Research Symposium

BIO

I’m Andronika Christian, a sophomore at Florida State University, pursuing bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and Crime Scene Investigation. I’m originally from [Your Hometown], and I have a strong interest in understanding human behavior and the justice system. Currently, I’m working as a researcher on the RPO Research project, where I analyze and collect data from over 15,000 court cases, which has helped me develop skills in data coding and legal analysis. I also serve as an instructional faculty member overseeing CARE’s Engage 100 courses and hold leadership roles as VP of the Afro-Latinx Association and a member of Garnet and Gold Key.

My career goal is to become a forensic psychologist, combining my passion for criminal justice and psychology to help understand and analyze behavior within the legal system. Outside of academics, I’m the President of Kindness Matters at FSU, where I lead outreach efforts and mentorship programs for local schools.

A Mixed-Methods Evaluation of the Impacts and Implementation of Florida’s Risk Protection Order (RPO) Law

Abstract

The goal of this project is to explore the efficacy and implementation of Risk Protection Orders (RPOs) in Florida.
RPOs were introduced in the Florida Legislature in 2018 and since their inception very few studies have been conducted on them. It is important that we investigate the implementation of RPOs on a larger scale to determine whether they are an efficient mechanism to reduce gun violence. The three stages to this analysis are: collecting the data from over 15,000 RPO cases from Florida to create a database, running four levels of quantitative analysis to evaluate the effect of RPOs on reducing gun violence and using mixed methods to explore the differences in RPO implementation across jurisdictions.
Although the project is in its first stages, it promises to strengthen and broaden the knowledge on RPOs and their relation to gun violence exponentially. The database created will be the largest and most representative sample of RPOs and will allow for the most comprehensive evaluation of a state's RPO laws. The findings generated by the analyses will reveal important trends of the implementation and efficiency of RPOs in preventing gun violence, an ongoing issue that has affected millions of lives. Researching the efficacy of the legislation that is created to reduce gun violence will allow future legislators to create new and better solutions.

Keywords: Legal Research, RPO, court cases