Partners With the INITIATIVE to Launch CENTRAL, an Analytically Backed Community Policing Tool

ATLANTA, June 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As public concern intensifies over community-law enforcement relationships around the nation, a high-profile coalition of community leaders, police professionals and academic experts dubbed The Initiative is working with Atlanta-based Kaizen Analytix to launch CENTRAL™ (patent pending), a data and analytics platform designed to measure police department effectiveness in community policing and ultimately build stronger connections with local public safety agencies.

THE INITIATIVE: Advancing the Blue and Black Partnership ("THE INITIATIVE"), an organization committed to healing the community-police relationship and building healthier communities, tapped Kaizen to develop and help launch "CENTRAL" as an analytics platform designed to assess police agency's community policing practices, provide credibility, and allow command staff to identify opportunities for growth. By combining an analytical approach with input from local leaders, communities, and law enforcement leaders, CENTRAL is standardized, scalable, and measurable.

Community policing is seen by many as a solution to an age-old problem that has reached a boiling point in recent years. Community policing involves police agencies fostering trust and a positive relationship between officers and the community. "To build trust with anybody, you have to build relationships," said Chief Mathis in a recent interview with NPR, WABE's Rose Scott. This trust has deteriorated over time, even more so recently with technological advances allowing tragedies to be seen in detail by millions. Philosophy is not as simple as it seems, so CENTRAL is there to simplify the implementation and evaluation process. As Executive Director of The Initiative, Nadine Jones, said in the same interview, "we broke it down into three main categories: officer training, organizational development, and community engagement."  

When police agencies make the decision to evaluate their community policing, the process begins with a confidential online questionnaire. Within a day of completion, the user gains access to the CENTRAL dashboards and scorecards showing their scaled evaluation in the three main categories mentioned above. Here agencies are able to dive deep into their strength and weaknesses as well as compare themselves to other agencies locally and nationally. Results from other agencies are anonymized and aggregated, and statistics from the FBI's UCR database can also be analyzed in comparison. From here, The Initiative offers to provide the agency with tools and recommendations to help increase their score. Through the utilization of CENTRAL, the goal is for agencies to improve their score and eventually achieve a score they're proud of.

CENTRAL offers police agencies access to unique community policing benchmark data that is not available anywhere else. "By combining data from The Initiative's proprietary survey alongside crime statistics and demographic data, CENTRAL provides actionable insights to agencies to improve community policing practices," said Bobby Falconer, Senior Direct of Business Analytics Consulting at Kaizen. The next phase of the project, CENTRAL Plus™ (patent pending), incorporates the voice of the community into CENTRAL to gain an even deeper perspective on how police agencies and the community view community policing practices.

Kaizen is proud to power the dashboards and analytics behind CENTRAL. Our mantra is "continuous improvement", and that does not have to only apply to analytics. By combining our tools with those of The Initiative, there is a hope that every police agency in the nation can strive for continuous improvement as well.

About Kaizen Analytix

Kaizen Analytix LLC is an analytics products and services company that gives clients unmatched speed to increased revenues, reduced costs, and maximized margins through advanced analytics solutions and actionable business insights. Working from client and industry data, Kaizen combines its proprietary KaizenValueAccelerators™, data, and data from KaizenDataLabs™ with proven analytics subject matter experts to rapidly deliver insights across the value chain, from Sales and Marketing to Operations and Finance. For more information, visit www.kaizenanalytix.com

About THE INITIATIVE

THE INITIATIVE: Advancing the Blue and Black Partnership was founded by a group of Howard University Alumni and friends committed to healing the community-police relationship and building healthier communities. THE INITIATIVE identifies and funds programs that bring police and diverse communities together, intending to build productive relationships. THE INITIATIVE's approach involves partnering with stakeholders to evolve legal and institutional practices and implement scalable solutions that create systemic change in policing practices. Visit https://theblueandblackpartnership.org for more information.

Press Contact: [email protected] 

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SOURCE Kaizen Analytix