The NYC Panel studies resident attitudes about government effectiveness and the willingness of neighbors to act collectively. The project is sponsored by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ) and is a partnership between the John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center and NORC at the University of Chicago. NORC surveyed adults in approximately 20,000 households in 15 areas of NYC across three waves of surveys.  

The project aims to measure resident attitudes toward government programs that provide human services and violence reduction programs. Residents were selected from three different categories of neighborhoods

• neighborhoods with public housing participating in the Mayors Action Plan (MAP) with a history of higher-than-average violence and public safety challenges

• neighborhoods with high rates of gun violence that are in the catchment area for programs using violence interrupters to end the cycle of retaliation after a shooting

• comparison neighborhoods selected to be representative of the city as a whole 

This research aims to better understand the effects of human services interventions designed to improve public safety in nontraditional ways through increases in trust between government and residents, trust among residents, changes in readiness for collective action, and improvements in the perceived legitimacy of government actions.