Zencity Public Safety Confidence Index

The National Policing Institute partnered with Zencity to analyze large-scale community feedback data collected through digital channels. The project uses advanced weighting techniques to produce meaningful indices of sentiment and safety for community members across the United States.

Project Overview

The Zencity Project provides law enforcement agencies, local governments, and communities with a new way to understand perspectives on law enforcement at scale. Traditional surveys often suffer from low response rates and limited reach. By contrast, Zencity gathers thousands of resident voices each quarter from a diverse set of digital platforms. NPI’s role is to clean, analyze, visualize, and publish these data to ensure the findings are shared with a larger audience.

Through this collaboration, NPI is developing a set of indices—covering areas such as public sentiment and safety/security—that allow agencies to track trends over time and better align their policies, training, and community engagement strategies with resident concerns.

Methodology

Survey data are first cleaned and harmonized across quarterly cycles. This involves standardizing demographic variables, recoding responses, and aligning question formats across datasets. NPI applies statistical weights to adjust for under- and over-represented groups, ensuring that results accurately reflect the broader community.

Related measures—such as fairness, transparency, and officer approachability—are combined into indices. These indices are scaled into accessible 0–100 scores, allowing for straightforward interpretation by both agencies and community members. Analyses are stratified by state, region, race, and other demographics to uncover disparities and highlight areas for improvement.

Results

The Zencity Project has produced comprehensive, population-weighted indices of community sentiment and perceptions of policing. Early findings indicate meaningful differences across regions and demographic groups, highlighting areas where police-community trust is strong and where it needs attention.

By providing timely, data-driven insights, the project empowers agencies to tailor community engagement, improve service delivery, and track progress over time. The approach also demonstrates how innovative data sources, combined with rigorous statistical methods, can complement traditional survey tools in understanding public safety and trust.