In the spring of 2021, Police Departments across the nation found themselves at the center of a crisis due to the abhorrent, hateful, and inhumane actions of certain police officers. SMU MADI believed that there couldn’t be a more critical time to apply a Human-Centered Design lens to the very dynamic area of Procedural Justice. As a whole, the Spring 2021 design studio approached Procedural Justice as a framework developed by the Department of Justice in which police seek to build fair processes and improve the quality and perception of fairness within community interactions. Experiences of Procedural Justice are seen through four pillars: 

1. Dignity and respect 

2. Voice 

3. Neutrality and transparency 

4. Trustworthiness 

As a studio, each of us reflected personally on our beliefs and stances on this extremely heavy topic while we worked directly to design and define for the Dallas Police Department what an improved procedural justice experience might entail. Our team began our secondary research into relevant topics and information. Secondary research is an important part of the MADI process, as it allows us to build out a contextual framework surrounding both the client and the problem statement. This led us to first examine the meaning and motive behind the term “procedural justice”. By examining statements from multiple police departments, training guidelines, and even documents from President Obama, our team was able to better clarify the environment that this term lived in, as well as the relevant actions that have been taken in order to produce it.

A better understanding of procedural justice led us to define multiple avenues that we felt passionate about expanding into. These avenues were chosen not only by our research within procedural justice but by our first interview with Chief Anderson and Shaw. Through this interview, we were able to pull out aspects of procedural justice that piqued our interest, and wanted to do more research into. These categories include communication strategies, complaints, community engagement, and procedural justice training.

Communication Strategies: Police officers are often cast in a negative light when it comes to the media. This fact was confirmed by both Chief Anderson and Chief Shaw. They also lamented about how the positivity of the police force goes unnoticed and unseen. This led us to look into the DPD’s communication platforms and outlets, to try to understand what could be done better from the department's viewpoint. We also wanted to hear the media's take on this relationship, so we began to reach out to news outlets to get their take on police action as well.

Complaints: One of the shocking takeaways our team had from our initial interview was that the vast amount of citizen reports was due to discourtesy from officers. Respect and voice are key pillars in procedural justice, so we wanted to dive deeper into this issue. We did so by going over presentations and reports filed by police officers from past years to understand what and why these reports were occurring, and what actions were taken to amend them. We learned how these complaints were sent to the police oversight board for review and then were dealt with from there.

Community Engagement: When talking with Chief Anderson and Shaw, we heard a strong emphasis on community engagement. This emphasis resounded within us as well, as we saw key advantages of the police having a stronger bond within the community. To further explore this, we researched the current means of how DPD is involved within the community, which officers were at the forefront of this connection, and areas that could be capitalized on in the future. This search was fruitful, as we learned that Neighborhood Police Officers (NPOs) were often the key players in enhancing community relationships and that they needed to be a key group to focus on later.

Procedural Justice Training: Our final topic of research was procedural justice training. To understand the context around procedural justice, understanding how officers were trained in this field was critical. To do this, we looked into DPD procedural justice practices and presentations. We also looked into national training guides, to understand how the Dallas Police Department stacked up in comparison. 

Over the 16-week project period, our team facilitated 12 hours of interviews with DPD employees, spent 32 hours shadowing with the Public Information Office (PIO), surveyed 81 individuals from the general public about social media, and spent 8 hours benchmarking other media’ team’s best practices. Through our research, our group of three recognized that the Media Relations team or the Public Information Office (PIO) at the Dallas Police Department (DPD) is an under-resourced department that is the main channel of communication that DPD has with the public.  

To sum up all the interviews, we saw that there were many similarities and contrasting opinions. The main similarity was that there are a lot of tasks that a PIO officer has to do ranging from releasing critical information to social media and engaging the public. However, the PIO team is very understaffed and resourced, and could not get everything done. 

After these key interviews, it became apparent that Dallas’ PIO team required a form of structural change within the office. To fully understand what we could do to help and understand how the office functioned, we needed to see it in person. We decided that we needed to set up a day where we could go to the office and shadow the employees to better understand everyone’s role, what their daily workload looked like, and what problems they ran into on a daily basis. We reached out to Sergeant Warren Mitchell, and he was happy to oblige.

We set a date, devised how we would operate within our time at the office, and created a clear set of questions that we needed answers to, in order to fully understand how we could improve the office. The major questions we wanted to understand were:

·       What was everyone’s role within the office?

·       What does a typical day look like?

·       How does the PIO office interact with the rest of the department?

·       What is their biggest barrier to success?

·       What functions well within the office?

With these questions in mind, we then met with the office. We spent eight hours going from person to person, asking questions, and going out into the field to see their work in action. From this, we learned a lot of information about the office.

Although we found a lot of things that could be improved or worked upon, there were a lot of great things happening as well. Everyone in the office was extremely passionate, proud, and motivated to do their jobs to the best of their ability, and they really believed that their work was improving the community.  Everyone also emphasized the importance of transparency within the department. Every person we talked to within the office reminded us how important communication is with the public, and the need to be open and honest with what they share with the citizens of Dallas.

The first major area that was apparent on arrival was that they simply did not have enough staff. After talking with Dustin Sternbeck, the Communication Director of the Metropolitan Police Department, and learning that his office had twenty-six full-time employees, we knew that the six employees the Dallas PIO employed simply were not enough. This lack of employees caused everyone’s efforts to be spread extremely thin to get everything accomplished on time.

The second area of improvement noticed was the lack of technological resources within the office. Everyone we talked to mentioned how much trouble they had communicating with the media because they had broken projectors, old laptops, and did not even have Wi-Fi in their office. This created a lot of embarrassment for the PIO because they often had issues during presentations and press conferences because of it.

The third issue we came across was role alignment within the office. Everyone in the office is working multiple roles and is overloaded with work simply because they are understaffed. Role alignment, a process of aligning skill sets with the appropriate workload, would allow the office to achieve more goals by narrowing the individual scope of everyone's work. Expertise is also something that became apparent to us when looking into role alignment. Since this is an informational office that deals with the public as well as the media, we expected some background in public relations, communications, or journalism, but that was not the case. Instead, practically everyone was self-taught and had no formal education in PR. This seemed like something that could be improved upon, so we dove deeper into this when coming up with possible solutions for the office.

We hypothesized that if DPD were to take control of the narrative and invest in the creation of proactive branding and messaging the organization could positively affect the overall public trust in the institution and better impact its overall goal of improving procedural justice within the department. 

 We designed a Development Plan for the PIO which included recommendations on:

• Organizational structure: Including additional staffing, clearly defined roles, and communications trained staff.

• Social media guidance: Creating appropriate visuals and strategy.

• Relationship-building techniques: Thinking of the local news as partners in getting information out to the public. 

• Resource expansion: Enabling the Media Relation’s (PIO) employees to function at a higher capacity.

Overall, the Development Plan we have created provides the department with a suggested PIO team structure, social media guidelines, suggested training opportunities, and steps on how to create a partnership with the local media in order to shape emerging narratives. How could this improve procedural justice for the DPD? Social media guidelines will give DPD a voice to tell their side of the story. Having a voice is one of the components of procedural justice. Additionally, effective communication and outreach will help ensure transparency between DPD and the community, which could lead to having the trust of the public. If the public trusts the DPD this could improve procedural justice. Finally, the organizational structure for the PIO office in the development plans could help the office to build a media relations team that is able to communicate stories with the public in an unbiased and transparent manner. Ensuring that DPD has a media relations team that is unbiased and transparent is a crucial component of improving procedural justice for the DPD.