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

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.