OnPolicing Blog

Despite many technological innovations in policing over the past three decades, the profession remains rooted in face-to-face interactions between officers and community members. The mainstay of policing is still officers responding in person to a call for service and interacting with a community member. These interactions, occurring every day in communities large and small across the nation, have profound impacts on the perceptions of police agencies. Many of the outcomes chiefs care most about, trust, legitimacy, cooperation, and safe resolutions, are shaped less by any single policy decision and more by what happens repeatedly in thousands of routine interactions. That reality presents a leadership challenge. Even strong agencies can struggle to answer basic operational questions with confidence: Are our everyday encounters consistently professional and respectful across units and shifts? Which officer behaviors reliably support voluntary cooperation? Where do interactions most commonly become tense, and what can we do about it?

NPI’s Rapid Performance Assessment (RPA), powered by Polis TrustStat™ technology, exists to help agencies answer those questions with clarity and speed, using an information source most departments already have: body-worn camera (BWC) video.

Why interaction quality is a core performance issue

A large body of research shows that people’s perceptions of the police are heavily influenced by the fairness of the process, whether they feel listened to, treated with dignity, and dealt with in a transparent and impartial way1. Those perceptions are closely tied to legitimacy and can shape willingness to cooperate with officers and comply during encounters. The benefits of sustained positive perceptions of local law enforcement go well beyond an ivory-tower aspiration; they provide tangible benefits for both officers and community members. For example, both the police and the community want interactions free of conflict or discord. Higher-quality encounters can reduce escalation and improve investigative cooperation. Consistent professionalism also supports officer confidence and reduces the cumulative stress that comes from repeated conflict-laden encounters.

Police leaders have long understood this intuitively. The challenge has been building a practical system to see patterns, not just outliers, and to translate those patterns into training, coaching, and operational adjustments.

What the Rapid Performance Assessment is—and what it is not

The RPA is a structured review of a sample of BWC videos designed to produce a clear picture of the agency’s performance in everyday interactions. Understanding the big picture of officer-community interactions has traditionally been achieved using isolated data points, such as complaints and direct observations from supervisors. The RPA systematically examines observable behaviors by officers and community members and then summarizes findings in three easy-to-understand lenses:

• Trust (officer trust-building behaviors)
• Compliance/Cooperation (community-member responsiveness and cooperation)
• Overall interaction challenge (a holistic view of the difficulty of encounters, informed by behavior and context)

The RPA is not intended to be a disciplinary dragnet or surveillance tool. It is best understood as operational intelligence for performance improvement, much like professional sports teams use analytics to identify patterns and drive learning. This orientation matters because the RPA’s value depends on organizational trust: if officers view the effort as a “gotcha” program, leaders will get resistance instead of improvement. When agencies position the RPA as a learning-and-coaching tool, they can use it to reinforce professionalism, recognize strong performance, and support supervisors with concrete coaching points.

What leaders can expect to learn from an RPA

The RPA is structured to answer three practical questions that map directly onto executive decision-making:

1. What do our interactions look like overall? In broad terms, how often are encounters smooth versus challenging?
2. What behaviors drive outcomes? Which officer behaviors tend to build trust, and what early community behaviors predict difficulty?
3. Where should we focus our attention? How do patterns differ across organizational units, geography, call types, and other operational breakouts?

That structure is important. Many agencies have robust data on crime, calls for service, response times, and uses of force. But those indicators rarely capture the “how” of police work at scale. The RPA provides a leadership-ready bridge between outcomes (complaints, force, injuries, cooperation) and the behaviors and conditions that shape those outcomes in real time.

Turning idle video into a performance improvement system

Most agencies have made significant investments in BWCs, yet footage is typically used in narrow ways: case evidence, critical incidents, or complaint investigations. The RPA’s premise is straightforward: BWC videos become more valuable when used as a structured learning asset rather than solely as an evidentiary record. This is the critical distinction: the RPA is designed to help agencies build a repeatable feedback loop from everyday practice to training and supervision.

The behaviors that matter are coachable—and often small

One of the most actionable contributions of an RPA is its ability to move past broad concepts like “professionalism” and identify specific behaviors that can be coached, reinforced, and built into training and field supervision.

Trust-building behaviors often include practical actions such as active listening, demonstrating empathy, providing clear explanations, and offering support. These are not abstract ideals; they are concrete behaviors that can be practiced, observed, and reinforced.

Equally important is identifying early signals that an encounter may become difficult. The RPA is designed to highlight recurring patterns in the opening moments of encounters, precisely the point at which tactical communication and de-escalation choices can influence the trajectory.

How the RPA supports executive priorities

Police executives typically need tools that align with multiple priorities at once, such as public trust, officer safety, operational effectiveness, training return on investment, and accountability. The RPA is designed to support all of these when implemented with the right perspective.

Strengthening legitimacy through consistent practice

The RPA helps agencies locate where trust-building elements are used consistently and where they are not, so leaders can focus resources on the areas with the greatest improvement potential.

Improving de-escalation readiness in routine calls

Many agencies train de-escalation as a specialized skill set. In practice, the need for de-escalation often emerges during everyday calls, often quickly and sometimes without obvious warning. By identifying patterns in interactions that become tense, and by highlighting effective communication behaviors, the RPA helps agencies make de-escalation more operational: a normal expectation supported by coaching and examples, not just a training block.

Supporting supervisors with a concrete coaching framework

Front-line supervisors are often asked to correct performance problems with limited time and inconsistent information. The RPA can provide a shared language for coaching: specific behaviors to reinforce, patterns to watch for, and examples of strong performance to emulate. When agencies use the RPA to recognize what is going right, alongside identifying improvement opportunities, they can create a healthier performance culture that aligns accountability with professional growth.

Making training investments more targeted

Training divisions are routinely asked to “fix” broad issues with limited bandwidth. A common failure mode is trying to address everything at once. The RPA supports a more strategic approach: focus on a small set of high-impact behaviors, embed them in scenarios, reinforce them through field training and supervision, and then evaluate whether field practice is shifting.

What implementation looks like for a police executive

From an executive standpoint, the RPA should be treated as a managed change effort, not merely an analysis project. Successful implementations typically include:

• Clear purpose and guardrails: state up front that the goal is organizational learning and improvement, not discipline.
• Stakeholder alignment: engage labor leadership, supervisors, training, and internal affairs early so the effort is understood and not mischaracterized.
• Operational context: pair findings with an understanding of call types, workload, and community conditions so patterns are interpreted appropriately.
• Action planning: translate findings into a practical plan (training updates, supervisory coaching guides, recognition strategies, and targeted support for high-demand areas).

The bottom line: better visibility enables better leadership

Police leaders are accountable for outcomes they cannot fully control, public sentiment, social conditions, and the volatility of human behavior. But leaders can influence the consistency and quality of how their organization exercises authority.

The Rapid Performance Assessment is designed to provide an executive-level view of that reality: how officers and community members engage, where interactions become difficult, and what specific practices can be coached and reinforced to improve outcomes. Done well, it becomes a leadership asset: a practical system for turning everyday encounters into organizational learning.

In a profession where legitimacy is earned interaction by interaction, the most effective agencies are those that build a culture of continuous improvement around what matters most, the quality of their contact with the public. The RPA is one way to operationalize that commitment.