Anna Harvey

Professor of Politics and Director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University

Professor Harvey is Professor of Politics, Affiliated Professor of Law, and Director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University. She has served as Chair of the Department of Politics and as Interim Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science. Her work with the Public Safety Lab uses the tools of data science and social science to promote cost-effective public safety, with an awareness of both resource and social costs. The Public Safety Lab works with communities and law enforcement agencies to design, implement, and test analytic solutions that meet jurisdictions’ needs. The Public Safety Lab is currently working with several law enforcement jurisdictions to design and build analytic solutions that address officer safety in responding to 911 calls, the potential for human error in the priority codes assigned to calls for service, and strategies to identify human trafficking victims from the online corpus of commercial sex ads and provider reviews. The Lab is also engaged in a randomized controlled trial of a platform that pushes an SMS-based survey to recent 911 callers, asking them to rate their experience of the police response. The Public Safety Lab is also developing and piloting a mobile application that will allow a community to partner with a policing agency to co-produce public safety. Through the app, criminal investigators will be able to communicate with civilians near the location and time of day of recently committed crimes, with the capacity to solicit and receive video, photographic, or textual information.

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