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What's New, What's Happening
Innovations in Measuring Community Perceptions Challenge
Consistent, rigorous measurement of community perceptions provides police, city managers, advocates, and community members with a quantitative assessment of performance (Rosenbaum, Lawrence, Hartnett, McDevitt, & Posick, 2015) and is an essential ingredient in building community trust in law enforcement (La Vigne, Dwivedi, Okeke, & Erondu, 2014). Accurate measurement of community views can inform the development of new and more effective strategies for improving both police-community relations and public safety, as well as provide important feedback related to changes in policy and practice. Traditionally, law enforcement agencies have primarily relied upon largely subjective, qualitative input from community meetings or convenience sample-based citizen satisfaction surveys to obtain community feedback. However, people who live in places where crime and police presence are most intensive are less likely to participate in community meetings and surveys than those who reside in lower crime areas. As a result, general community surveys typically “over represent the views of affluent, educated, white people and underrepresent the experiences of people of color, particularly those residing in impoverished communities” (La Vigne et al., 2014, p. 1). Additionally, community surveys are often expensive, time-consuming, and unable to provide estimates at smaller geographies within municipalities. At the same time, there have been significant advances in data availability and use to model human behavior and quantify preferences and attitudes. However, these advances have yet to be widely applied within the criminal justice realm. To address these issues, the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ) Measures of Community Perceptions Challenge (the Challenge) invites innovative methods for measuring community attitudes, perceptions, and/or beliefs about public safety.