American Politics & Public Policy: Joint Workshop with Minali Aggarwal and Taran Samarth, Yale

AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP

Minali Aggarwal: “The Limits of Non-Police Crisis Response and Shifting the Paradigm for Public Safety in American Cities”
Abstract: In response to the 2020 uprisings against police violence, alternative crisis response programs have rapidly expanded across the United States. These programs deploy social workers, EMTs, and trained mediators to handle quality of life issues, mental health emergencies, neighborhood disputes, substance-related public health issues, and other non-violent situations that benefit from de-escalation or specialized intervention rather than traditional law enforcement responses. Amid the emergence of these programs, political science research on public safety remains focused on policing as a paradigm for public safety. As a consequence, it has paid minimal attention to the positive visions for public safety popularized by activists and done little to evaluate the material and ideological power of police in local governance more generally. This paper shifts the field’s focus to these matters by examining the political, institutional, and theoretical challenges faced by alternative crisis response programs. To do so, I conducted 40 in-depth interviews with 29 advocates and 22 implementation staff representing 22 publicly funded non-police crisis response programs across the U.S. My analysis highlights the steep political challenges that non-police crisis response programs have faced, namely due to police resistance and a widespread reliance on the paradigms of policing and punishment to manage social crisis in the city.

Minali Aggarwal is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in the departments of Political Science and Black Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on local politics, racial politics, and social movements.

Taran Samarth: “Who Should Know What? Federalism Attitudes and Public Opinion Toward Intergovernmental Data Sharing”
Abstract: Americans express coherent preferences about the distribution of governing authority, but whether these attitudes are principled commitments or instrumental responses to policy content remains unresolved. I test whether diffuse federalism attitudes predict how citizens evaluate a concrete intergovernmental arrangement — cross-jurisdictional data sharing from automated license plate readers, a case of “data federalism” as termed by legal scholars — and whether they do so even when the arrangement serves the respondent’s preferred policy outcomes. I present a research design for a survey experiment that varies the scope and policy purpose of a data-sharing arrangement, with pre-treatment measurement of federalism attitudes, in order to adjudicate among competing accounts: that diffuse attitudes predict concrete evaluations, that they do so only among ideological conservatives, or that they are behaviorally inert. The study will speak to a broader question: as governments expand their reliance on data-hungry technologies, can public opinion function as a constraint on how state power is assembled and distributed?

Taran Samarth is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science and an ISPS and RITM graduate fellow. Their research examines how federalism shapes American social movements, especially in municipal politics and the carceral state.

This workshop is open to current members of the Yale community only.