• While nearly two-thirds (63.2%; n=2188) of survey respondents favored police-initiated petitions, write-in responses illuminated nuanced and context-dependent tradeoffs situated within racialized legal, political, and economic systems. 
• These tradeoffs included: 
  1. systems knowledge versus relational and contextual knowledge;
  2. mainstream credibility versus direct lines of communication;
  3. procedural burden versus personal capacity and responsibility;
  4. fear of repercussions versus wariness of law enforcement; and
  5. law enforcement training and risk assessment versus alternative crisis response options. 

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Findings underscore the importance of ERPO implementation strategies that are responsive not only to legal and procedural requirements but also to the social and relational contexts in which decisions about petitioning occur. More broadly, findings add support to growing efforts within the field, catalyzed in part by community organizing efforts around health justice and racial equity, to assess, adapt, and scale peer-and community-based navigation approaches that complement existing implementation processes and help ensure more equitable access to the preventive benefits of ERPOs for reducing firearm-related harms.

METHODS

We use data from the 2024 California Safety and Wellbeing Survey, a repeated cross-sectional general population online survey of California adults, to estimate the prevalence of support for and opposition to police-initiated petitions and thematically analyze open-ended responses describing the reasons for these preferences. 

Learn More

• Read the paper in Frontiers in Public Health