The New Haven Police Academy uses an innovative approach to training that builds relationships between police and members of the community. K. Codish, the Department’s Director of Training and Education, created long-term, interactive, small group learning initiatives called term projects. These projects experiment with the arts as a way of developing empathy and problem solving skills, and creating occasions for constructive interaction between police and the community.

Susan Sturm was drawn to study and collaborate with the New Haven Police Academy because its approach resembled in important ways her work with Lani Guinier on building multi-racial learning communities. The police-community training emphasizes active learning to enable people to think differently about polarizing interactions. It creates opportunities for collaboration with other students, community members, and social service providers.
See operating principles.

This section of the website and guidebook are a result of her collaboration with K. Codish and the participants in the New Haven Police Academy. With Ellen Reynolds, Sturm made a videotape about the New Haven Police Department’s term project program.

Term projects are problem-solving collaborations that use art to create relationships among small, diverse groups of police students and members of the community. These groups are assigned a problem of mutual and pressing concern. They then work together over an extended period of time toward a common goal: a work of art that deepens understanding of the problem and its impact on police/community interaction. Police students have approximately 18 weeks to complete their project, and work is done simultaneously with the scheduled daily academy program.

	to enable diverse groups of police students and community members to interact constructively over time and to confront stereotypes that limit their capacity to work together;
	to develop cross-group relationships with potential long-term partners;
	to improve police students’ capacities to work effectively as a diverse team;
	to develop interdisciplinary research and problem solving skills;
	to broaden policing students’ understanding of complex problems they will encounter as officers and their empathy for those involved; and
	to create memorable images of their interaction and learning for police and community audiences that provide a catalyst for further problem solving

"Art allows people to see with new eyes. When you flip power around, and role plays is one of the best ways to do that, that’s one of the best ways to get people to understand power, that there IS power… To the extent to which you can flip things around, it can create a great space for thinking about how race and power and gender work." Professor Harlan Dalton, Yale Law School