• The darker side of the dark web: Weapons trade

    Debates over gun regulations make headlines across the world, but there’s an underground operation for weapons that has drawn very little attention – until now. Researchers crept into the dark web to investigate how firearms are anonymously bought and sold around the world.

  • “Hardened” schools are not safe from gun violence

    Hardening of schools seems to be a questionable endeavor, given the dearth of evidence regarding effectiveness, says an expert. A comprehensive review of the literature from 2000 to 2018 regarding school firearm violence prevention, found no programs or practices with evidence that they reduced such gun violence.

  • How Columbine became a blueprint for school shooters

    When twelve students and one teacher were killed in Littleton, Colorado twenty years ago, it not only became what at the time was the worst high school shooting in U.S. history. It also marked when American society was first handed a script for a new form of violence in schools. Since the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School, we identified six mass shootings and forty active shooter incidents at elementary, middle or high schools in the United States. In twenty – or nearly half – of those forty-six school shootings, the perpetrator purposely used Columbine as a model.

  • Knife-crime assault data to help forecast fatal stabbings

    Knife crime data from a 12-month period could be used to help forecast the London neighborhoods most likely to suffer a fatal stabbing the following year, according to latest research.

  • Studying Perry Mason to combat “innocence fatigue”

    Forensic science historian Professor Ian Burney is studying the influence of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of renowned TV attorney Perry Mason, in a bid to reveal the roots of the fascination with stories about wrongful criminal conviction. Burney hopes the study will help better understand some of the challenges facing today’s worldwide “innocence projects.”

  • It is safer to be a cop today than 50 years ago

    There is no doubt that policing is a dangerous profession. But is it safer to be a cop today than it was fifty years ago? Yes, according to a study that analyzed police officer deaths (felonious and non-felonious) in the United States from 1970 to 2016.

  • Do armed guards prevent school shootings?

    The presence of guns in schools is a fact of life for millions of American children. Forty-three percent of public schools had an armed law enforcement officer during the 2015-2016 school year. Does increasing armed school security could reduce deaths from active shootings or deter the attacks in the first place? Experts say the data is not encouraging. Guns have stopped some mass shootings — but not usually in schools.

  • Firearm deaths surges in school-age children

    Firearm-related deaths in school-age children are increasing at alarming rates in the United States where homicide rates are about 6- to 9-fold higher than those in comparably developed countries. This epidemic poses increasingly major clinical, public health and policy challenges.

  • Recaptured Italian former militant Battisti admits 1970s murders

    Former communist militant Cesare Battisti has admitted four murders carried out in the 1970s, during Italy’s so-called “Years of Lead,” weeks after being jailed in Italy for the killings that were part of a failed bid to spark a far-left revolution.

  • More mass shooting in states with permissive gun laws

    States with more permissive gun laws and greater gun ownership have higher rates of mass shootings, and a growing divide is emerging between states with restrictive versus permissive gun laws. According to a new study, researchers found that in most years permissive states had higher mass shooting rates compared to restrictive states.

  • Studying how hate and extremism spread on social media

    The ADL and the Network Contagion Research Institute will partner to produce a series of reports that take an in-depth look into how extremism and hate spread on social media – and provide recommendations on how to combat both.

  • Combatting human trafficking

    Law enforcement organizations across the United States have recently arrested multiple people charged with various crimes that include organizing, operating or paying for services from human trafficking rings. “Human trafficking is not synonymous with human smuggling,” notes one expert.

  • White supremacist propaganda and events soared in 2018

    White supremacists dramatically stepped up their propaganda efforts targeting neighborhoods and campuses in 2018, far exceeding any previous annual distribution count for the United States and showing how these extremist groups are finding ways to share hateful messages while hiding the identity of individual members.

  • European ethno-nationalist and white supremacist movements thrive

    More than seventy years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, ethno-nationalist and white supremacist movements in Europe continue to thrive. They include far-right political parties, neo-Nazi movements, and apolitical protest groups. Some groups openly espouse violent white supremacy, while others have propagated their radical stances under the guise of populism. Though not all of these groups directly link their ideologies to Nazism, their propaganda portrays immigrants and ethnic minorities in a similar manner to how Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews, blaming them for national economic troubles and depicting them as a serious threat to the broader national identity.

  • Warrior vs. guardian policing

    The pros and cons of policing methods have been heavily debated for decades in the United States. Now, a team of researchers has created a model to measure the differences between two distinct approaches to policing — the warrior approach and the guardian approach.