Description

January 29th 2025 Webinar – Staffing Levels and Response Times: Considering American-based Research When Canadian Police Service Boards/Commissions Are Assessing Police Service Budgets Proposals and Strategic Planning with Scott M. Mourtgos and Justin Nix

Scott M. Mourtgos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. His applied research focuses on policing and criminal justice policy. In particular, he is interested in public perceptions of police use-of-force, crime deterrence policies, police personnel issues, and the application of Bayesian statistics in criminal justice research. He has over twenty peer-reviewed publications on these and related topics, and his work has been published in the top general interest journals of both criminal justice and public administration, including Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Public Administration Review. He is committed to integrating police practice with high-quality scientific evidence, an aim that is supported by his appointment as a 2020 NIJ LEADS Scholar. He also serves on the Research Advisory Board for the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), is an affiliate of the Police Staffing Observatory at Michigan State University, a member of the Police Accountability and Policy Evaluation Research (PAPER) lab at the University of South Carolina and University of Utah, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Criminal Justice and Police Practice & Research: An International Journal. His public-facing communication has appeared in multiple written, radio, and podcast outlets. He is a past doctoral fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (2022), and an FBI National Academy graduate (Session 280), having served in various capacities in policing for two decades, including as a police executive.

Justin Nix is a Distinguished Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha, where he teaches classes on policing and research methods, and coordinates the Master of Arts degree program. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 2015. His research interests include police legitimacy and officer decision-making. To date, Justin has authored or co-authored more than fifty peer-reviewed journal articles on these topics, as well as several book chapters, research briefs, and op-eds. He has served as a consultant to the National Policing Institute, the COPS Office, and the Department of Homeland Security. In 2019, Justin was one of four early career researchers selected by the NIJ for its LEADS (Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science) Academics program. In 2020, he received the Early Career Award from the ASC Division of Policing, and in 2021, he received the same award from the ASC Division of Experimental Criminology. He is a member of the Crime and Justice Research Alliance’s expert panel, and frequently engages with local and national media on issues pertaining to policing and criminal justice.

He is currently working on an NIJ-funded project that involves evaluating a de-escalation training program for police officers in Virginia Beach.