Grant Recipient: Police Foundation
Principal Investigator(s): Karen Amendola, Robin Engel, Andrea Headley, Emily Owens, David Weisburd
Term: 2023 – 2025
Funding: $1,499,503
Summary: In this project, we will test a low-cost, “light touch” supervisory approach in which officers meet with supervisors to de-brief them on recent, relatively uneventful encounters with members of the public, to replicate the findings of an earlier study. Supervisors will be trained to model procedural justice principles (providing voice and demonstrating respect, concern, and fairness), where the focus is not on the encounter itself, but the supervisory meeting. We will test the impact of these monthly meetings on the use of force and arrests; in a previous single-jurisdiction study, we found a negative relationship (Owens, et al., 2018).
We also hypothesize that this approach will result in positive feedback from officers and their supervisors, and, consistent with recent research, that this internally just supervisory approach will lead to more positive perceptions and attitudes about the job and translate to public trust and support for external procedural justice (see, Carr & Maxwell, 2017; Sun et al., 2018; Wu, et al., 217).
