Jennifer Lavoie
Areas of Expertise
- Community Safety
- Criminal Justice Policy
- Criminology, Policing and Corrections
- Housing, Homelessness and Poverty
- Mental Health
Biography
I am cross-appointed to the Departments of Criminology and Psychology, and my academic background is primarily based in training as an experimental forensic psychologist. I am appointed to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and currently serve as the Graduate Coordinator for the Criminology MA program.
I received my MA (2004) and PhD (2010) in forensic psychology and law from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia. I received my BA (Hons) in psychology from Carleton University in my hometown of Ottawa, Ontario (2001).
Prior to joining Laurier, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Ontario (2010) where I contributed to the Mental Health Commission of Canada National Research Team on the At Home/Chez Soi Research Demonstration Project on Mental Health and Homelessness.
I conduct nationally and provincially funded research focused on police interactions with people in mental health crisis. My program of work investigates the effectiveness of police de-escalation and crisis response training models, the use of co-response models, and police decision-making during encounters with citizens in mental health crises. I also explore how people with lived experience of mental illness and family carers experience and perceive police encounters during crisis. I am currently leading and working in partnership on a number of research initiatives to develop, produce and test de-escalation and crisis intervention training for frontline police officers using high fidelity, immersive virtual reality simulations.