Rape Talk: Student Awareness and Perceptions of Campus Sexual Assault and Resources

This project evaluates student perceptions of campus sexual assault and related resources at Marquette University of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As campus sexual assault and an unsafe rape culture are still persistent, research is needed to bring about awareness and spark an open discourse of this issue. The original data of this project consists of the researcher’s autoethnography, observations of Marquette’s online sexual violence resources, student interviews, and an online student survey. After analyzing this data, the most important finding was that students do not share the same perceptions and knowledge of this issue, despite receiving the same resources. Also, the relationship between Marquette students and staff and other non-student people is distant and in need of development. Lastly, students want to see more change on campus concerning this issue. However, the overarching theme of their desires for change is a wish for more transparency on campus.https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_3210ur/1028/thumbnail.jp

Why Do We (Still) Lack Data On Policing?

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Let It Come From the People”: Exploring Decentralization, Participatory Processes, and Community Empowerment in Western, Rural Uganda

This study sought to understand the extent to which the participatory planning framework established in the Local Government Act of 1997 is utilized and to what extent it encourages and results in genuine community empowerment for rural communities.More specifically, it aimed to understand the extent of genuine citizen participation by assessing the degree to which community members feel that they are empowered to participate in strategies for rural development at all levels of the government. Additionally, this project sought to explore the position that the Epicenter Managers have within the participatory framework established for rural development, with a particular focus on if and how they stimulate genuine, meaningful community participation in the formation, implementation, and evaluation of rural development policies. Situated in Kibaale District in western Uganda in the sub counties of: Burora, Kabamba, Mugarama, Muhorro, and Pachwa, this research project relied on semi-structured formal interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation engaging community members, local government officials, and the Epicenter Managers. Formal interviews began on October 31st, 2013 and the research concluded formally on November 21st, 2013. The study found that the participatory framework established through the decentralization structure is not fully utilized and that the majority of rural community members feel that there are not adequate mechanisms in place for them to meaningfully influence the national policy framework for development. The main explanations provided for this failure of the decentralization structure to result in community empowerment were: elite capture, whereby political leaders at various levels siphon off resources that are allocated for rural development, corruption, whereby political leaders use patronage systems to gain support as opposed to pursuing development strategies for the entire community, lack of effective participation by community members, and a lack of adequate fiscal resources for lower local governments

Objective Muscular Fatigue Analysis in Minimally Invasive Surgeries

Researchers are finding that minimally invasive surgeries, such as laparoscopic and robotic surgeries, commonly result in musculoskeletal neuromuscular injuries, muscular fatigue, and arthritic injury and pain. These surgeries allow for a quicker patient recovery time, but pose a hard physical toll on surgeons. If these problems are not prevented, they can impact the healthcare system by affecting operation schedules and the quality of surgeries. Studies were geared towards identifying physical symptoms and reducing pain and discomfort from different surgeries. Physical discomfort, postural stability, ergonomic issues, stress, surgeons’ activities, spinal motion, workload, and Electromyography (EMG) data were measured in order to determine the risks and effects of laparoscopic surgeries on surgeons. EMG signals showed that certain muscles are used more frequently than others and therefore have a greater risk of fatiguing suggesting that operations requiring higher accuracy be performed earlier in a surgeon’s schedule. It was also found that laparoscopic surgeries have more taxing effects on surgeons due to the high physical muscular workload required of the thumb and forearm muscles, measured by surface EMG during a simulated task. However, studies were limited in measuring fatigue due to identifying a specific point at which an individual is fatigued. Another issue was the difficulty ensuring constant conditions in real workplaces because there may be disturbances from time constraints, cleaning, or changing specifications. The results of this research will provide more insights to the sources of fatigue (tools, procedure, posture, etc.) over the surgery time

The Problem of Policing

The legal problem of policing is how to regulate police authority to permit officers to enforce law while also protecting individual liberty and minimizing the social costs the police impose. Courts and commentators have largely treated the problem of policing as limited to preventing violations of constitutional rights and its solution as the judicial definition and enforcement of those rights. But constitutional law and courts alone are necessarily inadequate to regulate the police. Constitutional law does not protect important interests below the constitutional threshold or effectively address the distributional impacts of law enforcement activities. Nor can the judiciary adequately assess law enforcement practices or predict police conduct. The problem of policing is fundamentally a problem of regulation-a fact largely invisible in contemporary scholarship. While scholars have criticized the conventional paradigm, contemporary scholarship continues to operate within its limits. In this Article, I advocate a new agenda for scholars considering the police, one that asks not how the Constitution constrains the police but how law and public policy can best regulate the police. First, scholars should evaluate policing practices to determine what harms they produce, which practices are too harmful, and which are harm efficient. These inquiries are essential to ensuring that the benefits of policing are worth the costs it imposes. Second, scholars should explore the full law of the police -the web of interacting federal, state, and local laws that govern the police and police departments. Presently, for example, courts tailor their interpretation of § 1983 and the exclusionary rule to encourage changes in police behavior yet civil service law, collective bargaining law, and federal and state employment discrimination law simultaneously discourage the same reforms, a phenomenon ignored by the academy. Third, scholars should analyze the capacities and incentives of nonjudicial local, state, and federal institutions to contribute to a regulatory regime capable of intelligently choosing and efficiently promoting the best ends of policing. This agenda offers a path for moving beyond constitutional criminal procedure toward a legal regime that promotes policing that is both effective and protective of individual freedom

The Problem of Policing

The legal problem of policing is how to regulate police authority to permit officers to enforce law while also protecting individual liberty and minimizing the social costs the police impose. Courts and commentators have largely treated the problem of policing as limited to preventing violations of constitutional rights and its solution as the judicial definition and enforcement of those rights. But constitutional law and courts alone are necessarily inadequate to regulate the police. Constitutional law does not protect important interests below the constitutional threshold or effectively address the distributional impacts of law enforcement activities. Nor can the judiciary adequately assess law enforcement practices or predict police conduct. The problem of policing is fundamentally a problem of regulation-a fact largely invisible in contemporary scholarship. While scholars have criticized the conventional paradigm, contemporary scholarship continues to operate within its limits. In this Article, I advocate a new agenda for scholars considering the police, one that asks not how the Constitution constrains the police but how law and public policy can best regulate the police. First, scholars should evaluate policing practices to determine what harms they produce, which practices are too harmful, and which are harm efficient. These inquiries are essential to ensuring that the benefits of policing are worth the costs it imposes. Second, scholars should explore the full law of the police -the web of interacting federal, state, and local laws that govern the police and police departments. Presently, for example, courts tailor their interpretation of § 1983 and the exclusionary rule to encourage changes in police behavior yet civil service law, collective bargaining law, and federal and state employment discrimination law simultaneously discourage the same reforms, a phenomenon ignored by the academy. Third, scholars should analyze the capacities and incentives of nonjudicial local, state, and federal institutions to contribute to a regulatory regime capable of intelligently choosing and efficiently promoting the best ends of policing. This agenda offers a path for moving beyond constitutional criminal procedure toward a legal regime that promotes policing that is both effective and protective of individual freedom

Why Arrest?

Arrests are the paradigmatic police activity. Though the practice of arrests in the United States, especially arrests involving minority suspects, is under attack, even critics widely assume the power to arrest is essential to policing. As a result, neither commentators nor scholars have asked why police need to make arrests. This Article takes up that question, and it argues that the power to arrest and the use of that power should be curtailed. The twelve million arrests police conduct each year are harmful not only to the individual arrested but also to their families and communities and to society as a whole. Given their costs, arrests should be used only when they serve an important state interest; yet, they often happen even when no such interest exists. Governments have allowed constitutional law to become the primary constraint on arrest practices, and it has proved a poor proxy for good policy analysis. The Fourth Amendment permits arrests whenever an officer has probable cause: it has no mechanism for ensuring that the state has any interest in making an arrest—as opposed to starting the criminal process in another way. More broadly, traditional arguments for arrests cannot justify existing arrest practice. Arrests are usually unnecessary to start the criminal process effectively, to maintain order, to collect evidence, or to deter crime. In most cases, reasonable, less intrusive, alternative means exist or could exist for achieving these ends. Even arrests for some serious crimes might be curbed significantly without risking substantial harm to public safety or order. If the state can achieve its law enforcement objectives without arrests, then police departments should conduct far fewer arrests than they currently do, and states should restrict the statutory authority to arrest accordingly. Though there are risks to reducing arrests, those risks are far less problematic than continuing what is presently a massive, and largely unnecessary, enterprise of state coercion