Blockwise Onboarding AM
Why do we run Blockwise surveys?
Description
Zencity's Blockwise survey is a recurring survey that helps law enforcement agencies measure their community's sense of safety and trust in policing — over time and against a cohort of similar agencies. It measures resident sentiment across four key aspects: Safety, Fairness, Respect, and Voice. Agencies can also use the survey's add-on and custom question options to focus in on issues specific to their community, such as homelessness or drone use. It's built around three core principles:
Timely
Zencity's digital distribution reaches residents where they already are — on their phones, tablets, and other devices — instead of relying on slower traditional methods like phone or mail surveys. That speed matters for a police department: it means leadership gets a current read on community trust and safety perceptions quickly, and can respond to emerging concerns while they're still relevant, rather than acting on sentiment that's already months old by the time it's collected and processed.
Recurring
Rather than a one-off snapshot, Blockwise is fielded on an ongoing cadence — typically monthly or quarterly — tailored to each agency. This means departments aren't just capturing a single moment in time; they're building a trend line across the Safety, Fairness, Respect, and Voice measures, seeing whether trust is improving, declining, or holding steady, and can swap in a custom question each cycle as new priorities surface in the community.
Benchmarked
Results aren't just informative in isolation — they're contextualized. Zencity Benchmarking compares an agency's scores to peer communities with similar demographics, population size, and characteristics (currently U.S. clients only), so agencies can tell whether a given score is genuinely strong or weak relative to comparable places, not just relative to their own history.
Adding value through blockwise - examples
Example Reports
Here we have attached a few example of different blockwise reports and the differerent ways we can use the report to add value. For any more details please reach out to an EE!
Performance Management - Staffordshire Police Quarterly Executive Report (ENT, outside of platform, Expert Services)
This is an example of a Blockwise quarterly executive report built for Staffordshire Police, tracking resident trust and confidence across the force's key measures (respect, confidence, fairness, voice, safety, engagement, and transparency) month over month within the quarter, broken down by demographic group and local policing area. Rather than a one-off survey snapshot, it becomes a recurring input command staff can bring straight into their existing performance management cycle, giving them a defensible, resident-informed read on where trust is holding and where it's slipping, area by area. This particular report was delivered through Expert Services (outside the platform), but it's a strong example of the value Blockwise can add to performance management once it's live in-platform.
Performance Management - LMPD Post-Interaction x Blockwise Comparison Report (ENT, currently out of platform but will be integrated)
This is an example of a monthly report pairing LMPD's post-interaction survey, feedback collected right after a resident's direct contact with an officer, against Blockwise's representative community pulse, using matched questions across both surveys. Rather than looking at officer performance through one lens, it puts the two side by side across the same dimensions (reliability, timeliness, professionalism, respect) and by district, so command staff can see where the experience of people who just interacted with police diverges from how the broader community feels overall. That gap is the real value: it gives leaders a defensible way to separate a strong direct-contact score from a wider trust problem (or the reverse), and to bring both into the same performance management conversation instead of relying on post-interaction feedback alone.
Budget Planning - National Survey: Insights on Police Budgets (Rotating Questions)
This is an example of a Blockwise national benchmark report, drawing on representative input from thousands of Americans across five budget priority areas (staffing and presence, compensation and retention, technology and surveillance, de-escalation and crisis response, and community policing and engagement). The national findings on their own are a useful reference point, but the real value is that any PD client can choose to add these same questions to their rotating question set and get this information for their own population. That gives them a resident-informed case they can bring into their own budget planning and council prep, built on data specific to their community rather than the country as a whole.
Performance Management - Philadelphia PD, 24th District Quarterly Report (ENT, within platform)
This is an example of a standard, in-platform Blockwise quarterly report scoped to a single police district rather than the whole department. It tracks the same core trust measures (safety, fairness, respect, and voice) over time and breaks each one out by demographic group, giving an individual district commander a direct, defensible read on how their own area is trending over time and where gaps show up by group, without needing a bespoke build.