K-12 School Shootings in Context: New Findings from The American School Shooting Study (TASSS)

The American School Shooting Study (TASSS) is an ongoing mixed-method project funded by the National Institute of Justice to catalog US school shootings. It has amassed data based on open sources and other public materials dating back to 1990. This brief presents new insights from TASSS, diving deeper into the database's potential to examine the locations, timing, and student involvement of youth-perpetrated gun violence

A Mixed-Method Analysis of Fatal Attacks on Police by Far-Right Extremists

Several recent high-profile homicides of police officers have brought increased attention to issues of far-right extremist violence in the United States. We still, however, know very little about why (and how) certain encounters between far-right extremists and police result in violence. To fill this research gap, we conduct a mixed-method analysis of far-right antipolice homicides based on quantitative and qualitative data from the U.S. Extremist Crime Database. We begin by categorizing cases based on key aspects of homicide storylines. We then comparatively analyze attributes of event precursor, transaction, and aftermath stages across four storyline categories. Finally, a case study is purposively selected to follow-up on each storyline category to better capture the nuances of fluid homicide processes. Our findings have important implications for identifying triggering events, escalation factors, and other situated sets of conditions and circumstances that contribute to deadly outcomes for police officers

Community-Based Violence Prevention: An Assessment of Pittsburgh's One Vision One Life Program

Assesses the implementation, operations, and impact of the One Vision One Life violence prevention strategy, including community-building, conflict intervention, and mediation; impact on violence trends; comparisons with other cities; and lessons learned

Police Consolidation in the News

Although there is a large body of research on media coverage of crime and criminal justice issues, there is significantly less information about policing issues generally, and there has not been a study that specifically examines how the consolidation of law enforcement agencies has been presented in the news. This study fills this gap. We explore two general themes. First, we detail what issues about consolidation have been emphasized in the news. Second, we examine the types of sources that news reporters have relied on and how they have used them in stories about consolidation. © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Only the Bad Die Young: The Correlates of Organizational Death for Far-Right Extremist Groups

The domestic far-right movement has existed in the United States for many years. During that time, groups have appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. Unfortunately, very little is known about what causes these groups to disband. Prior research has focused on long-lived groups, but the majority of extremist or terrorist groups fail to survive for an extended period of time. This study examined a variety of external and internal correlates of organizational death identified from both terrorism and organizational literature, to empirically test which correlates lead to a group dying young

Is More Violent Better? The Impact of Group Participation in Violence on Group Longevity for Far-Right Extremist Groups

Recent research has begun to explore the causes of organizational death for domestic far-right extremist groups. An important aspect that has not been examined is whether or not a group\u27s participation in violence influences its longevity. This study addresses this gap in the literature by examining over 400 domestic far-right extremist groups that persisted for varying lengths of time to determine whether or not group participation in violence influences their longevity. Additionally, this study also examines whether a variety of external (environmental) and internal correlates influence the longevity of violent and nonviolent groups differently

Exploring the crime-terror nexus in the United States: a social network analysis of a Hezbollah network involved in trade diversion

ArticleThis is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict on 30th November 1015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17467586.2015.1104420.This exploratory study examined the nexus between crime and terrorism through a social network analysis of an American based Hezbollah network involved in trade diversion of cigarettes for self-financing purposes. Our study had three goals: (1) to explore the structural characteristics of an Islamic extremist network involved in trade diversion; (2) to identify key actors in the network and their links to other network participants; and (3) to compare these findings with the depiction of the network and its structure provided by U.S. public authorities. We used court documents and open source information to identify network participants and coded all the links existing among them. We used the software package “Pajek” and also provided visual representations of the networks through sociograms. Our findings revealed important features of a so-called “dark network” and provided practical implications for policy-makers involved in counter-strategies, improving their understanding of the relational aspects and dynamics among network participants that can sometimes be overlooked. First, only six out of 34 participants in the conspiracy were identified as supporters of Hezbollah, thus supporting the so-called “crime-terror nexus” theory. Second, while previous research has tended to neglect the existence of lower-level interactions occurring outside static and predetermined organizational settings, we found evidence that links between extremists and non-extremists occurred within fluid and dynamic structures that form part of broader social networks. This key point questions the validity of simplistic labels such as “terrorist cell” or “criminal organization” when used with reference to entities that involve both extremists and non-extremists. This finding has policy implications, given that this type of “hybrid” networks may require a different investigative and prosecutorial approach combining strategies and tools from both organized crime and terrorism investigations. Finally, our actor-centered analysis showed interesting similarities as well as differences between our findings and the way prosecutors classified suspects based on their role in the conspiracy.U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate’s University Program DivisionNational Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START