🔗 linkedin.com/in/dr-baron-a-dyer-646a4a18b

Research Focus: Institutional Trust • Government Policy • Organizational Change

“Perceptions and Realities in Policing: A Comprehensive Action Research Study on the Experiences of Police Officers within a BIPOC Community”

What research challenge did your dissertation address?

My research examined a problem that sits at the center of policing in America: the negative experiences police officers have when interacting with BIPOC communities and the role those officers’ own perceptions play in creating them. The profession has long been a flashpoint for questions about systemic bias, excessive force, and the breakdown of trust between law enforcement and communities of color. But there is surprisingly little research on the officer’s side of that equation. Specifically, how police officers perceive the communities they serve, and whether those perceptions can be changed.

My research focused on the officers. Through semi-structured interviews and an immersive community engagement initiative, I set out to understand what was shaping their views of a predominantly BIPOC downtown community — and then to create conditions where those views could shift. The goal was to help officers see past the accumulated weight of difficult calls and troubled encounters, and recognize the community for what it actually is: working families, neighbors, people living their daily lives.

What inspired you to pursue this research?

I have been in policing for over a decade and currently serve as a Sergeant. I have seen firsthand the assumptions officers carry into interactions with community members — assumptions built up over years of responding to people’s worst moments. A domestic call, a shooting, a drug arrest: that is the filter through which too many officers come to understand an entire neighborhood. And I understand how that happens. But I also grew up in a single parent household in communities that look a lot like the ones I now police. I have seen both sides.

What I kept coming back to was this: if officers only encounter a community during its worst moments, of course their perception of that community becomes distorted. The solution was not a lecture or a training module. It was experience — real, sustained, human contact outside the context of a call for service. My research was built on the belief that if you put officers in a community as people rather than enforcers, and give them enough time to actually get to know the residents, something changes. I wanted to study whether that was true.

What did your research find, and what is its impact?

The research found that experiential, immersive community engagement significantly changes how police officers perceive the communities they serve — but depth of participation matters.

In the first cycle of the study, I interviewed ten officers across ranks. Six consistent themes emerged: unfavorable views of the downtown area, a perception of general discontentment from residents during police encounters, the belief that media narratives and family conversations shaped community attitudes toward police before any individual interaction occurred, perceived issues with police presence in the community, a recognized need for mutual respect, and a genuine desire among officers for more personal engagement with residents. That last finding was the foundation for everything that followed.

In the second cycle, twelve officers participated in a sixteen-week community engagement initiative I designed and implemented with the support of the Chief of Police. Two officers at a time went into the downtown community on Friday and Saturday evenings — in uniform, in a marked cruiser — not to respond to calls, but simply to talk to people. Using conversation-starting questions I developed for the initiative, they stopped in at convenience stores and the local shopping plaza, introduced themselves, and asked residents about their lives, their neighborhoods, their histories. A monthly community clean-up, conducted in plain clothes, ran alongside the tours.

What officers found surprised many of them. Residents who were initially guarded became welcoming. Shop owners began greeting participants by name. Officers played basketball with children. One officer sat outside with a homeowner and shared a meal. The community (which many officers had described in Cycle 1 as high-crime, troubled, and unwelcoming) turned out to want more police presence, not less. What residents did not want was police who only showed up when something went wrong.

The impact was real, but it was not uniform. Officers who completed three or more engagement tours reported transformative shifts in perception, seeing the community as family-oriented and hardworking, carrying what they learned back into their daily work on patrol. Those who participated only once or twice had transactional rather than transformative experiences: they saw something different, but it did not stick the same way. That finding carries its own practical implication: sustained engagement is what produces sustained change.

“My research demonstrates that the trust deficit between police and communities isn’t fixed — it’s produced by institutional conditions that can be redesigned. That’s not just a policing insight. It’s a governance insight with implications for any institution that claims to serve the public.”

Baron Dyer

“I feel changed by this experience,” one participant said after completing multiple tours. “I’m a better cop because I got to interact with the people here — seeing families with their children just living their everyday lives.”

The officers who found the study most impactful continue to be positively affected by it. They developed genuine rapport with community members and carry that understanding into every interaction they have in that area today. That is the ultimate measure of whether this kind of work succeeds: not what officers report in a feedback session, but how they show up the next day.

Fulbright Specialist Program

In 2025, Baron Dyer was accepted to the Fulbright Specialist Program — a U.S. Department of State initiative that places credentialed experts at institutions in more than 150 countries for short-term collaborative engagements of two to six weeks. Specialists are selected through a competitive peer-review process and recognized as globally credentialed practitioners in their fields.

Dyer applied for the Specialist track — which allows experienced working professionals to take on focused international projects without leaving their positions — because the problem his research addresses is not uniquely American. When conducting the literature review for his dissertation, he found that some of the most substantial bodies of scholarship on police officers’ perceptions of their communities came not from the United States, but from India — a country where, despite vastly different social structures, officers navigated strikingly similar tensions between institutional identity and community trust.

That finding pointed him toward where he wants to take this work next. Dyer’s goal is to bring the community engagement model he designed and tested — the tours, the ice breakers, the structured debrief process, the experiential learning framework — to police departments in India and other countries grappling with the same breakdown of trust between law enforcement and marginalized communities. The research demonstrated that the barriers are not cultural peculiarities. They are human ones. And human problems can be approached with human solutions.

The connection to India is also personal. Dyer’s mother is Indian, and he visited the country as a child. Coming back as a Fulbright Specialist — as a researcher, a practitioner, and a doctoral graduate — closes a loop that is both professional and deeply personal.

“I wouldn’t have been able to become a Fulbright Specialist without the EdD program,” Dyer said. “My research demonstrates that the trust deficit between police and communities isn’t fixed — it’s produced by institutional conditions that can be redesigned. That’s not just a policing insight. It’s a governance insight with implications for any institution that claims to serve the public.”