Collaborative Research: Reimagining Policing by Making Neighborhoods Safe and Strong

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The project will build on and adapt the Police and Community Engagement (PACE) program to study the conditions that build safe and strong communities. Through the cultivation of collaborative and sustained dialogues between the police, residents, and other community resources and stakeholders, the PACE model enables collective understanding, strengthens relationships, and coordinates actions that build strong and safe places. The PIs propose situational policing as a theoretical framework that shifts away from policing as law enforcement to policing as a means for creating safe places. The constructs (neighborhood atmosphere and latent psychodynamic processes) provide a way to reimagine policing with a strong-community end in mind. The situational policing framework provides officers and communities with a way to visualize and assess progress toward this desired end. The PIs seek to answer the question: What keeps communities safe and strong? Reimagining the police with measurable community-outcome goals—and with strategies to achieve them—has the potential to guide a larger cultural transformation in the field of policing well beyond this project.This mixed-methods study uses a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, which is isomorphic to situational policing. PAR democratizes the research process by including the stakeholders (e.g., local residents, business people, police officers) as co-researchers. The sampling frame includes neighborhoods in four police districts. The PIs select two neighborhoods in each district based on high risk for crime and poor police-community relationships. In each police district, one neighborhood will be identified as a control and the other for the PACE treatment. Pre- and post-treatment surveys will be conducted by the PAR teams with graduate students. The four neighborhoods identified for the PACE treatment will participate in structured conversations designed to foster understanding about the challenges between and among the police and residents. The conversation will include a broad spectrum of stakeholder participants leading to informed and collaborative action. All eight neighborhoods will be surveyed at times pre and post treatment. In addition, semi-structured, open-ended focus groups will be conducted in the treatment neighborhoods by the PAR research team. The goal of both the quantitative and qualitative components of the study is to reveal latent psychodynamic processes that create a neighborhood atmosphere. The study measures the effect of the neighborhood atmosphere on crime, violence, drug abuse, and other social problems and the impact of PACE in a reimagined policing with a safe, strong community focus.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.