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Imagine if police officers handed out customer survey cards?
The thought occurred to Virginia Commonwealth University Police Chief John Venuti a few years ago amid the national outcry over police shootings of unarmed Black men. So in 2019, he instituted a new policy: The department’s officers would hand out business cards after every encounter, be it a traffic or foot patrol stop, or a simple conversation in the street.
Then earlier this year, Venuti took the program a step further, partnering with an upstart company in Northern Virginia, Guardian Score, to issue “Score Your Police Encounter” cards with a QR code that allows civilians to rate their interactions with officers. It’s a novel concept — only two other police departments in the United States use the program — that Venuti says aligns with the department’s reform-minded policing efforts.
The idea, says Guardian Score co-founder Burke Brownfield, is to shift the focus of performance evaluations away from arrests and writing tickets to how officers interact with the community.
The Guardian Score survey includes questions such as “How would you rate the officer’s listening skills?” and “How fairly did you feel that you were treated by the officer?” They are all built around the idea of promoting unbiased policing and procedural justice.
The cards provide instant feedback, Venuti says, and they are used to help gauge how the department’s 95 officers are performing. From Jan. 15, when the cards were first issued, through May 3, VCU Police handed out more than 1,100 cards, with a little more than 200 returned. So far, the vast majority of the ratings have been positive, according to the police chief.
“Feedback is a really, really important aspect of policing,” Venuti says. “There is a not big organization that is growing, improving, changing [and] adapting that doesn’t use feedback to drive that process. We’re no different.”
