NASW Social Justice Brief: Reimagining Policing

Course Details

Course Description

The course content was developed around the recent 2020 NASW Social Justice Brief titled “Reimagining Policing: Strategies for Community Reinvestment,” which explores pre-arrest diversion and innovative approaches to 911 emergency responses in the United States. The overarching purpose of this brief is to reinforce the fact that an undisputable culture of racism plagues law enforcement agencies throughout the country. This objective is strongly associated with the need to discuss, analyze, and make recommendations on police reform models that can have a mitigating impact on reducing police encounters that are disproportionately injurious and lethal to communities of color.

The NASW Social Justice Brief discusses effective models for reinvesting part of law enforcement budgets in community-based psychosocial programs—with an objective of redirecting and reinvesting budget dollars aimed at reducing the frequency of police encounters in the course of preventing low-level crimes. To complete this course, participants read the 20-page brief, view a short web-based video clip, and pass the online posttest with a score of 80% or better to print a certificate of completion.

Target Audience

This course was written for social workers, behavioral health practitioners, and other service providers who are interested in how policing might be reformed in a manner that has other professionals (including social workers) assuming some of the roles and responsibilities that police currently hold.

Learning Objectives

After completing the course, registrants will be able to do the following:

Briefly describe the history of policing in America and how that has led to the current demands for comprehensive police reform.
Briefly describe recent examples of models already being used in the US such as the systemic change models, the community reinvestment model, the Colorado reinvestment model, and pre-arrest diversion models and services intervention.
Identify key factors in implementing police social work within and outside of police departments, implementing crisis intervention training (CIT) programs, and rethinking 911 emergency response.
Identify NASW recommendations moving forward, along with related resources.