An SSU-designed survey to gauge Sonoma County Sheriff’s officers’ effectiveness in community-oriented policing launched this month, and all county residents are invited to participate.
In 2020, SSU Criminology Department Chair Emily Asencio was asked by the director of Sonoma County’s Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Outreach (IOLERO) to help the office assess community-oriented policing efforts.
“The goal is to get data on how the community feels the Sheriff’s Department is doing with community-oriented policing, how the sheriffs think they are doing, and then assess if there are any gaps," Asencio said.
If gaps are identified, a third party will be asked to suggest ways to help close them, and then the SSU-led study would continue to see if those interventions are effective, she said.
Asencio has led different teams of students in developing the survey over the past four years. Starting with four students who interned with the IOLERO in 2020, criminology students have participated in developing the survey – from literature and research reviews to planning, design drafts, focus groups, and final design.
To be sure respondents have a shared definition of the term “community-oriented policing,” the survey team ran 10 focus groups with different parts of the community and five focus groups with Sonoma County sheriffs.
The survey lists this definition at the outset: “Community-Oriented Policing is when the police and the community work together as a team. The police and the people they serve become partners. They work together to keep the community safe and solve problems.”
All students had to have training certification in Human Subjects Research and be approved by IRB to be a part of this project. Each year, Asencio took participating students to the Pacific Sociological Association's annual conference to get feedback on their phase of the project.
“We got to learn from our colleagues in the field throughout the process,” Asencio said.
Current students on the project will work on the collection and analysis with Asencio this spring, when she is on sabbatical. “In the end, the timing has worked out wonderfully,” she said.
“In conducting research, I tell students, ‘Social science is different from the natural sciences. Our subject matter is subjective. We are subjective. That’s why it takes longer to figure out how to measure and how to interpret the data we collect,’” Asencio said.
All Sonoma County residents are invited to participate in the survey.