Public Safety
& Community Well-being
Studying how communities and public institutions can work together to promote safety, trust, and well-being through policing reform, civic engagement, and cross-sector collaboration.
Overview
Faculty study the conditions under which communities thrive and public institutions earn trust. Their work spans policing and violence reduction, nonprofit leadership, criminal justice reform, and comparative justice systems, approaching public safety as foundational to democratic stability and community health. The area brings together practitioners working to improve systems from within alongside scholars examining how those systems can be structurally reformed, with shared attention to race, history, and identity as essential context for any policy response.
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Brian N. WilliamsProfessor of Public Engagement and Public PolicyBrian Williams is a professor of public engagement and public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and Director of the Public Engagement in Governance: Looking, Listening and Learning Laboratory (the PEGLLLLab) at UVA. His research centers on issues related to demographic diversity, local law enforcement, and public governance, with special attention devoted to the co-production of public safety and public order.
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Kyle S. H. DobsonAssistant Professor of Public Policy and PsychologyKyle S. H. Dobson is an assistant professor of public policy and psychology at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Dobson takes an interdisciplinary approach to organizational studies, focusing primarily on occupations where employees sacrifice their well-being in service to others. His work has focused on police departments primarily, with expansion to schools and other organizations.
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Paul S. MartinAssociate Professor of Public PolicyPaul Martin is an associate professor of public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Martin studies how and when political elites respond to the preferences of ordinary people; political participation and advocacy, how and when citizens become involved in the policy process; on the role of mass media; and on the origins and consequences of social capital .
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Gerard RobinsonProfessor of Practice in Public Policy and LawGerard Robinson is a professor of practice in public policy and law at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the School of Law. His areas of expertise are K-12 and higher education, criminal justice reform, race in American institutions, and the role of nonprofit organizations in civil society.
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Gerald HigginbothamAssistant Professor of Public Policy and PsychologyGerald Higginbotham is an assistant professor of public policy and psychology at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Utilizing social and cultural psychological insights, Higginbotham researches the imprint of history on people’s modern social perceptions and policy attitudes, and the psychological underpinnings of how people perceive history and its consequences.
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John HolbeinAssociate Professor of Public Policy, Politics, and EducationJohn Holbein is an associate professor of public policy, politics, and education at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Holbein studies political participation, political inequality, democratic accountability, political representation, and education policy.