Written testimony of Nicholas Turner, president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice, on the topic of building trust and legitimacy between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve, submitted on January 9, 2015 to the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Turner discusses how trust between police and communities h...
What “Baby Hope” Teaches Us About Immigrant Victims and Witnesses of Crime
Someone was empowered to speak up. In New York City, home to what many claim to be the most opinionated voices in the country, we often take for granted that people will talk—that they’ll share their stories, scream out during an emergency, and tell it like it is. But in the case of “Baby Hope,” it took two decades for someone, an anonymous tipster...
Storm Lake is a town of 13,000 people in northwestern Iowa. I became the police chief in October 1989 just as our town was reaching a demographic tipping point. At first, change came slowly in the late 1970’s with the arrival of small groups of immigrants from Laos and various Latin American countries. But by the early 1990’s, it just exploded, tra...
Promising Practices from the Field
Today, approximately 40 million foreign-born people live in the United States, seven million of whom arrived within the past eight years. Because very little is known about how most police agencies nationwide work with immigrant communities, in 2010, Vera’s Center on Immigration and Justice partnered with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of ...
The United States is becoming increasingly diverse as people emigrate from around the world seeking opportunities. The multicultural society this is generating presents new challenges for law enforcement. Recent immigrants can be both more vulnerable to crime and less likely to report it to law enforcement. Local police departments often feel blind...
