IBSS-L: Procedural Mechanisms and Systemic Inequality in Municipal Law Enforcement

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This interdisciplinary research project will expand the scope of the National Justice Database, the nation's first multi-site database to track police behavior such as stops and use of force, and it will assess how common policies and procedures in policing influence racially disparate outcomes. The project will promote the development and validation of a nationally standardized approach to police stop data collection, analysis, and interpretation. It will enhance basic understanding of individual, organizational, and systemic discrimination as well as the interactions among those levels. The project will provide new insights that will inform interventions and strategies to bridge the divide between police officers and the communities they serve. The project will help transform the National Justice Database into a tool that can inform interventions and strategies as well as determine the success rates of strategies and interventions devised by police departments. By studying policies, with a particular focus on those directed toward training, accountability, community-oriented policing, "hot-spot" policing, calls for service, and other deployment strategies, the project can help identify which policies are most successful at reducing racial disparities and what conditions moderate that relationship. This knowledge will assist in reducing racial profiling and bolster equitable policing.This project will examine how common policies in policing influence racially disparate outcomes across formal policy, organizational climate, geospatial, and community-guided police activity domains. This investigators will use an interdisciplinary approach to identify specific mechanisms of policing that can contribute to more or less unequal outcomes. By examining outcomes across these domains, they will provide a large multi-site assessment of how organizational policy produces racially disparate outcomes, with special attention given toward identifying how to reduce those disparities. The investigators will draw heavily on theoretical frameworks from social psychology, economics, and sociology, such as implicit bias, resource efficiency, and social stratification. They will trace causal chains from police department (and related municipal and state) policies (such as training and supervision) through the social and organizational attitudinal climates of departments in order to examine how these policies and climates interact with different deployment approaches (such as "hot spot" and proactive policing) to affect outcomes for citizens, especially racially and ethnically discriminatory outcomes in stops, searches, arrests, and excessive use of force. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.