State trooper Joe Dunsmore remembers watching the George Floyd homicide on the news—and the summer of 2020 that followed.

“The nation saw that incident and there was a ton of questions about how, and why, and should we be policing at all,” Dunsmore said. 

He designed a new community policing program-- Building Bridges-- as the response.

“[It’s] a platform for members within our communities to be able to sit down with members of the Pennsylvania State Police,” Dunsmore said, "and to ask tough questions about policing. To ask questions, air complaints or grievances that they may have.”

Building Bridges has been up and going for almost four years. This week, members of the press were invited for a session in Harrisburg. For two hours, journalists got to ask questions, test their knowledge, and do some point of view exercises.

At one point, Pennsylvania’s use of deadly force policy was copy and pasted on the presentations. The room got into the nitty gritty of legal reasoning for the vagueness of the policy, concerns for that vagueness, and stories— then reenactments— of real life scenarios police have faced.

“This program's not designed for the Pennsylvania State Police to come out and just give a lecture on policing,” Dunsmore said. "It's a dialog. It's a forum.”

Any community entity can request the program—churches, schools, non profits.

Dunsmore has visited over 15 colleges, where students air legitimate grievances… but also get confronted with their own misconceptions of how police work. Assumptions from movies or misinformation from social media can complicate encounters with police.

For example, if a police officer asks for your driver’s license, you are legally compelled to give it.

If a police officer commands you to step out of your vehicle during a traffic stop, you do have to comply based on the Supreme Court ruling Pennsylvania v. Mimms.

“If you're more aware of what you can and cannot do in these situations, that can maybe..  hopefully prevent some of these these excessive use of force. Or any use of force coming into play,” Nathan Kruis said, an associate professor of criminal justice at Penn State Altoona.

Kruis and other professors at Altoona have studied the program for two years. Their research confirms that after participating in Building Bridges, students know more about their rights when interacting with law enforcement.

Their perceptions of police also increase in favorability.

“There’s a carryover. It’s not just perceptions of PSP (Pennsylvania State Police) increasing,” Kruis said. "It's also perceptions of policing more broadly, municipal and local police are perceived as more legitimate because of Dunsmore’s presentation."