As public safety and community well-being come under scrutiny, the scholarship of Dr. Eric L. Piza, associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, provides insight into policing and alternative approaches to public safety as well as evidence-based solutions.
Prior to entering academia, Piza spent five years working at the Newark Police Department in New Jersey as a geographic information systems specialist, a crime analysis and program evaluation position.
“He’s a really unique individual because he brings both his academic perspective and he’s got the practical hands-on policing,” says Dr. Anthony Carpi, associate provost and dean of research at John Jay. “It’s really informed some of the efforts at the college to think about how we should be training police officers … to be most effective and understanding in the different situations they may encounter in the field.”
Rather than coming up with a theory and then gathering data to support that theory, Carpi says Piza maintains an objective perspective and looks at what the data shows when examining communities with higher rates of violence or crime. Piza says an unbiased look at the data may yield an unexpected conclusion.
“At the Newark Police Department, I saw the benefit that research and evaluation can have for public safety purposes, but I also saw how difficult it was … for police departments to carve out time to do the science,” Piza says. “That’s really what sparked my research interest in looking at research questions that not only have academic importance, but also have practical value to the everyday challenges of enhancing public safety.”
Crime reduction is only one part of a complicated equation, says Piza. There must be sensitivity to community perspectives and walking the fine line between maximizing public safety while making sure policing is bias-free. Over the next two to three years, Piza will review police body camera footage and systematically view, code and analyze it.
“What we’ve been doing with [the Newark Police Department] is looking at body camera footage of use of force events for the purpose of understanding how police use of force unfolds in the field,” says Piza. “We want to understand better exactly why a given situation resulted in force while another one didn’t.
