San Diego Police Department Partners with Zencity to Increase Community Trust

San Diego – the 8th largest city in the US – takes a major leap forward to increase police accountability by teaming up with Zencity – and we couldn’t be more excited!

Last week, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and Chief of Police David Nisleit announced a new partnership between the San Diego Police Department and Zencity. Its goal: to better understand the trust and public safety issues that are important to the City’s 1.39 million residents.

Through a series of online surveys created, distributed, and analyzed by Zencity, San Diegans will be able to anonymously voice their opinions on neighborhood safety and their sentiment towards police. The survey will take only a few minutes of their time, be available in seven languages, and will reach residents where they are: online. The survey results will then become part of a public dashboard that will help keep the San Diego Police Department more responsive and accountable to the communities they serve. 

In speaking about the new partnership during a joint press conference, Police Chief David said:

This survey allows us to engage and collaborate with our community in new ways. It will help us understand how residents across San Diego feel about police in their communities, make improvements based on that feedback, and monitor how that sentiment changes over time.

You can read more about the announcement and the joint press conference here.  

That announcement comes on the heels of another exciting announcement from the Seattle Police Department last month. In order to reach a broader range of voices in the community, Seattle Police Department is using Zencity’s survey solutions to help identify the issues of most importance to their residents. More than that, in a great step towards accountability, Seattle Police Department will be publishing data gathered by Zencity on a public dashboard. Seeking to reach a broader range of voices in the community, SPD will start utilizing Zencity’s survey solutions to help identify which areas are of greatest concern to residents. 

These partnerships, with the 8th and 18th largest cities in the United States respectively, are an important milestone for Zencity—and for me personally—as they bring us one step closer to the mission Ido and I had in mind when we founded Zencity. That mission was to spark and support a global effort to improve the lives of people around the world by enabling the governments that serve them to be more aligned to community sentiment and priorities. Today we can both be proud to say — along with a team of over 100 talented and passionate professionals across the world — that we are doing just this.

At a time when there’s a growing demand among communities to have their governments be more responsive to their needs, and to be publicly transparent and accountable, I think it’s important to take a moment to applaud both cities’ leadership for not only tackling policing and public safety in partnership with residents, but also for the transparency with which they launched their new community survey.

This is an exciting moment of growth for Zencity, one which builds on our merger earlier this year with Elucd, and which I hope will inspire other cities and police departments across the country to listen more closely to their residents’ voices and to do so publicly and transparently. I’m proud of the incredible work the team at Zencity has done in helping cities achieve their goals, and am hopeful for the role of residents in the policing of the future.

We are honored to add the San Diego Police Department to our list of law enforcement agencies from across the U.S. that are already leveraging Zencity to connect with community members and better understand resident concerns. More than that, we are proud partners in helping these police departments and the forward-thinking leadership of SDPD take a more public-facing approach to understanding community concerns.