ATLANTA — Police departments have to work on building strong community relations long before a serious incident erupts, analysts said during a Monday session the Public Risk Management Association's Annual Conference in Atlanta.

Chief Patrick Ridenhour of the Stratford, Connecticut, Police Department and Gloria Francesca Mengual, a consultant with the National Conference for Community and Justice in Windsor, Connecticut, spoke about the issues connected with effective policing and risk management.

Ms. Mengual noted the increased visibility of police incidents and the U.S. Department of Justice's community policing recommendations that came out after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which resulted in several days of unrest.

“Cities are being investigated all over the country,” she said. “Police are winning cases, but police departments are losing in terms of the court of public opinion. And it turns out they're also losing in terms of jury awards in civil cases. It's not going away.”

Ms. Mengual discussed the results of a 2004 North Dakota State University study where only 14 out of 354 law enforcement agencies said they considered risk management a tool worth using.

“The good news is that police departments are finding that they need to do something about it,” she said. “They're losing a lot of money. Cities are losing money; they're raising taxes to cover the expenses.”

While acknowledging the importance of training sessions to increase police officers' awareness, Ms. Mengual stressed the interaction of people of different races “sitting together where they can break bread and talk.”

“We have to share our humanity,” she said, “and you have to do that face to face.”

Ms. Mengual said that the good news about implicit biases is that they are malleable; they can be unlearned.

“It's not the incident itself,” Chief Ridenhour said. “It's what happens afterward. We learned that building relationships is an ongoing process.”

Chief Ridenhour said his department has made efforts to reach out to the community so that the residents get to know his officers, including working with a local martial arts school to start a boxing program and establishing a baseball camp.

“We do a variety of things to reach out to kids,” Chief Ridenhour said, “to let them know we put our pants on one leg at a time like everybody else. We're not much different than their parents.”

He said this good will paid off when there was an incident where a white police officer shot an African-American man. The police immediately put out a press release about the incident, and Chief Ridenhour said he turned the investigation over to the Connecticut State Police in the interest of transparency and “to let people know we're not hiding anything.”

“You don't wait until you have that officer involved shooting,” he said, “to call the secretary and say 'Hey, find the number for the president of the NAACP … find the number for the Hispanic Coalition.' No, those relationships need to be built up beforehand. You can't build a relationship on the fly.”