Build and Broaden 2.0: Understanding Barriers to Equity in Public Safety Policies

该奖项全部或部分由《2021年美国救援计划法案》（公法117-2）资助。拟议研究的目标是对公共安全政策中目前阻碍公平的障碍获得新的见解。拟议的研究采用混合方法，以更好地了解心理特征及其与旨在提高公平水平的公共安全政策变化的关系。在公共安全的几乎所有方面都存在差异，包括邻里暴力、应急反应时间和派遣、总体执法、起诉和定罪率、审前拘留、保释和保释金水平以及量刑。这项研究将采用混合方法，重点关注似乎从不平等中受益的人群，以及他们接受新政策和做法的障碍。这一点很重要，因为它偏离了大多数调查，这些调查倾向于通过以痛苦为中心的研究，而不是以不平等为中心，将边缘化社区病态化，很少关注潜在的来源。该项目将采用三个阶段的研究方法。第一阶段将利用最近通过的州一级公共安全政策的一系列政策变化，探讨在五个变化领域预测反对公共安全政策和资金变化的特征（例如，价值观、年龄、种族、个性和态度）。第二阶段将仔细研究不同州居民群体之间的价值观、态度、特征和对变革的抵制之间的关系，以便更好地理解跨子群体的重叠和独特的变革障碍。第三阶段将包括对前两个阶段的一部分调查参与者的定性访谈，以确定最能解释支持和抵制这些政策变化的理论。因此，这项通过政策变化减少不平等的障碍的研究可能会增加对在全国范围内实现公共安全公平的障碍的理解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). The goal of the proposed research is to gain new insights into current barriers to equity in public safety policy. The proposed research employs mixed-method approaches to better understand psychological characteristics and their relation to changes in public safety policy aimed at greater levels of equity. Disparities are present in virtually all aspects of public safety, including exposure to neighborhood violence, emergency response times and dispatch, overall enforcement, prosecution and conviction rate, pretrial detention bail and bond levels, and sentencing. This study will employ mixed-method approaches focused on the population of people who appear to benefit from inequity, as well as the barriers to their acceptance of new policies and practices. This is important because it deviates from most inquiry, which tends to pathologize marginalized communities through research that centers suffering as opposed to inequity, with little attention given to potential sources. The project will use a three-phased research approach. Phase 1 will explore the characteristics (e.g., values, age, race, personality, and attitudes) that predict opposition to changes in public safety policies and funding, across five areas of change, using a recently passed series of policy changes in state-level public safety policy. Phase 2 will take a closer look at the relationships between values, attitudes, characteristics and resistance to change among distinct groups of state residents in order to better understand overlapping and unique barriers to change across subgroups. Phase 3 will consist of qualitative interviews with a subset of survey participants from the first two phases to identify the theories that best explain support for and resistance to these policy changes. Therefore, this study of the barriers to reducing inequities through policy changes may increase understanding of barriers to attaining public-safety equity nationally.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.