CASE STUDY
Advancing Racial Equity
Racial equity is an imperative in the quest for governance policies and programs that serve every individual, regardless of background or zip code. Yet deep systemic racism continues to foster disparities in decision-making, uneven access to opportunities, and poor outcomes for people of color across systems. Addressing racial and ethnic disparities and promoting equity is at the center of many initiatives that ISLG undertakes.
Challenge:
Good governance should inherently prioritize the development of policies and delivery of services in a way that serves every individual in the community equitably. Yet centuries of structural racism have created deeply entrenched barriers to the provision of equitable governance across our institutions and systems. These barriers have perpetuated a lack of representation in decision-making, uneven access to opportunity, unequal treatment of individuals based on their race, and disparately poor outcomes for people of color in systems ranging from criminal justice to housing to health care.
Enhancing these systems in order to advance and achieve equity demands a conscious and persistent effort by public servants to understand and confront systemic disparities perpetuated through existing policies and practices. A sustainable approach requires quantitative and qualitative data analysis and close partnership with communities that are most affected by inequities. Both are critical for identifying and understanding the drivers of these inequities and developing meaningful and effective solutions that directly address them. With an intentional emphasis on equity in governance, ISLG supports government agencies and community partners in these efforts, helping them achieve measurable progress toward greater shared opportunity for every member of the community.
Approach:
Equitable governance for all—regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, or other characteristics—is a fundamental ideal that unites the vast majority of our work. When it comes to racial equity more specifically, we strive to engage in initiatives that not only help government and community partners identify and understand inequities that exist, but where there is the potential for real impact. Our approach is multi-faceted and involves both data and analysis and building partnerships between government and communities. Across these realms, we provide support to government and communities at three critical points: 1) understanding of disparities that exist and what’s driving them; 2) developing and implementing informed solutions to tackle those disparities; and 3) evaluating solutions for impact and effectiveness.
Progress:
Through several past and ongoing projects, many focused on the criminal justice system, we have worked to advance fairness and transparency in government decision-making and partner with communities to enhance access to opportunities, services, and supports.
Prosecutors are responsible for wide-ranging decisions throughout the pretrial process, from charges to plea bargaining. As an analytic partner, ISLG is supporting the Office of Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez in promoting community safety, fairness, and equal justice by carrying out a research study on racial and ethnic disparities across prosecutorial decision points, and helping the office apply the findings to policy and practice strategies designed to address the drivers identified and promote equity.
Criminal Justice Investment Initiative (CJII)
An innovative justice reinvestment approach, CJII invests law enforcement dollars into community projects that improve public safety, develop broad crime prevention efforts, and promote a fair, efficient justice system in New York City. ISLG develops partnerships between law enforcement and communities and provides technical assistance through the investment process and oversight support for funds and grantees. To date, more than 25,000 New Yorkers have received crucial services as a result of CJII investments in transformative projects that strengthen city youth, families, and communities.
People of color experience inequities across a range of sectors and systems, among them economic, education, public health, and criminal justice. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, ISLG created a flexible methodology to help cities gather input from communities and develop Equity Indicators tools that allow them to measure equity across these various sectors and track progress toward increasing it over time. Originally piloted in New York City, tools have been adopted by cities nationwide to spur new policies, galvanize collaborations among city agencies and broader communities, inspire data collection efforts, and make more equitable budgeting allocations.
In 2013, the federal district court in Manhattan found that the policies and practices of the NYPD related to “stop, question, and frisk” were unconstitutional as they were based on individuals’ race or ethnicity, and appointed a monitor to oversee reforms designed to ensure that NYPD encounters with citizens meet the requirements of federal and New York law. ISLG was selected by the monitor to conduct a study addressing fundamental questions about officer compliance in police-citizen encounters, escalation in encounters, appropriate documentation of encounters, and racial disparities in each of these areas. With the implementation of a policy requiring officers to record nearly every encounter with body-worn cameras, our study will access a broader range of police-citizen encounters than the monitor has been evaluating.
While much of the dialogue around mass incarceration has centered on prison populations, so many more people are affected by incarceration in local jails. On any given day more than 740,000 individuals are in jail—the majority without a conviction. Within this population, there is a harsh overrepresentation of vulnerable groups, including people of color, at a huge cost to both individuals and society as a whole. With the MacArthur Foundation, we have helped jurisdictions nationwide develop, implement, and monitor data-informed strategies that aim to reduce the overuse of jails and racial and ethnic disparities present across the system. Our ongoing performance tracking for the initiative shows that while many sites have achieved significant progress toward reducing incarceration, disparities persist. ISLG will continue to provide data and analytic support to sites as they undertake more intensive reform efforts toward racial equity in the next phase of the SJC initiative.
Contact Reagan Daly, Research Director, at Reagan.Daly@islg.cuny.edu for more information.