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91��ܽ's School of Criminology is thrilled to announce that criminology scholars Maaike Helmus and Rylan Simpson have been awarded Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grants.

Helmus’ project titled “Examining Racial/Ethnic Bias in Psychological Risk Assessment, Diagnoses, Expert Recommendations, And Release Decisions for High-Risk Sex Offenders” aims to help promote fair, reliable, and valid assessment and decision-making for justice-involved individuals, with the potential to reduce racial/ethnic over-representation and other decision biases.

In collaboration with Kelly Babchishin from Carleton University and Mark Olver from the University of Saskatchewan, Helmus will analyze psychological reports from 2013-2023 of roughly 200 men declared Sexually Violent Predators in Washington state. The analysis will cover their initial evaluation and annual re-evaluations assessing progress and suitability for release.

Simpson’s project titled “(Extra)ordinary Abilities of Police: A Multi-Method Assessment of Civilian and Officer Performance” will assess the accuracy and reliability of police performance on policing tasks as well as the extent to which officers’ judgements may be driven by biases, expectations, pre-existing beliefs, and/or contextual information.

Through a combination of surveys and experimental methods, this five-year project will explore and compare beliefs held by civilians and police officers about their abilities in the context of several different tasks, and examine both groups’ actual abilities on tasks that police officers are expected to perform at an extraordinary level.

“Our findings will help to shape police training, inform legal and societal expectations of police officers, and ensure that the courts are using an appropriate reasonableness standard when assessing police behaviour,” says Simpson. “Our findings will also help to promote fair, effective, and impartial policing as well as ensure that best practices are rooted in empirical evidence as opposed to anecdotes and/or intuition.”

Simpson’s research will be conducted in partnership with Adele Quigley-McBride and Ryan Fitzgerald from SFU’s Department of Psychology.

are designed to support research excellence in the social sciences and humanities. Stable support for long-term research initiatives is central to advancing knowledge. It enables scholars to address complex issues about individuals and societies, and to further our collective understanding.