With today’s changing cultural environment, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) understands its need to redefine their relationship with the community while creating a proactive strategy to serve the region’s rapidly growing population.
There’s no tip-toeing around the fact that addressing the shifting cultural ideals surrounding police forces in the United States is a sensitive subject. But we need to commend CMPD’s vigilance to creating a better connection within their community by creating a plan for a transparent police force.
We’ve been working with CMPD during the past year on the long-tail view on how they can shift the way they run their organization while better serving their community to reduce crime during a time of population growth. As we helped guide them to update their plan for year two, here are a few cool takeaways we gathered from our week-long working sessions:
- They’re evolving their original plan, not redoing all of it. As they enter the second year of their strategic plan, CMPD looked at what was working, what wasn’t, and gained consensus on what needs to be accomplished differently this year versus last year.
- They’ve been reviewing performance. CMPD did an outstanding job reviewing both organizational and individual performance throughout the year. This empowered their organization to come to these planning sessions prepared and engaged with important information.
- They brought in other city municipalities to collaborate. One of the coolest aspects of their planning sessions was bringing in other city municipalities to collaborate on crime issues that were simply out of CMPD’s control. This allowed both CMPD and the City to have a holistic view of what each different city municipality needs to accomplish to decrease crime in Charlotte.
It was a great week working with CMPD on updating their plan. We’re excited to see the results and organizational change because of their second year in planning and execution!
