Recently, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), with support from Arnold Ventures (AV), launched the Criminal Justice Innovation (CJI) Fellowship program, which supports early-career researchers who are exploring what works to make communities safer and the criminal justice system fairer and more effective.

We spoke with current CJI Fellow Shinjini Pandey, who is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Economics at Duke University and a Visiting Research Scholar at NBER.

Fellow Shinjini Pandey hails from India, where she completed her master’s in economics at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research and her bachelor’s at the University of Delhi. Before beginning her Ph.D. at The Ohio State University, Pandey worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute, where she studied the role of self-help groups in improving women’s nutrition and agency.

“My shift from development economics to criminal justice research happened almost by chance,” says Pandey. What began as a summer research assistant position on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project evolved into a three-year long collaboration with the Columbus Division of Police. Pandey’s work centered on evaluating the effectiveness of alternative police responses in Columbus that were designed to improve how behavioral health crises are handled by police. The project came at a particularly timely moment, as interactions between police and individuals experiencing behavioral health challenges became increasingly common across the U.S.

Shinjini Pandey

As part of this collaboration, Pandey is evaluating the impact on crisis response by officers who had received crisis intervention and de-escalation training.[SP1]  She also studied the impact of the Columbus police co-response program, where officers are paired with mental health clinicians and jointly respond to crises. “The findings of our study are not only crucial for the city of Columbus but also highly relevant for many other cities that are adopting—or considering—similar programs,” Pandey says.

Pandey’s exposure to the administrative data and interactions with the officials at the Columbus Emergency Communication Center also drew her attention to the critical but understudied role of 911 call-takers and dispatchers. Serving as the first point of contact for both emergencies and non-emergencies, dispatch employees collect information from callers, assess the nature and urgency of the situation, record key details, and dispatch appropriate assistance.

Their decisions directly shape the quality of public safety responses, yet social scientists know very little about the factors that influence their decision-making. “One part of my Ph.D. research was therefore focused on filling this gap,” says Pandey. “Specifically, I studied how the race of suspects, identified in dispatcher notes, affects call classification and dispatch decisions, and how those decisions in turn influence officer behavior and response times.”

As a CJI fellow, Pandey will continue her research on 911 dispatch, with a focus on understanding inconsistencies in dispatch decision-making and the factors that drive them. This work has the potential to help dispatch centers tailor training and design interventions that reduce subjectivity and strengthen public safety responses.

“In parallel, I am collaborating with colleagues at Ohio State on projects examining disparities in Columbus police use-of-force and traffic stop decisions. This has also sparked my interest in broader questions of police accountability, particularly in studying the role of police unions and insurers in shaping patterns of misconduct,” says Pandey.