The Podcast @ DC

Followers of The Lab @ DC may be familiar with one of our first projects, which was a collaboration with DC’s Metropolitan Police Department — MPD for short — to evaluate the impact of wearing a body-worn camera on many outcomes. Among those were our best existing measures of police-community relations — namely, complaints of police misconduct and the rate at which officers use physical force in interacting with a community member. In case you forgot, here's a reminder of the results: we found across those outcomes and others almost no measurable effect of using a body-worn camera in DC. Now, MPD still uses Body Worn Cameras, but we as a District think of them more as a vital source of public record for high profile events, and less as a tool to improve police-community relations as a result of that evaluation.

So, if we still believe there is room for improvement police-community relations in DC, the logical question is what’s next? To MPD’s credit, they've tried something new, and importantly, they chose to evaluate it in the most rigorous possible way. Here's a little bit about this new project:

We know that police officers and residents often have different expectations about policing, and they inform how they interact with one another. Acknowledging this difference and its role in shaping overall police-community relations, MPD sought to equip officers with detailed knowledge of the community. So, working with history professors from the University of the District of Columbia, MPD developed a new training program to be delivered to all personnel. The training includes rigorous classroom instruction on the history of the District as well as a tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

This special live episode of the Podcast @ DC was recorded in the spring of 2019. You will hear a panel discussion from the team that assembled this new program, including the professors from UDC, MPD’s training team, officers who participated in the program, and Lab fellow Anita Ravishankar who all worked together to ensure that the training was effective. You'll also hear from members of the community who want to know how this training might improve their lives as DC residents.

Panel moderator:

Heather Foster

Panelists:

Mr. Marvin (Ben) Haiman

Commander Ralph Ennis

Dr. Sharita Thompson

Dr. Bernard Demczuk

Officer Melvin Evans

Sergeant Ilah Wiggins

Anita Ravishankar

Music from https://filmmusic.io

"Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

In 2001, the District government instituted its own version of the federal government’s Earned Income Tax Credit, also called the EITC. It's intended to assist low- to moderate-income working families with children. In a recent expansion of DC’s credit in 2015, the District offered access to working families without children and expanded eligibility criteria overall, so that it included more families. How does this tax credit compare to federal assistance programs like SNAP or TANF? Does the credit do what it intends to? How can we evaluate how well it’s working?

To learn more about this, the Lab's Interim Director Sam Quinney will have a discussion with Dr. Bradley Hardy, an associate professor of Public Administration and Policy at American University, and a nonresident senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. He has worked with other policy experts to research the EITC, labor economics, income volatility, and poverty.

Music from https://filmmusic.io

"Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

On July 20, 2017, Mayor Muriel Bowser launched The Lab @ DC within the Office of the City Administrator. Supported by Arnold Ventures philanthropy, The Lab is a bold effort to include a team of scientists in the inner workings of DC Government. When we first developed The Lab @ DC, we did so with an idea in mind⁠—what we scientists would call a hypothesis⁠—about how DC government could work better for you.

This bonus podcast is brought to you in celebration of the two year anniversary of The Lab @ DC. We’re celebrating with an open letter to our DC neighbors.

Read the Director's letter here: https://medium.com/@the.lab/the-lab-is-turning-two-8bc7af4f14b1

Stay updated on our work: https://thelab.dc.gov/get-involved.html

Deadlines. The word itself probably makes you a little anxious. And when the deadline is something like renewing your eligibility for social assistance, deadlines are high stakes. So what can we do to help people meet them? Are there bottlenecks we can lessen, or behavioral interventions we can introduce?

This episode is extra special for The Lab @ DC, because we're talking about one of our own projects. We have been investigating this very question with our colleagues at the DC Department of Human Services. Podcast Host David Yokum is joined by Lab Senior Social Scientist Katie Gan, and Chief of Strategic Planning and Project Management at DC's Department of Human Services Steph Bloch, both of whom led this project.

In February 2018, DC welcomed its 700,000th resident, putting the city’s population at its highest its since the mid-1970’s. But with a growing population comes a growing concern around the District’s ability to provide affordable and inclusive housing. Does the city have enough homes? Are they varied enough to accomodate singles, couples, and families? What will make the city financially accessible for native and new Washingtonians?

Earlier this summer, our team had the opportunity to join the Association for Psychological Science’s annual conference in San Francisco. And while we were there, we got to talk to a few psychologists about the application of their research. In our final episode of the series is a discussion on perception and attention with Daniel Simons, Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Music From the Free Music Archive: "The Grass is Always Greener" by Pure Grease.

Earlier this summer, our team had the opportunity to join the Association for Psychological Science’s annual conference in San Francisco. And while we were there, we got to talk to a few psychologists about the application of their research. Next up in our three-part series is a discussion on organizational psychology with Dorothy Carter, Assistant Professor of Organizational Psychology at the University of Georgia.

Music From the Free Music Archive: "The Grass is Always Greener" by Pure Grease.

Earlier this summer, our team had the opportunity to join the Association for Psychological Science’s annual conference in San Francisco. And while we were there, we got to talk to a few psychologists about the application of their research. First up in our three-part series is a discussion on memory with Lynn Nadel, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona.

Music From the Free Music Archive: "The Grass is Always Greener" by Pure Grease.

Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital.

In this live recoding of The Podcast @ DC, we're joined by the book's authors - Chris Myers Asch and Derek Musgrove - for a conversation on Washington's history as a battleground for issues of slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification.

Music From the Free Music Archive: "The Grass is Always Greener" by Pure Grease.

If you live in a city experiencing rapid urbanization, you know it's hard to agree on how to inclusively utilize important urban goods. What practical tools and governance forms can residents and policymakers rely on to come to a satisfactory agreement? We’re joined by Sheila Foster, Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University, to talk about the Co-Cities project that investigates new forms of collaborative city-making.

Music From the Free Music Archive: "The Grass is Always Greener" by Pure Grease.