Community Policing, Governance, and Security

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This project seeks to explore how different stakeholders grapple with national debates about community policing and enforcement by examining the problems articulated and the solutions proposed in New Orleans, Louisiana. As the city with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, New Orleans is an ideal site to understand policing. It also has a community policing program in place that allows the researchers the opportunity to methodologically evaluate police-citizen relationships. The current climate of heightened awareness around policing demands a comprehensive study of policing, rooted in rigorous, historical, ethnographic analysis. The project would train graduate students in methods of scientifically-grounded and empirical data collection. Project findings will also be presented to non-academic audiences, improving efforts to communicate science to the public. The project has clear plans to engage with the policy community, police organizations, and community organizations on this topic, engaging stakeholders in policy-relevant collaborations. Lastly, the project would broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences.Dr. Laurence Ralph and Dr. Aisha Beliso-De Jesus of Harvard will conduct and ethnographic study of police-citizen relations in New Orleans, Louisiana. How do different stakeholders understand what constitutes effectives methods of policing, security, and governance in this community? Through a mixed-methodological approach that employs qualitative surveys, participant observation, in-depth interviews, social media analysis, ethnographic mapping, and team-based qualitative data coding, this research has the potential to transform the way police enforcement is scientifically measured and understood. This research will advance anthropological theories of policing, force, and governance. The project promises coherent generalizable model that deals with the complexities of police force and will be useful to anthropologists, political scientists, social psychologists, sociologists, and criminologists who study the racial and social disparities in policing, racial bias among police officers, and others who have expressed difficulty in standardizing data on police use of force.