Most police agencies can tell you exactly what happened last quarter — how many calls came in, how fast they responded, how many cases were cleared. What they can’t always tell you is how their community feels about it. The Edmonton Police Service decided that wasn’t good enough, and set out to bring community voice into their strategic plan as more than a checkbox. Here’s how they’re doing it.
The Gap Between Crime Data and Community Reality
Law enforcement agencies have always been data-driven: crime statistics indicate what happened, response times show how fast you reacted, and clearance rates tell you how often cases were solved.
None of those numbers tell you how residents feel about public safety in their neighborhood. None of them tell you whether trust is rising or falling, whether a specific community is feeling heard or ignored, or whether a new policing strategy is landing the way leadership intended.
Edmonton Police Service (EPS) recognized this gap. They had an annual perception survey — most agencies do — but as Brian Harker, EPS Director of Strategy and Innovation, described it, that approach only provided a snapshot. “It wasn’t enabling us to really dig in and understand how those things were trending and changing.” The results arrived once a year, went into the annual report, and by the time leadership could act on them, the moment had often passed.
EPS decided to do something different: treat community trust not as a byproduct of good policing, but as a strategic outcome — one that deserved the same rigor, the same data infrastructure, and the same accountability as any other priority in their strategic plan.
Starting With Strategy: Building Community Voice Into the Plan
That commitment was put to the test when EPS began designing its 2027–2030 strategic plan.
The process was deliberately inclusive. EPS held a full-day strategic offsite with approximately 100 leaders, alongside members of their Police Commission. Harker’s team presented a comprehensive foundational dataset: an environmental scan of the current state of policing, a jurisdictional scan of where other services were heading, crime statistics, the financial picture, and frontline employee engagement feedback.
EPS also conducted extensive public engagement to inform the strategic plan — reaching residents directly through multiple channels. Within that broader effort, two data sources played a particularly distinct role in how community voice shaped the plan.
Broad, continuous citizen perception data from Zencity gave leadership a data-backed picture of how trust, perceived safety, and satisfaction with police services were trending across Edmonton’s districts — broken down by neighborhood, tracked over time, and updated on a regular cadence rather than once a year. This data directly informed the strategic offsite: where sentiment was shifting, which areas needed attention, and how community perception aligned — or didn’t — with what operational metrics were showing. As Harker put it, the Zencity data gave EPS the ability to understand “the trending and the ebbs and flows of community safety that are happening within our different communities” in a way their previous annual survey never could.
Deep, relationship-based insight from EPS’s five Community Advisory Councils add context that quantitative data alone can’t provide. Representing Indigenous communities, racialized and faith communities, 2SLGBTQ+ communities, Elders, and youth aged 16–22, each council was engaged separately during the planning process — sharing what they were hearing from their communities and where EPS needed to course-correct.
Gina Daus, EPS Director of Equity, Inclusion and Human Rights, emphasized that this wasn’t a one-way exercise. After collecting input, EPS followed up with each council to share where the process stood and how their feedback was being used: “We ensure that we do have that community engagement cycle where we’re listening, we’re taking what we can action, and then we’re making that visible for the council members so that they know that their contributions are valued.”
The result: a strategic plan shaped by operational data, financial realities, frontline perspectives, and community voice — both the broad, continuous signal from resident surveys and the deep, relationship-based insight from the communities EPS serves.
From Strategy to Accountability: Making Community Sentiment a Performance Metric
A strategic commitment to community trust only matters if you can track whether you’re delivering on it. That’s where most agencies stall. The strategy document says the right things, but there’s no continuous measurement system to hold anyone accountable.
Working with Zencity, EPS built that system.
They implemented a division-level community sentiment tracking capability that layers public safety perception data on top of geographic and operational data across Edmonton’s districts. Here’s what that changes in practice:
Before: A branch commander might know that calls for service were up 5% in a given area, that staffing levels were on track, and that crime stats were trending in the right direction. What they didn’t know was whether residents in that same area felt safer — or whether a particular incident, a shift in local demographics, or a media story had quietly eroded the trust their team had spent months building.
After: Branch inspectors have access to regular community sentiment survey data broken down by area — tracking perception of safety, satisfaction with police services, confidence in response, and trust over time. The numbers don’t replace judgment. They inform it.
And the data doesn’t just serve scheduled reporting cycles. Harker described Zencity as one of the first sources EPS turns to when ad hoc requests come in from their council or commission: “We have this consistent stream of public perception that’s searchable within a platform that we can really easily identify what citizens are thinking in relation to targeted initiatives.” It’s become a tool for governance and political navigation — not just performance management.
"We have this consistent stream of public perception that's searchable within a platform that we can really easily identify what citizens are thinking in relation to targeted initiatives."
The Performance Management Workflow in Practice
For EPS, the Zencity performance management workflow runs roughly as follows:
- Continuous listening — Zencity monitors publicly available community conversations across digital channels, categorizing mentions related to public safety, police interaction, crime concern, and community trust by area and topic.
- Regular pulse and safety surveys — Targeted, representative resident surveys go out on a monthly cadence, capturing structured sentiment data on key performance dimensions: perceived safety, satisfaction with police services, trust in the department, and responsiveness.
- Neighborhood mapping — Sentiment data is layered geographically, allowing EPS leadership to see not just citywide trends but how trust and perception vary district by district, neighborhood by neighborhood
- AI-assisted insight synthesis — Rather than requiring analysts to manually sift through data, Zencity’s AI surfaces the most significant trends, flags shifts that require attention, and generates plain-language summaries that go directly into leadership briefings.
- Performance reporting — Community sentiment metrics are incorporated into EPS’s regular performance reporting cadence, sitting alongside traditional operational metrics — because the department has made a deliberate decision that how residents feel about their police service is as important a performance indicator as how many calls were cleared.
- Advisory council validation — As EPS executes against its 2027–2030 strategic plan, the advisory councils will continue to play an active role — reviewing progress, providing feedback on whether initiatives are landing, and helping leadership understand whether the numbers match the reality on the ground.
The Engagement Balance: Digital Data and Human Relationships
What makes EPS’s approach especially effective is the deliberate pairing of continuous digital data with sustained human relationships.
The five Community Advisory Councils aren’t symbolic bodies. They meet regularly with EPS leadership, participate in hands-on learning events, and feed directly into both strategic planning and ongoing performance evaluation. A Police Commissioner sits on the Chief’s Community Council, building a direct governance relationship. And EPS periodically brings all councils together for shared learning, strengthening connections across communities.
Daus also noted a practical benefit that’s easy to overlook: reducing engagement fatigue. Every time an advisory council convenes, members are taking time away from work and family. Having continuous digital sentiment data means EPS doesn’t have to rely solely on those in-person meetings for every insight — freeing up council time for the deeper, more strategic conversations where human relationships matter most.
When Rising Crime Is a Sign That Trust Is Working
One of the most counterintuitive — and most important — insights from EPS’s work with community sentiment data involves the relationship between trust and reported crime.
As Harker explained, EPS actually expects reported crime rates to increase as trust grows. The reason: when communities don’t trust police, crimes go unreported. As trust builds, people become more comfortable coming forward.
The challenge is narrative. If crime stats spike and you can’t explain why, it looks like failure. But when you can show that trust metrics are rising in parallel, the story changes entirely — more reporting is a sign that the relationship is working, not that safety is deteriorating.
This is a measurement capability that simply didn’t exist before continuous sentiment tracking. And it’s one of the clearest examples of why community voice belongs alongside crime statistics in any performance dashboard — not as a “soft” metric, but as essential context for interpreting the hard numbers.
The Bigger Picture
EPS didn’t wait for a mandate to start measuring community trust. They decided it mattered, built the infrastructure to track it, and wove it into how they plan and how they hold themselves accountable.
The shift from assumption to data doesn’t require a cultural revolution. It requires the right infrastructure — and a decision to hold community input to the same standard as every other metric you already track.
Zencity powers the work of policing with community voices — giving public safety leaders continuous, neighborhood-level insight into community sentiment so strategic plans are built on what residents actually experience and performance is measured by what matters most.
To learn how Zencity can support your agency, get in touch with our team.
