Mapping What Works: Stakeholder Perspectives on Police Reform Implementation

Background: Efforts to reform policing practices in the United States have proven persistently difficult, yielding incremental, uneven, or short-lived change. There is extant research on interventions aiming to improve police–community interactions, including with youth; however, far less attention has been paid to the conditions under which such reforms are successfully adopted, implemented, and sustained within law enforcement organizations. Understanding these barriers and facilitators is critical to assessing the viability of advancing durable change. This paper presents an implementation analysis of Policing the Teen Brain (PTB; Strategies for Youth, SFY), an intervention that seeks to enhance officers’ understanding of developmental science and trauma-informed strategies. Focusing primarily on results from a participatory implementation analysis, the study seeks to answer the questions: what determinants do stakeholders perceive as shaping the adoption, implementation, and sustainability of PTB? And, how do perceptions of what matters vary by stakeholder groups?

Methods: Guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), this study examines multilevel factors that shape the adoption, implementation, and sustainability of PTB within law enforcement agencies (k = 15) across one California county. Data sources include semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders (i.e., police, county implementation team members, and SFY interventionists; n = 33), CFIR Pragmatic Context Assessment Tool (p-CAT) scores (n = 30), non-participant observations (397 hours observed), and participatory concept mapping with implementation and intervention team members (n = 16). In partnership with implementation and intervention team members, study staff engaged stakeholders directly in the analytic process through structured, collaborative activities in four steps: (1) participant co-development of digital concept and process maps to identify barriers and facilitators to implementation, (2) study team integration and organization of these barriers and facilitators with those identified in qualitative analysis of stakeholder interviews and observations, and quantitative p-cat scores, (3) participant reflection and ranking of barriers and facilitators, and (4) participant review of the final implementation determinant list and prioritization.

Findings: The analysis yielded a comprehensive list of perceived implementation determinants, including individual (e.g., policing philosophy, beliefs about gender, class, and race), internal (e.g., leadership buy-in, resource allocation, internal culture) and external factors (e.g., external resources, community trust). Findings also indicate convergence and divergence across stakeholder groups. While some core implementation determinants, such as leadership support and staffing, were widely acknowledged, notable differences emerged in how officers and community partners assessed barriers, particularly regarding organizational culture, accountability, and prioritization of policing youth.

Conclusion: Findings contribute to social work and criminal legal reform, demonstrating the value of participatory implementation science in complex, cross-system interventions, and the importance of attending to diverse stakeholder perspectives. The participatory process surfaced how implementation is experienced differently across stakeholders’ institutional positions, underscoring the importance of engaging stakeholders as co-constructors of knowledge. It also functioned as member checking, enabling validation and refinement of themes and assessment of alignment between officer and stakeholder perspectives. The study offers practical and methodological insights for critically assessing and informing police reform efforts, deepening understanding of the conditions under which such interventions are taken up, reshaped or resisted.