Madison Police Department Pilots Bread & Badges Program Amid Research Challenging Its Approach to Building Trust

Trust in police is built and lost in the everyday encounters that matter. Is Bread & Badges one of them?

Key Points

• The Madison Police Department launched Bread & Badges on May 10, a Midtown District pilot during National Police Week that pairs officers with volunteer hosts for meals in residents’ homes.

  
  

• The premise in the launch release, stated by Officer A. Lewis, is that trust is built in everyday conversations rather than in moments of crisis.

  
  

• Decades of police trust research point the other way. Trust is built or lost in the encounters that matter, and a single bad interaction often carries more weight than many good ones.

  
  

• MPD already does substantial trust measurement, including an annual trust survey the department has conducted since 2005, quarterly community surveys published since 2022, a 2022 citywide survey, and a 2023 to 2028 strategic plan that names building trust as Priority 1 and commits the department to evidence-based policing and procedural justice training.

  
  

• In a May 12 response to 77 Square Miles, MPD did not identify any evaluation metrics for the pilot, did not reference the department’s published community surveys, and did not answer questions about which Madison residents have the lowest trust or what empirical data informs the department’s approach.

A Press Release and a Premise

Somewhere in Midtown this week, a Madison resident is setting an extra place at the dinner table. They volunteered. They are looking forward to hosting a police officer. The residents whose trust the Madison Police Department most needs to earn are not the ones who tend to volunteer.

The residents whose trust the Madison Police Department most needs to earn are not the ones who tend to volunteer.

On May 7, the Madison Police Department issued a press release announcing Bread & Badges, a pilot program in the Midtown District running May 10 through 16. [1] The pilot pairs participating officers with community members who volunteer to host them for a meal in their home during National Police Week. There is no set agenda. Only conversation.

The program’s premise is stated by Officer A. Lewis, who is helping lead the initiative.

“Trust isn’t built in a moment of crisis. It’s built in everyday conversations,” Lewis is quoted as saying. “Bread & Badges gives us the chance to show up not just as officers, but as people who care deeply about the neighborhoods, we serve.”

That premise is the part worth examining.

What the Research Says About Trust

For decades, researchers studying public confidence in police have asked when and how trust actually changes. The literature converges on an answer that runs against the premise Officer Lewis offered.

Wesley Skogan’s 2006 study of Chicago survey data, the foundational work in this area, found that bad experiences with police carried four to fourteen times the weight of positive experiences in shaping public confidence. [2] Departments often got essentially no credit for delivering professional service, while a single bad encounter could shape a resident’s view of both performance and legitimacy. Later researchers have reinforced this asymmetry as a consistent pattern. One negative interaction tends to drive trust down strongly. Multiple positive encounters generally move it little if at all.

What Skogan and others have found is that crisis is not separate from the everyday. For many residents, especially in marginalized communities, the encounters with police that matter most are crises. The traffic stop is the everyday. The welfare check is the everyday. The response to a mental health call is the everyday. By locating trust-building in voluntary dinners hosted by friendly residents, Bread & Badges skips past the encounters that produce distrust in the first place.

The second consistent finding in the literature is that how people are treated in those encounters matters more than the outcomes they receive. A 2019 meta-analysis of 56 studies and 88 samples testing the procedural justice model produced a mean effect size of 0.48 between procedural justice and legitimacy. [3] Residents who believe they were treated fairly and with respect by police are more likely to see law enforcement as trustworthy and legitimate. A 2023 meta-analysis pooling 123 studies and roughly 200,000 respondents reached the same conclusion. [4]

One positive finding cuts the other way. A 2019 randomized field experiment in New Haven, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Peyton and colleagues, found that a single brief visit by a uniformed officer with no enforcement purpose substantially improved residents’ views of police legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. [5] The effect was largest among Black residents and among those who had been most skeptical of police at baseline. The improvement persisted at 21 days.

This is the strongest evidence in the literature that something resembling Bread & Badges can move attitudes. The caveats are important. The New Haven visits were randomly assigned to households across the city, which meant officers reached residents who would never have invited them in. Bread & Badges depends on volunteer hosts. That self-selection screens out the population that the New Haven design captured. The New Haven measurement ended at 21 days, with no long-term follow-up published. And the New Haven program ran at scale across ten police districts. Bread & Badges is one week in one district.

The broader literature is skeptical of single interventions. The National Academies’ 2022 report, Developing Policing Practices that Build Legitimacy, concluded that no single intervention or program is likely to be enough on its own to build legitimacy with the public. [6] Community policing initiatives, the report noted, have shown limited success specifically in marginalized communities. Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, reviewing cross-national evidence, found that community policing has not reliably built trust, increased information sharing with police, or reduced crime. [7] The underlying study, by Blair and colleagues, was a preregistered meta-analysis of randomized field experiments in six countries published in Science in 2021. The authors found that the interventions “largely failed to improve citizen-police relations, and did not reduce crime,” and concluded that societies may need to implement structural changes first for incremental police reforms such as community policing to succeed. [21] The Urban Institute, writing about Coffee with a Cop, said that changing community perceptions of police will take a more integrated, comprehensive, and sustained effort than a single day can deliver. [8]

What MPD Already Knows About Trust in Madison

MPD’s work on trust did not begin this week. In 1993, the National Institute of Justice published an evaluation of the department’s Experimental Police District co-authored by Mary Ann Wycoff and Wesley Skogan, the same researcher whose 2006 finding on asymmetric impact appears earlier in this post. [22] The report evaluated three years of Madison’s experiment with community-oriented policing, problem-oriented policing, and participatory management. Skogan was here thirty-two years ago.

MPD has not been silent about trust. In its 2018 written response to the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, the department reported that it has conducted an annual survey on trust, neighborhood crime, and fear since 2005. [15] The department also publishes Quarterly Community Survey Results going back to early 2022. [9] The quarterly surveys go to community members who have recently had contact with MPD, asking about the quality of the interaction and their feelings about community safety. Recent quarters have drawn around 100-110 responses each.

In 2022, MPD commissioned a broader citywide survey through Matrix Consulting Group and Public Values Research. [10] The survey reached 721 Madison residents using an address-based sample of 3,000 households, a response rate of about 24 percent. The release accompanying the results said that while the majority of residents approved of the job MPD was doing and felt safe in their neighborhoods, many did not feel safe in the city as a whole and wanted more accountability for officers. [11] Community Outreach Captain Matt Tye, in the release, said: “We know there are people and communities out there who don’t trust police. This will take time. But we are committed to rebuilding this trust, however long it may take.” [11]

The 2022 survey, the focus groups that followed it, and the one-on-one engagements with community stakeholders fed into MPD’s 2023 to 2028 strategic plan. [12] The plan names building strong trusting community relationships as Priority 1 under its first strategic goal, Madison Centric Policing. The plan acknowledges what the research literature has long established. There is currently a lack of relationships leading to distrust between police and the community. External high-profile incidents, the plan says, have local impact on how the community perceives MPD. Under the plan’s third priority, Evidenced-Based Policing, the department commits to develop and deliver training on evidence-based policing to all MPD members, to create a Research Advisory Committee in partnership with academia, and to deliver education on procedural justice principles to all employees. The plan states that progress on Priority 1 will be measured through ongoing citizen and employee surveys, focus group meetings, and feedback from a Madison-Centric Policing Work Group. [12]

None of this was new in 2023. In 2017, the OIR Group’s independent review of MPD recommended that the CORE Team, the department’s Community Outreach and Resource Education unit, take advantage of its centralized role and provide rigorous analysis of individual outreach initiatives as to their relative impact and effectiveness. [16] The Madison Police Policy and Procedure Review Ad Hoc Committee adopted the same recommendation in 2019 as Recommendation 16. [17] In its 2018 written response to the OIR Group, MPD agreed with the concept but acknowledged a capacity gap. The department wrote that rigorous analysis of effectiveness poses a challenge, that community outreach work simply defies easy analysis, that MPD has limited internal capacity for complex social science analysis, and that additional funding for staff, software, or external partnerships would be needed to accomplish it. [18] Since 2018, MPD has added four full-time analyst positions, at a 2026 cost of $407,452. The Research Advisory Committee promised in the 2023 strategic plan is the department’s stated mechanism for closing the remaining gap. Bread & Badges launched without it.

MPD also publishes detailed enforcement demographics each year in its Annual Report. The 2025 Annual Report shows that Madison residents who are Black, who make up about seven to eight percent of the city’s population, accounted for approximately forty-eight percent of adult physical arrests, seventy-five percent of youth physical arrests, twenty-seven percent of traffic citations, and thirty-six percent of municipal citations in 2025. [19] The research on asymmetric impact says these are the residents whose encounters with police shape trust most strongly. The data identifying which segments of the Madison community have the most police contact is in MPD’s own annual report. The department’s May 12 response did not answer which segments of the Madison community have the lowest trust.

So MPD knows several things about trust in Madison. First, that public attitudes can be measured in survey form, vary across districts, and can be tracked over time. Second, that the 2022 survey identified accountability as a specific area where residents wanted more. Third, that the department’s own strategic plan treats building trust as the top priority and commits the department to evidence-based policing, procedural justice training, and an academic Research Advisory Committee, with progress measured through ongoing surveys and focus groups. Fourth, that demographic data on which residents the department’s enforcement most affects is in the department’s own Annual Report. Fifth, that two independent oversight reviews of MPD and the department’s own strategic plan have, since 2017, told the department to rigorously analyze the effect of its outreach initiatives.

What MPD Said When Asked

On May 11, 77 Square Miles sent eight questions to Commander Shannon Blackamore of the Midtown District. On May 12, Commander Blackamore forwarded responses from MPD Public Information Officer Stephanie Fryer. [13]

On cost. Fryer wrote that there is no cost to the department, and that a community member brought the idea to MPD, and the department agreed.

The framing is incomplete. Officers attending Bread & Badges are doing so during their paid working hours, as Fryer’s next answer confirms. The food and hosting are donated by residents. The labor is not free. It is paid by the public from the MPD budget.

On staffing. Fryer wrote that MPD staff will be attending while on duty, and that participants include several detectives, commanders, and specialized officers, not patrol officers.

This is worth noting. The friction in police-community relations—the encounters that drive distrust—are largely between residents and patrol officers. Detectives, commanders, and specialized officers, by Fryer’s description, will be the ones at the dinner tables. The officers whose conduct most shapes day-to-day public perception of MPD are not the ones being sent to the dinners.

On success metrics. Fryer wrote that everyone’s definition of success differs, that MPD looks forward to good conversation and a deeper connection with neighbors, and that being invited into the space is itself something the department considers a success.

This is the most important answer in the response. The original press release said the initiative is being piloted in Midtown to evaluate its impact and potential expansion to other districts. The follow-up answer says there is no measurement. The two cannot both be true. If the threshold for expansion is having been invited, the threshold is met by definition before the pilot begins.

If the threshold for expansion is having been invited, the threshold is met by definition before the pilot begins.

On other trust-building work. Fryer wrote that MPD does weekly outreach in every patrol district, volunteers at community centers, spends time with youth, hosts public events, shares information, and supports procedural justice.

These are activities. The response did not say whether any of them have been evaluated for their effect on community trust, what trust outcomes the department has measured in connection with them, or how the department defines what it means to support procedural justice.

On surveys. Asked when MPD last conducted a community trust survey and whether the results are public, Fryer wrote that the department holds regular meetings with stakeholders from all backgrounds and gathers public input during every interaction.

This answer does not address the question. MPD publishes Quarterly Community Survey Results on its public website, with quarterly digests going back to 2022. MPD commissioned a 721-person citywide community survey in 2022 through Matrix Consulting Group and Public Values Research, which informed the department’s 2023 to 2028 strategic plan. None of that work was mentioned in the response.

On factors influencing trust. Fryer wrote that MPD believes trust improves through action and transparency.

The phrasing offers no specifics. No reference to the department’s own survey findings. No reference to the procedural justice research that the department says it supports. No identification of which actions or which kinds of transparency.

On the lowest trust segments and empirical data. Two questions were not answered. The story asked which segments of the Madison community have the lowest levels of trust in MPD, and what empirical data informs MPD’s approach to maintaining and building community trust. The department’s response did not address either question.

The 2017 OIR Group review of MPD warned about this exact pattern. The review observed that when MPD leadership defends officers unremittingly and treats outside criticism as disregardable, public trust erodes. When community members ask hard questions and receive what the OIR Group called “stiff-armed responses,” the review wrote, suspicions about police accountability only grow. [16] The OIR Group was writing about responses to officer conduct, not pilot programs. The pattern it described, hard questions met with partial or absent answers, is visible in the department’s response on Bread & Badges.

The pattern in the response is consistent. The department’s answers to questions about evaluation, measurement, data, and demographic analysis of trust either redirect to general statements about activity or do not appear at all. The strategic plan promises evidence-based policing, a Research Advisory Committee, and procedural justice training, all measured through surveys and focus groups. The department’s response on a pilot the department’s own press release framed as evaluable showed none of that machinery in operation. The department’s stated trust strategy, on the evidence of the response, is not connected to the department’s own measurement infrastructure or to the empirical literature its strategic plan acknowledges.

What MPD Should Consider

The research base and MPD’s own data point in a consistent direction. The response from MPD reinforces it. If MPD wants to improve trust, the program design the evidence supports is not a week of voluntary dinners in one district. It is something else.

First, the cohorts that matter most are not represented at the table. The research on asymmetric impact suggests that the residents whose trust matters most for legitimacy are those whose recent encounters with police were bad, especially in groups that have historically had the most negative experiences. Those residents do not volunteer to host an officer for dinner. They have to be reached through other means, or not at all. The department’s response did not identify those cohorts. The 2017 OIR Group review of MPD anticipated the structural problem. The review observed that engagement is “easy when the police set the terms and discussion points” and harder when “the hardest of issues are embraced collectively.” [16] Bread & Badges sets the terms. The hosts are volunteers. The conversation has no agenda. The pilot is the kind of engagement the 2017 review described as easier and less productive.

Second, the most effective programs in the literature do not look like one-off public engagement events. They look like sustained, structural changes in how officers interact with the public on every encounter. Procedural justice training, applied consistently, has the strongest evidence base. So does meaningful, visible discipline when officers behave badly. So does prompt, transparent investigation of complaints. The National Academies report is clear that a single intervention is not enough, and that community policing initiatives, on their own, have shown limited success in marginalized communities. The department’s response said MPD supports procedural justice but did not describe what that means in practice.

Third, MPD’s existing trust data should be doing more work than it appears to be doing. A department that publishes years of community survey results, that commissioned a 721-person citywide survey in 2022, and that names trust as its top strategic priority, should be in a position to say which segments of the Madison community have the lowest trust and what specific factors drive that distrust. The department’s response did not say. The department’s own data is not visible in the department’s own answers.

Fourth, evaluation matters. The original press release framed the pilot as something to evaluate for potential expansion. The response says success is whatever conversation occurs. Those two framings cannot both be true. A real pilot has a stated outcome, a baseline, and a post-pilot measure. Bread & Badges, on the department’s own description, has none of those.

Bread & Badges may produce warm moments in Midtown. It may produce a few useful conversations. On the evidence, it will not change the trust profile of the department in any measurable way.

Opposing Views and Tradeoffs

Reasonable people will note that pilot programs are how municipal governments learn. A small, low-cost experiment in one district that fails to move outcomes is a cheap form of learning. That is fair as far as it goes. But the value of the learning depends on the evaluation. MPD’s response confirms that the department has not specified what it will measure, what counts as success, or how it will tell whether the program affected trust as opposed to officer morale or volunteer host satisfaction. Without those specifications, the pilot will produce anecdotes. Anecdotes are not learning. They are publicity.

Anecdotes are not learning. They are publicity.

A second reasonable objection. The New Haven study showed that even brief positive contact can move attitudes, including for skeptics. If a Madison version of that study were conducted, with random assignment and proper evaluation, it would be a contribution to the local evidence base. Bread & Badges, as designed, is not that study. It selects for friendly hosts. It runs for a week. As far as the public record shows, it is being evaluated by the department running it.

A third reasonable objection. The program does no harm, and warm interactions between officers and residents are valuable on their own terms. That is also fair. The concern is not that the dinners will harm anyone. The concern is that a department whose own strategic plan names trust as the top priority, and whose 2022 survey identified accountability as a key gap, is launching a pilot during National Police Week that pulls public attention toward the friendliest possible interpretation of community relations and away from the structural questions the data actually raises.

What Readers Can Do

The pilot ends May 16. The 2027 city budget is in process. Readers who want this work to matter can contact Commander Shannon Blackamore of the Midtown District, Yvette Craig, the community engagement specialist for MPD, at ycraig@cityofmadison.com, [14] the Mayor, and their City Council Alder. The questions worth asking are about resources:

• Ask MPD to publish the total annual cost of its community engagement initiatives, including officer time, with a breakdown by program (including Bread & Badges) and the documented results each produces.

  
  

• Ask the Mayor and Council to use that information in the 2027 budget to fund the initiatives that produce measurable trust gains, reduce funding for those that do not, and redirect the savings to core police services.

If MPD produces that information, the 2027 budget can be built on evidence. If it does not, the community engagement portfolio remains a set of programs measured in press releases, Bread & Badges among them, and the harder work of building trust remains undone.

A Pattern

Bread & Badges is not the first community engagement program a Madison department has launched without publishing the data that would tell anyone whether it worked. It will not be the last. The pattern is familiar at City Hall. A friendly initiative is announced. The release contains warm quotes. The evaluation is not specified. The follow-up is light. The next year, a new initiative is announced with similar framing. The underlying conditions, the ones the data would actually let us track, change slowly or not at all.

The pattern repeats in the recommendations the department has received and not visibly acted on. In its 2021 Sentinel Event Review of MPD’s response to the 2020 protests, the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice wrote that MPD must rededicate itself to expanded community engagement and community policing initiatives, and in particular to connecting with and rebuilding trust with those members of the greater Madison community who are the least willing to speak with MPD today. [20] Bread & Badges relies on Madison community members who volunteer to host an officer. That design selects for residents most willing to speak with MPD, not least willing. The pilot’s premise is structurally the inverse of what the 2021 review told the department it needed.

The pattern is also visible in the aggregate. MPD’s 2026 operating budget is $102.5 million. The department runs many initiatives that touch on trust: the Proximity Project, Coffee with a Cop, Community Policing Advisory Boards, the Citizen Academy, the youth academies, Amigos en Azul, the Black Officer Coalition, Pride, Mental Health Services, the Madison Area Recovery Initiative, and the neighborhood and community policing teams. The 2023 to 2028 strategic plan adds procedural justice training, evidence-based policing training, and a Research Advisory Committee. No public document breaks out what each of these initiatives costs or what each one has produced. The total MPD budget is public. The total cost of these engagement initiatives, and a breakdown by program, are not.

The research on police trust is unusually clear by social science standards. Trust is built and lost in the encounters that matter—encounters that are not, for the most part, dinners with volunteers. They are the ones residents did not choose. MPD has the data infrastructure to know which Madison residents have the lowest trust and why. The next test of seriousness is whether the department uses it.

77SquareMiles.com covers what mainstream media won’t, because democracy dies in darkness, especially at City Hall.

© Alex Saloutos 2026.

Footnotes

[1] Madison Police Department press release, “Bread & Badges,” May 7, 2026. Reported in WMTV15 News, “Madison Police to partake in ‘Bread & Badges’ event,” May 7, 2026, https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/05/07/mpd-partake-bread-badges-event/.

[2] Skogan, Wesley G., “Asymmetry in the Impact of Encounters with Police,” Policing and Society, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2006, pp. 99 to 126, https://doi.org/10.1080/10439460600662098.

[3] Walters, Glenn D., and Bolger, P. Colin, “Procedural justice perceptions, legitimacy beliefs, and compliance with the law: a meta-analysis,” Journal of Criminal Justice, 2019, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047235219300029.

[4] Chan, Andy, Bradford, Ben, and Stott, Clifford, “A systematic review and meta-analysis of procedural justice and legitimacy in policing: the effect of social identity and social contexts,” Journal of Experimental Criminology, 2023, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-023-09595-5.

[5] Peyton, Kyle, Sierra Arevalo, Michael, and Rand, David G., “A field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 16, 2019, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1910157116.

[6] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Developing Policing Practices that Build Legitimacy, 2022, Chapter 3, https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/26678/chapter/5.

[7] Blair, Graeme, Weinstein, Jeremy, et al., “Community Policing: A Better Way to Improve Policing or a Bust?” Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, September 15, 2022, https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/community-policing-better-way-intervene-or-bust-practice.

[8] La Vigne, Nancy, “It takes more than ‘Coffee with a Cop’ to build relationships,” Urban Institute, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/it-takes-more-coffee-cop-build-relationships.

[9] Madison Police Department, Quarterly Community Survey Results, https://www.cityofmadison.com/police/data-records/reports/quarterly-community-survey-results.

[10] Public Values Research, Community Survey on Policing in the City of Madison, Wisconsin, May 2022, https://www.cityofmadison.com/police/documents/surveyCommResults2021.pdf.

[11] City of Madison, “Survey results released: Madison residents satisfied with MPD performance overall, more work needs to be done,” July 14, 2022, https://www.cityofmadison.com/news/2022-07-14/survey-results-released-madison-residents-satisfied-with-mpd-performance-overall.

[12] Madison Police Department, 2023 to 2028 Strategic Plan, April 26, 2023, https://www.cityofmadison.com/police/documents/reports/StrategicPlan2023-2028.pdf.

[13] Email from Capt. Shannon Blackamore, Madison Police Department Midtown District, to Alex Saloutos, May 12, 2026, forwarding responses from MPD Public Information Officer Stephanie Fryer to questions submitted May 11, 2026. On file.

[14] WMTV15 News, “Madison Police to partake in ‘Bread & Badges’ event,” May 7, 2026, https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/05/07/mpd-partake-bread-badges-event/.

[15] Madison Police Department, “Current Status & Plan for 21st Century Policing: Report of MPD Efforts in Relation to the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing 2018 Update,” 2018, https://www.cityofmadison.com/police/documents/21stCenturyPolicing.pdf.

[16] Gennaco, Michael, Connolly, Stephen, and Ruhlin, Julie, OIR Group, “Madison Police Department Policy and Procedure Review: Report to the City of Madison and the Madison Police Department Policy and Procedure Review Ad Hoc Committee,” December 2017.

[17] Madison Police Department Policy and Procedure Review Ad Hoc Committee, Final Report, October 18, 2019, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/madison.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/d4/9d4ef30b-a236-5e44-b459-a3cdb70b9f1f/5daba1a4ddb81.pdf.pdf.

[18] Madison Police Department, “Response to OIR Report,” January 31, 2018, https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/09io3jh3o6sfjwc4h8s7r/Madison-Police-Department-RESPONSE-To-OIR-Report.pdf?rlkey=zv0w1ciuv1i3sm2l27rfbxzk7&dl=0.

[19] Madison Police Department, 2025 Annual Report, https://www.cityofmadison.com/police/documents/reports/AnnualReport2025.pdf.

[20] Madison Police Department, “Sentinel Event Review (SER) of the Department’s Responses to 2020 Protests of Police,” prepared by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, November 16, 2021, https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/11942-madison-sentinel-report.

[21] Blair, Graeme, et al., “Community policing does not build citizen trust in police or reduce crime in the Global South,” Science, Vol. 374, Issue 6571, November 26, 2021, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd3446.

[22] Wycoff, Mary Ann, and Skogan, Wesley G., “Community Policing in Madison: Quality from the Inside, Out: An Evaluation of Implementation and Impact,” National Institute of Justice, May 26, 1993, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/146684.pdf.