Gangs in School: Exploring the Experiences of Gang-Involved Youth

This study explores three questions: (1) What are the criteria that current or formerly gang-involved youth use to identify the presence of gangs in school? (2) Do gang activities produce incivilities and victimizations within the school context? and (3) What is the impact of a gang presence on youth in the school, specifically with respect to the presence or absence of fear? We examine the influence of gangs in schools through qualitative analysis of 180 in-depth semistructured interviews. The sample includes youth with varying levels of gang involvement who attended schools across the United States. Youth relied on personal knowledge and visual cues to identify gangs in their school. Despite the occurrence of vicarious victimizations and incivilities at the hands of gang youth, respondents indicated that gangs did not impact their school life. These youth frequently used normalization and delimitation processes to deal with gangs in their school

University of Missouri- St. Louis Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (UMSL CSSI)

View the website for this project here: https://www.umsl.edu/ccj/research/cssi.htm

Modeling, Identification and Control at Telemark University College

Master studies in process automation started in 1989 at what soon became Telemark University College, and the 20 year anniversary marks the start of our own PhD degree in Process, Energy and Automation Engineering. The paper gives an overview of research activities related to control engineering at Department of Electrical Engineering, Information Technology and Cybernetics

Unconscious bias in the suppressive policing of Black and Latino men and boys: neuroscience, Borderlands theory, and the policymaking quest for just policing

his article applies neuroscience and Borderlands theory to reveal how unconscious bias currently stabilizes suppressive policing practices in America despite new efforts at reform. Illustrative cases are offered from Oakland and Santa Barbara, California, with a focus on civil gang injunctions (CGIs) and youth gang suppression. Theoretical analysis of these cases reveals how the unconscious biases of validity illusions and framing effects operate despite the best intentions of law enforcement personnel. Such unconscious or implicit biases create contradictions between the stated beliefs and actions of law enforcement. In turn, these unintended self-contradictions then work to the detriment of Latino and Black boys. The analysis here also extends to how unconscious biases and unintended self-contradictions can influence municipal policymaking in favor of suppressive police tactics such as CGIs, thereby displacing evidence-based policies that are proven to be far more effective. The article concludes with brief discussion of some of the means by which the unconscious biases – effects to which everyone is involuntarily prone – can be disrupted

Academic Consequences of Suspension

Seven million public-school students are given either an in-school or out-of-school suspension each year. The resulting time out-of-the-classroom has serious consequences for suspended students, including lower test scores and higher dropout rates. Prior research also suggests that minority, particularly black, students are disproportionately suspended and bear the brunt of these deleterious consequences, which some argue contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. There is also evidence that school suspension rates may also have a negative impact on non-suspended students\u27 academic performance. Relying on data from two waves of the UMSL CSSI project, we examine the following three topics: 1) the academic consequences (i.e., grades, school commitment and perceptions of school climate) of suspension on individual students; 2) the differential effects of suspensions by race; and 3) the extent to which school suspension rates affect the consequences of suspensions reported by students