Urban Security: A Pilot Experiment

Adapting the original setting of the Deliberative Poll®, the citizens of Chieti (Region Abruzzo, Italy) do experience a pilot event, organized by the City and the University. In order to answer the research question: “how much do misperceptions of fear matter?” this pilot experiment deals with two issues, the main being urban security and the “embedded” being third country migration, in a unique context. On the one hand, as the most recent data (Eurostat 2014) on crimes in this area show, it will be measured the perception (and the idea) of security of the participants, in a low-rate crimes situation; on the other hand, strictly interconnected with this main issue, it will be measured how the self-selected participants deal with the (almost unknown in their real life) topic of immigration, considering that Chieti, likewise every other territory of the Region Abruzzo, has no experience of compulsory quotas of third country migrants decided at a national level (because of the terrible earthquake L’Aquila suffered in April 2009). Experimental design will follow some of the main guidelines elaborated by Fishkin for his Deliberative Poll®, with participatory adjustments due to the availability of public officers, experts and citizens. During the first meeting (January 2016) the participants fill in the paper questionnaires during the introduction of the event (T1) and again after a week (T2) they fill in a similar online questionnaire; moreover, the small groups do deliberate on the selected issues after a previous introduction of the City Mayor and Public Security Officers but without briefing material, which they do receive during the week before the second questionnaire; finally, this first group discussion is recorded for further analysis of the discourses, eventually measuring the quality of the deliberation with appropriate coding instruments already developed. In the second meeting (March 2016) the participants fill in the paper questionnaires before (T3) and after the event (T4), where they get introduced by the Rector of the University and Professors; right after that, discussions take place starting from the missing arguments of the January recordings; as for the first event, recordings will be made of the discussions, in order to make further research on that; finally, a plenary discussion take place. After 7/10 days from the second event, the participants are again invited to fill in an online version of the questionnaires (T5), thus concluding the experiment, whose complete duration is 60 days. The full experiment is well advertised and televised by the local branch of national media, as well as the web and ordinary local press.