Criminology researchers aim to improve police decision-making and address racial/ethnic sentencing disparities with SSHRC Insight Development Grants

Simon Fraser University's School of Criminology is proud to announce that criminology researchers Eric Beauregard and Zachary Rowan have been awarded Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grants.

Beauregard’s project, titled “Improving Police Decision-Making During Hostage and Barricade Incidents” aims to develop a risk assessment tool to predict the risk of violence in hostage and barricade incidents based on information available to the police when the crisis negotiation team arrives at the scene.

“We believe that with such a tool, the police would be better equipped to respond adequately to the various situations they are facing during such incidents, says Beauregard.”

For this project, Beauregard will work in collaboration with Sergeant Josh Silverman from the Portland Police Bureau, Julien Chopin from the University of Lausanne, and Patrick Michaud, who is an investigator at Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes (BEI) in Quebec. MA student, August Skrudland will also work on the project and will use some of the data for his MA project.

Rowan’s project titled “The Role of Attributions in Racial/Ethnic Sentencing Disparities and Cumulative Disadvantage” will review and analyze pre-sentence reports for nearly 1000 youth who were sentenced to custody and are part of the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study (ISVYOS).

Rowan and his team aim to identify differences in how probation officers characterize these individuals and their offending across racial and ethnic groups, and then link these differences to sentencing outcomes.

“If we can understand the mechanisms that explain why these groups are more likely to receive harsher punishments, we may be able to provide recommendations to mitigate these consequences when probation officers generate presentence reports,” says Rowan. “Additionally, findings from this study may also help inform how judges incorporate information from presentence reports into their sentencing decisions.”

For this project, Rowan will work with criminology professor Evan McCuish, alumnus and Penn State University’s professor Holly Nguyen, Brian Johnson from the University of Maryland, and Jeffrey Ulmer from Penn State University.