Description

Non-Members Pricing – September 23rd, 2024: Surveying Public Attitudes towards the Police with Chris Giacomantonio

Currently, most police services in Canada conduct public attitude surveys on a regular basis; however, no two police services ask the same survey questions, and many police services vary their questions between surveys. These inconsistencies create problems of comparability between jurisdictions and within a given jurisdiction over time. By building surveys that are anchored in a validated set of indicators, and connected to a longer-term plan for establishing and understanding trends in attitudes, police services and governance boards can derive greater value from the surveying process. This session will therefore consider strategies for surveying public attitudes about the police, in light of recent research and key questions regarding what public attitude surveys are good for.

Chris is an assistant professor of sociology at Dalhousie University and is the Director of the Clairmont Centre for Community Safety Research. He is a criminologist and social policy researcher with over a decade of experience conducting research in Canada, the US, the UK and the European Union. His academic research has focused on the organization, governance, and reform of public police in democratic societies, and he also conducts social policy and evaluation research on a wide range of topics including criminal justice and security, harm reduction, health and social care, and social finance. Alongside his work at Dalhousie, Chris is a scientific advisor at Pier Labs, a non-profit social innovation outpost based in Halifax. Prior to working with Pier Labs, Chris was the research coordinator for the Halifax Regional Police, and before that he led the policing research portfolio as a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation’s European offices.

Links to materials:

Research Summary – Developing a Common Data Standard for Measuring Attitudes toward the Police in Canada, at: https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/2019-s003/index-en.aspx

Full report: Giacomantonio, C., Mugford, R., Maslov, A. and Lawrence, A. 2019. Developing a Common Data Standard for Measuring Attitudes toward the Police in Canada. Ottawa: Public Safety Canada. At: https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/2019-r003/2019-r003-en.pdf

Academic article: Jackson, J., Bradford, B., Giacomantonio, C., & Mugford, R. 2023. Developing core national indicators of public attitudes towards the police in Canada. Policing and Society, 33(3), 276-295. At:  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10439463.2022.2102757