Austin Police Chief of Staff Brian Manley Austin Police Chief of Staff Brian Manley[/caption] Police departments need a community policing philosophy not just a community policing program. That's what Austin's interim police Chief Brian Manley suggested Saturday during Day 2 of the South by Southwest Conferences & Festivals, when he sat on a panel about reducing violent police-citizen interactions alongside the public policy research nonprofit Urban Institute and the founder of Black Lives Matter Austin. "For true, effective community policing, it has to be in the DNA of your organization," he said. Community policing starts at the officer recruitment level, he said. Last month, the Austin Police Department revamped its recruitment website, including its recruitment video, which now shows police officers interacting with the community. Manley said Austin has been at the forefront of community policing, welcoming organizations like the Urban Institute to study the department's data and having oversight in the form of the Office of the Police Monitor. At the beginning of the year, APD began collecting data on all stops not just those that ended in citations or arrests. The department will gather the information for a full year and present it in 2018. "We really want to get to the true numbers," Manley said. "We want to know what really is happening."   Nancy La Vigne, director of public policy for the Justice Police Center at the Urban Institute, said a new participatory research model on community policing has emerged. Called the Community Voices model, it aims to place researchers, community members who have faced policing injustices and police officers together to evaluate the state of community policing. She said this works better than the traditional method of researchers visiting a city for a brief period of time, collecting and analyzing data, then going home and publishing a report. Another new APD implementation is training on fair and impartial policing, which Manley said all 1,908 APD officers must take. About 25 percent of the department has completed this course so far, according to Manley. "We’re all going to have bias," he said.  "As a police chief, my main concern is that the officers don’t act on those biases." Margaret Haule, who founded the Black Lives Matter Austin chapter, called for more transparency and uniform accountability in police departments. Manley said he wished there were more ways to compare his department's data with the data from other police departments. "We're only going to get better if we can truly look at the data and compare ourselves to other cities," he said. Last year, the Office of the Police Monitor found Austin police officers in 2015 stopped African-Americans more and used force against them more frequently than any other ethnic group. Manley said he was not surprised by the disparities in the report—disparities like the fact that in 2015, African-Americans had a 1-in-7 chance of being searched if stopped by police, compared to the 1-in-9 chance for Hispanic or Latino individuals and a 1-in-21 chance for Caucasians. Manley said those types of reports, combined with constant communication with residents, is how true community policing should be. "There’s a lot of work we need to do, but we have a community that’s willing to work with us," he said.