Venues: Locating Social Context

The “Primed to (re)act” project has multiple aims, among them testing the viability of using two-way radio transmissions between police dispatchers and law enforcement officers to understand how policing professionals communicate about male youth of color before and during an incident. With Prof. Margaret Beale Spencer and her PVEST theoretical framework, my goal is to demonstrate how existing AI tools enable analysis of these broadcast police communications (BPC) at scale.

A major goal of this work is to establish a baseline understanding of how policing professionals coordinate their activities using a sociotechnical system whose properties shape how and what police communicate, and thus how officers make split second decisions with minimal, incomplete, or otherwise limited information. Providing a window into these processes allows us to understand how policing organizations operate in practice. Analysis of BPC provides unique insight compared to official records, which are generated after the fact, and body worn cameras, which involve police-citizen interactions: Only BPC capture professional communications directing officer activities in real time. BPC thus represent some of the most direct observational data on policing currently available to researchers and/or the public at large.