Reimagining Community Safety Through Participatory Action Research
Understanding Multi-systems Impacts of Police, Policing, and Prison and Envisioning Ways to Transform Harm
Overview
The call for a policy shift that defunds police and prisons and reimagines community safety is a call for transformative work in systems that are deeply embedded in our modern society and culture. The research that supports this shift should investigate both what is and what could be; it should lift up the voices of those most directly and deeply affected by these systems; and it should invite the community to participate in learning and the development of plans for new systems of safety and care.
This project is led by Dr. Lisa Bates (PI) and supported by Imagine Black via the Reimagine Safety Fund (Northwest Health Foundation)
Understanding multi-systems impacts
This project seeks to understand how police and policing and prisons and punishment affect our people across multiple systems of well-being—health, housing, education, work—and at multiple scales—from individual to family to neighborhood and community. We build this understanding with community members as co-researchers, recognizing and centering the knowledge held by those who are directly affected by policing, incarceration, and related systems. An intergenerational, multi-sited participatory action research (PAR) approach invites cohorts of adult and youth community members to define questions and methods for investigation, connecting lived experiences to an analysis of systems and institutions in order to learn not only what is going on, but also what we can do about it.
Community visions for collective safety and mutual care
This approach to research includes inviting the larger Black community into dialogue about how to define new goals for safety and well-being, by bringing the findings of PAR cohorts into public engagement forums. Along with community-based organization partners, we will bring creative tools like photography, podcasting, and interactive mapping exercises, sharing research findings through storytelling and highlighting findings of promising ideas, concepts, and practices for community safety. These activities will emerge from the participatory research practice and Imagine Black Futures’ work learning about models used around the nation.