Radicalization and Violent Extremism in the Era of COVID-19

On January 21, 2021, the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS) Vancouver hosted its first digital roundtable event of the year, Radicalization and Violent Extremism in the Era of COVID-19. The presentation was conducted by guest speaker, Dr. Garth Davies, an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. He is also currently involved in developing data for evaluating programs for countering violent extremism. Dr. Davies’ presentation provided an overview of the changes that society has had to make in adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic and shared some of his research findings on radicalization and violent extremism online during the pandemic. The increase in working remotely and being on the Internet has possibly contributed to a larger dissemination of misinformation leading people to certain extremist sites and forums that may contribute to radicalization. Additionally, Dr. Davies answered questions submitted by the audience, which focused on online radicalization, online platforms used for recruiting by extremist groups, misinformation, and the Incel movement

Street Stops and Broken Windows: \u3ci\u3eTerry\u3c/i\u3e, Race and Disorder in New York City

Patterns of stop and frisk activity by police across New York City neighborhoods reflect competing theories of aggressive policing. Broken Windows theory suggest that neighborhoods with greater concentration of physical and social disorder should evidence higher stop and frisk activity, especially for quality of life crimes. However, although disorder theory informs quality of life policing strategies, patterns of stop and frisk activity suggest that neighborhood characteristics such as racial composition, poverty levels, and extent of social disorganization are stronger predictors of race- and crime-specific stops. Accordingly, neighborhood street stop activity reflects competing assumptions and meanings of policing strategy. Furthermore, looking at the rate at which street stops meet Terry standards of reasonable suspicion in various neighborhoods provides additional perspective on the social and strategic meanings of policing. Our empirical evidence suggests that policing is not about disorderly places, nor about improving the quality of life, but about policing poor people in poor places. This strategy contradicts the policy rationale derived from Broken Windows theory, and deviates from the original emphasis on communities by focusing on people. Racially disparate policing reinforces perceptions by citizens in minority neighborhoods that they are under non-particularized suspicion and are therefore targeted for aggressive stop and frisk policing. Such broad targeting raises concerns about the legitimacy of law, threatens to weaken citizen participation in the co-production of security, and undercuts the broader social norms goals of contemporary policing

British Columbia SHIFT: Early Lessons Learned from a Provincial Program for Countering Radicalization to Violent Extremism

Many existing programs for countering violent extremism focus on either end of the radicalization spectrum. On one hand are prevention programs aimed at deterring individuals from starting down the path to violent extremism. On the other hand are disengagement/de-radicalization programs designed for assisting individuals who have been fully radicalized. Conspicuously absent are programs for those who fall in-between, into what might be referred to as the pre-criminal space: individuals who have begun to exhibit signs of radicalization, but for whom radicalization is not yet complete. The British Columbia Shift (BC Shift) initiative was created to assist individuals determined to be in this pre-criminal space; that is, those deemed to be in danger of radicalizing. The goal of BC Shift is to stop individuals from traveling further down the path of radicalization, and, ideally, to turn individuals away from the path. BC Shift operates as a navigational model, connecting at-risk individuals with services and supports in the community. BC Shift is a government initiative supported by the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence. It is a civilian organization that partners very closely with, but is separate from, law enforcement. In addition to its primary CRVE mandate, BC Shift has rapidly evolved and expanded into several other responsibilities, including coordination on national CVE standards; liaising with other CVE programs across Canada; maintaining stakeholder relationships; and helping create capacity through dialog and training. Although the program only began accepting referrals in 2019, its operation has already revealed many important lessons for CRVE programs. First, it is critically important to have the right people in the room. There has to be buy-in from the highest levels of partner agencies and stakeholders, particularly early on. Second, programs of this sort should leverage existing resources wherever possible. BC Shift has been lucky enough to coordinate with situation tables, such as the CHART program in Surrey. There are already many organizations doing excellent work in their respective communities; it is very helpful to plug into those resources. Third, even though BC Shift operates as a navigational hub, it has benefitted greatly from having a social worker as part of the team. This skill set is important in helping referred individuals feel comfortable with the process of accessing services and supports. Finally, marketing matters! CRVE programs such as BC Shift have to navigate a complex reality. The very concept of violent extremism is disconcerting to a lot of people in the community; these fears have to be addressed, and difficulties related to differences in perspective and language have to be overcome. BC Shift’s first year-and-a-half of operation has also highlighted several issues that have not yet been satisfactorily resolved. There is, for example, the “low hanging fruit” problem; agencies are typically referring less severe cases. Trying to get agencies to refer more serious cases has proved challenging. We hope that, by outlining these lessons and issues, this presentation proves to be useful to other CRVE initiatives

Crime and Enforcement in Immigrant Neighborhoods: Evidence from New York City

Immigration and crime have received much popular and political attention in the past decade, and have been a focus of episodic social attention for much of the history of the U.S. Recent policy and legal discourse suggests that the stigmatic link between immigrants and crime has endured, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. This study addresses the relationship between immigration and crime in urban settings, focusing on areal units where immigrants tend to cluster spatially as well as socially. We ask whether immigration creates risks or benefits for neighborhoods in terms of lower crime rates. The question is animated in part by a durable claim in criminology that areas with large immigrant populations are burdened by elevated levels of social disorder and crime. In contrast, more recent theory and research suggests that “immigrant neighborhoods” may simply be differentially organized and function in a manner that reduces the incidence of crime. Accordingly, this research investigates whether immigrants are associated with differences in area crime rates. In addition, we ask whether there are differences in the effects of immigration on neighborhood crime rates by the racial and ethnic makeup of the foreign born populations. Finally, we examine the effects of immigration on patterns of enforcement

Race and selective enforcement in public housing

Drugs, crime and public housing are closely linked in policy and politics, and their nexus has animated several intensive drug enforcement programs targeted at public housing residents. In New York City, police systematically conduct "vertical" patrols in public, making tens of thousands of "Terry" stops to detect drugs or weapons each year under the Trespass Abatement Program, or TAP. Both uniformed and undercover officers move systemically within the halls and stairwells of buildings, temporarily detaining and questioning residents and visitors, often at a low threshold of suspicion, and usually alleging trespass to justify the stop. This pattern of selective enforcement through elevated rates of high discretion stops in public housing under TAP raises constitutional concerns at the intersection of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibitions on racial discrimination -- residents of public housing are overwhelming nonwhite -- and Fourth Amendment prohibitions on suspicionless stops. We use a case-control design to identify the effects of living in a public housing development on the probability of stop, frisk and arrest for trespass or other crimes in New York City's 330 public housing developments from 2005-8. We find that the incidence rate ratio for trespass stops and arrests is 1.5 times greater in public housing than in the immediate surrounding neighborhoods. We decompose these effects using first differences models and find that the difference in percent Black population in public housing compared to the surrounding area predicts the disparity in trespass enforcement. Four-wave cross-lag regressions show that trespass enforcement in public housing is independent from enforcement in the surrounding area, suggesting that public housing is specifically targeted for intensive enforcement. The results raise constitutional concerns about equal protection. Qualitative evidence suggests that stops have a stigmatizing effect on public housing residents and their families, and that they inhibit basic social interactions such as child care arrangements and family visitation

Getting to Death: Race and the Paths of Capital Cases after \u3cem\u3eFurman\u3c/em\u3e

Decades of research on the administration of the death penalty have recognized the persistent arbitrariness in its implementation and the racial inequality in the selection of defendants and cases for capital punishment. This Article provides new insights into the combined effects of these two constitutional challenges. We show how these features of post-Furman capital punishment operate at each stage of adjudication, from charging death-eligible cases to plea negotiations to the selection of eligible cases for execution and ultimately to the execution itself, and how their effects combine to sustain the constitutional violations first identified 50 years ago in Furman. Analyzing a dataset of 2,328 first-degree murder convictions in Georgia from 1995–2004 that produced 1,317 death eligible cases, we show that two features of these cases combine to produce a small group of persons facing execution: victim race and gender, and a set of case-specific features that are often correlated with race. We also show that these features explain which cases progress from the initial stages of charging to a death sentence, and which are removed from death eligibility at each stage through plea negotiations. Consistent with decades of death penalty research, we also show the special focus of prosecution on cases where Black defendants murder white victims. The evidence in the Georgia records suggests a regime marred less by overbreadth in its statute than capriciousness and randomness in the decision to seek death and to seek it in a racially disparate manner. These two dimensions of capital case adjudication combine to sustain the twin failures that produce the fatal lottery that is the death penalty

The Paradox of the Drug Elimination Program in New York City Public Housing

In this study, we examine the effects of the DEP intervention at three levels of complementary theoretical and practical relevance: the public housing development itself, the neighborhood in which public housing is situated, and the police precinct where the tract is located. From surveys of residents, observations of program activities, and analyses of NYCHA\u27s program records, we compiled detailed information on the components of DEP and the reactions of public housing residents to each type of intervention. We then analyzed panel data from 1985-1996 to estimate the effects of DEP on crime rates in and around the city\u27s public housing projects before and after the implementation of DEP. We used alternate measures of DEP interventions to provide robust estimates of the contributions of DEP to the decline in the city\u27s crime rates beginning in 1991, a year after the onset of DEP. The results show that while DEP efforts were linked to declines in crime rates in the census tracts and police precincts surrounding public housing, there were no measurable declines in crime in the public housing projects themselves. We draw lessons from theories of procedural justice and social norms to explain why harsh treatment of public housing residents by police and prosecutors may have generated resistance among public housing residents to the legal norms that were the focus of DEP efforts. We begin in Section I with a detailed description of the DEP Program implemented by the New York City Housing Authority. Section II provides an overview of NYCHA\u27s Drug Elimination Program as implemented in the City\u27s public housing projects. Section III discusses the details of the research protocols and analytic methods. Section IV presents the results for each of the three spatial dimensions of program effects: the projects themselves, the census tracts where public housing developments are sited, and the police precincts where DEP and other law enforcement strategies were implemented and managed. Section V discusses lessons for the theory, policy, and practice of drug control

Social Contagion of Violence

Since 1968, violence and other crimes in New York City have followed a pattern of recurring epidemics. There have been three consecutive and contiguous cycles characterized by sharp increases in homicides and assaults to an elevated rate followed by equally steep declines to levels near the previous starting point. The most recent epidemic, from 1985-96, had the sharpest rise and steepest decline of the three epidemics. Popular explanations of the current epidemic fail to account for both the rise and fall of the decline, or for the repetitive pattern of these epidemics. In this article, we use public health data to identify factors associated with the cyclical rise and fall of homicides and non-lethal injury violence in this most recent of the three epidemics. Homicides in this period were concentrated among minority males, ages 15-24, while victimization rates for females of all ages remained stable. Gun homicides and non-lethal gun assaults accounted for all the increase and decline in interpersonal violence from 1985-95; intentional injuries caused by other means also were stable or declining over this period. Next, we use hierarchical linear regression models, with a rich set of time-varying covariates and controls for both temporal and spatial autocorrelation, to identify whether the rise and fall of homicide are explained by processes of diffusion across adjacent neighborhoods. We estimate the probabilities of homicides and assaults in a neighborhood controlling for rates of homicide or assault in the surrounding neighborhoods in the preceding year, and find that gun violence diffuses across neighborhoods over time. Epidemic patterns of violence disproportionately affected African Americans as victims of gun violence, both homicides and non-lethal gun assaults. Diffusion was strongest in neighborhoods where social control was compromised by extreme poverty and concentrated racial segregation. Concentrations of immigrant households in neighborhoods were a protective factor in suppressing the violence epidemic. We then use social contagion theories to link contagion of violence across neighborhoods to individual data on social interactions that may animate the transmission and diffusion of violence. Analyses of the social contexts and interpersonal dynamics of violent events reveals how street interactions in interpersonal disputes link individuals within and across social networks in a competition for status that is skewed by the presence of firearms. Decisions to carry, show and use weapons are based on perceptions of threat and danger, which are shaped by the presence of firearms and the potential stigma associated with non-action. These events occur across multiple contexts - bars, streetcorners, drug markets - to reinforce perceptions of risk and expectations of the threat or reality of lethal violence