There have been four murders in Boston during the first have of 2024

Let that sink in, Boston a city of 650,000 people has had four murders so far this year

When city leaders in Boston set out last spring to renew their focus on violence prevention, they set a modest goal: reduce homicides by 20 percent in three years.

No one imagined what the city of 650,000 has seen so far this year: four homicides, a 78 percent reduction from the 18 that took place over the same period in 2023, reported The New York Times.

Luck has played a part, the normal ebb and flow of violent crime. Yet the longer the quiet has persisted, the more pressure the city has felt to sustain it. As summer set in with a blistering heat wave, anxiety rose. Will a seasonal uptick in violence shatter the preternatural calm?

“We’re not even halfway through the year, and I get superstitious,” Michael Cox, the Boston police commissioner, said in a recent interview, acknowledging his reluctance to talk too much about the phenomenon. “But we are doing so many things, and hopefully it is having an impact.”

City and police leadership are quick to acknowledge that the remarkably low number of homicides is not all their doing, and that bigger forces are at work. Large cities across the country saw violent crime decline in the first quarter of this year, part of a continuing downward trend after an alarming spike during the pandemic.

Boston’s smaller population, relative to other major cities, helps narrow the scope of violence prevention efforts. There is also a strong local foundation for such work, dating to the 1990s, when academic researchers, clergy and community leaders worked together to drive change so transformative, the “Boston Miracle” captured national attention.

The city set its new goal last year as Mayor Michelle Wu encouraged law enforcement and public health workers to revive that collaborative approach. Her administration has mined historical crime data to pinpoint 150 “micro-locations” across the city — as specific as a single intersection — where violence has flared in the past, and where custom-designed interventions can have outsize impacts.

Mayor Michelle Wu, center, encouraged law enforcement and public health workers to collaborate more closely and consulted outside experts. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

A similarly granular approach involves reaching out to past violent offenders, and survivors of violence — seen as largely overlapping groups — to find out what they need to stay out of trouble. Some ask for transfers to other public housing, away from conflicts that spur violence. Others need food, clothing or health care, or help acquiring G.E.D.s or skills training to prepare them for employment.

“Boston is a place where 40 percent of violent crime happens on 4 percent of city streets, and where a very small number of people drive a significant part of the violence,” said Isaac Yablo, the mayor’s 29-year-old senior adviser for community safety. “So when you go and get to know the people, eventually you’re going to know the people involved.”

The goal, pursued through outreach to neighborhoods and weekly meetings where 15 community organizations and city departments trade ideas and updates about some of the several hundred people on their radar, is to “engage 100 percent of the individuals most likely to shoot or be shot,” Mr. Yablo said.

Previous efforts to identify those most likely to be involved in crime have stirred concern about racial profiling and a lack of transparency. Ms. Wu, in her former role as a city councilor, raised such questions about a gang database maintained by the Boston Regional Intelligence Center and used by the city’s police. Some changes were made to the database as a result, including the removal of more than 2,000 names, but criticism of its use has continued.

Some intelligence and analysis from the center are used in the city’s latest push to curtail violence, but leaders of the effort said their approach goes far beyond policing, prioritizing public health and basic needs above the sorting and surveilling of gangs.

Thomas Abt, the founding director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland — who has worked with Boston in the past year on its techniques — acknowledged valid national concerns about overpolicing but described the Boston strategy as practical.

“They’re carefully identifying people they should spend more time on, based on past behavior,” he said. “That’s just smart policy.”

Boston’s murder tally was already low. The city had 70 homicides in 2010 and 56 in 2020; last year, there were 37. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum and a former Boston police operations assistant, said the city’s police department has become unusually adept at heading off potential retaliation after violent incidents, a tactic he said is “in their DNA at this point.”

Other experts stressed that multiple factors other than policing help to suppress violence in the city: the strict gun laws in Massachusetts; the significant number of new immigrants, linked by researchers to lower crime rates; and the top-rated hospitals that excel at saving gunshot victims.

“It’s not one thing, but a whole confluence,” said Jacob Stowell, a criminology professor at Northeastern University who studies patterns of violence. “The whys are elusive but fascinating, and worth trying to capture and perpetuate.”

Sandra Susan Smith, a professor of criminal justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School who has documented racial disparities in policing in Boston, credited the city for investing in community organizations — a step increasingly linked to lower crime rates — and said that micro-targeting of locations and people “is by definition not racial profiling, if practiced in the way that police describe.”

Yet she cautioned that attention should still be paid to other ongoing police practices to ensure that racial disparities elsewhere are not overlooked.

Earlier in her tenure, Ms. Wu, 39, faced some criticism of her handling of crime. After the city saw seven homicides in the first two months of 2023, some found fault with what they saw as a muted response.

Last summer, a city grant allowed residents of a public housing complex in the Charlestown neighborhood to run a dance program near a basketball court where residents had felt less safe in recent years.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

Since then, the mayor has cultivated deeper relationships with police leadership, helping to negotiate a new five-year police contract with annual raises of 4 percent and new limits on the use of arbitration to overturn officer discipline. She has also pushed back against the City Council’s recently proposed cuts to public safety funding.

In an interview last month, Ms. Wu described violence prevention as “something you have to work on with the same intensity every single day of the year, not just after an incident, when there’s pressure to respond.”

Summer, though, has often been a season of increased violence in Boston, with 30 percent of annual homicides, on average, occurring in June, July and August. On May 21, Ms. Wu announced her summer safety plan, including a revamped system for connecting young people with jobs, mental health outreach to neighborhoods, and funding for block parties and other social events, aimed at strengthening ties among neighbors and displacing drug use or fighting in shared outdoor spaces.

Ten days later, the city was rattled by its fourth homicide of the year, one that felt especially unsettling because the woman killed was not an “intended target,” according to officials.

It was a reminder of how tenuous the peace could be. But even in such moments, Mr. Abt said, “You work the plan, you stay the course.”

Some of the progress has followed long-term police work in high-risk areas. In February, after a two-year investigation of gang activity rooted in a public housing development, federal prosecutors charged more than 40 members of Boston’s Heath Street Gang with racketeering conspiracy, drug trafficking and other crimes.

After the sweep, police officers and city workers reached out to younger residents who had been on the fringes of the gang activity to help them find jobs, education, or other assistance with their own or their families’ needs.

“We want to fill that void before another gang comes in to fill it,” Commissioner Cox said.

City teams are also asking residents of high-risk neighborhoods what they think could help squash crime. Some requests are simple, like more lighting or speed bumps. More complex interventions, aimed at helping residents take back neighborhood spaces, are funded by $100,000 in small grants.

Last summer, a $5,000 city grant allowed residents of a public housing complex in the Charlestown neighborhood to run a dance program three nights a week near its basketball court, a popular spot where residents had felt less safe in recent years. A 15-year-old boy was hurt in a brazen midday shooting there in 2022.

Organizers with the Kennedy Center, a social service organization with 60 years of history in the neighborhood, recruited a local mother to teach a hip-hop class for girls, and found others to lead classes in Haitian folk dance and salsa.

“You could see people coming out of the house, checking it out, feeling like, ‘OK, I don’t have to worry for this hour,’” said Crystal Galvin, the Kennedy Center’s director of community services, who plans to bring back dance classes this summer.

Ms. Wu upped the ante last month, releasing the city’s first “Plan to End Violence” — a quest that sounds less absurd these days than it did a year ago.

“When the goal is to reduce violence, or respond to it better, it subconsciously sends the message that there’s not much you can do,” said Mr. Yablo. “This strategy is, prevent it.”

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Randolph Roth: GOVERNMENT LEGITIMACY, SOCIAL SOLIDARITY, AND AMERICAN HOMICIDE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Randolph Roth writing for Violence, Politics and Democracy on a historical perspective of homicide:

Why has the homicide rate in the United States risen by 60% since 2014, from 4.9 to 7.8 persons per 100,000 per year? And why, more broadly, have homicide rates changed over time in human communities and varied from one community to another? Historians and social scientists can’t perform controlled experiments on societies that are changing in many ways at the same time. We can’t measure the impact of a specific change while holding everything else in the human experience constant. We can’t go back to the 1850s, for instance, and uninvent modern breechloading handguns to see if the United States would have the high rates of homicide and armed robbery it does today if its citizens were equipped with nothing more than single-shot, muzzleloading pistols. Our only hope is to engage in “non-experimental empirical research”—to study societies across vast stretches of time and space, looking for deep patterns in human behavior.

 Social science historians search for associations among seemingly unique events, as scientists do in geology, evolutionary biology, paleontology, and other “historical” fields. If the associations come up consistently over decades or centuries, they reveal historical patterns that are almost certainly causal. The associations between homicides and the circumstances in which they are most likely to occur have differed for particular types of homicides over the past 450 years in Europe and in European-dominated colonies, including the United States. This is true for intimate partner homicides, for homicides of children by parents or caregivers, and for the homicides that make up the overwhelming majority of homicides and are the focus of this essay: homicides among unrelated adults (friends, acquaintances, strangers).

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Using an infectious disease model to battle gun violence

FASTER, which provides grants to state health departments, builds on another federal-state partnership that has been used to track infectious diseases and other public health threats using data from ER visits, reported The Trace. That system, known as the National Syndromic Surveillance Program, or NSSP, has served as an early warning system for the flu, the Zika virus, COVID-19, overdose clusters, and even lung injuries from vaping products. 

The goal of FASTER is to enable and encourage state and local health agencies to rapidly track emergency department-treated firearm wounds, classify them by intent, share that data with the CDC, and then use the information to help their local communities respond. State health departments, for example, could help cities target resources or develop violence prevention programs.

“We can support local and state health departments to respond more quickly to upticks, or abnormal patterns of firearm injury ED visits in their jurisdiction,” Marissa Zwald, of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, told me. “And that’s really the most important piece of FASTER — that data-to-action component.”

As part of the grant agreements, participating state health departments share more detailed data, allowing the CDC to examine information down to the level of individual visits, which goes far beyond the aggregate data that the federal agency currently has. And that data is typically available within one to two days.

“There’s more granularity, and we can see patient demographics and understand some of those trends by demographic characteristics, and empower our funded state health departments to look at and examine these data in that way, too,” Zwald said.

The new approach is less likely to suffer from the shortcomings of some of the CDC’s other efforts to estimate nonfatal shooting injuries, which have relied on small samples of hospitals. But, as with the NVDRS, it does have its own limitations that again come down to a trade-off between detail and timeliness. While FASTER is, well, faster, and will improve our overall understanding of nonfatal shootings, it will be nowhere near as detailed as the NVDRS. On top of that, researchers cautioned it was likely that the intent of injuries would be miscategorized — an assault might be coded as an unintentional shooting, for example.

Another issue: Some emergency rooms don’t yet submit data to the surveillance system. About 75 percent of ERs currently participate, but thanks to a 2021 federal rule change, that number is on an upward trajectory and is likely to get close to 100 percent soon.

FASTER is in its third and final year of the pilot, which wraps up in August. The effort has produced new mechanisms for logging details about firearm injuries into the NSSP system that will be made available to other state health departments. Going forward, it will also be incorporated into a broader initiative to improve surveillance of all violent injuries, not just those from firearms.

The system shows promise for improving national-level data, but getting truly accurate statistics will still take time. Nevertheless, FASTER is already providing benefits in states where it is operating. New Mexico used the data to inform a statewide strategic plan to address gun violence. In Oregon, legislators used it to pass a bill that provides consistent funding for hospital- and community-based violence intervention programs. And in Georgia, the state health department developed a data dashboard — with detail down to the neighborhood level — to support violence intervention efforts in Atlanta that it plans to soon make public.

“It obviously is more timely,” said Elizabeth Blankenship, an epidemiologist focusing on violence at the Georgia Department of Public Health, during a presentation in Milwaukee. “We really have just a great picture of both the morbidity and mortality side of things, and hopefully FASTER will be able to evolve outside of just firearm incidents.”

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MacDonald: 'Criminal justice reform should by guided by evidence'

 Criminal justice reform should be guided by evidence, not ideology, anecdote or magical thinking, writes Professor John MacDonald of the University of Pennsylvania in Vital City

 There is a growing body of evidence that politically popular justice reform efforts, such as raising the maximum age under which someone can be handled in the juvenile justice system, are proving to make no difference or even increase the risk of recidivism. Policies and programs for criminal justice reform should be guided by scientific evidence, not wishful thinking about what may work in a Utopian world. As Thomas Sowell notes, “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear” The field of experimental criminology should continue to embrace evidence-based policy and push back against “replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

The field of experimental criminology has become influential in designing, testing and evaluating criminal justice reforms and reporting their results, even when results are contrary to popularly held beliefs. After all, science advances by trial and error and generating findings sometimes that are at odds with prevailing beliefs. Science is about generating objective evidence. The only faith required is the belief in the scientific method. Findings should be objective as possible, recognizing that choices of statistical analyses and program evaluation designs can change findings. Hence the need for replication of results in other settings and reproductions of results when new methods develop.

In the context of criminal justice reform, social programs that do not show evidence of being effective at reducing crime or that increase crime should be redesigned or abandoned, regardless of political popularity. The esteemed economists John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman rarely agreed, but there are two quotes that offer useful guides for criminal justice reform efforts. John Maynard Keynes is attributed as stating “When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?” Similarly, Milton Friedman stated,, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

Criminal justice reform efforts should be guided by a basic understanding of the facts of crime and criminal offenders, and by scientific findings from social programs that have been shown to prevent crime and minimize the use of the criminal justice system. Over 100 hundred years of research has revealed seven indisputable facts about crime and offenders:

First, crime is highly concentrated by place. As little as 3% of addresses and 5% of street blocks account for more than 50% of crimes reported by citizens to the police. The concentration of crime is even greater if one focuses on more serious crimes that are less subject to under-reporting, such as shootings and homicides.

Second, crime is also concentrated by times of day, days of the week and months. Summers, nights and weekends are peak times for violence. Burglaries happen during the middle of the day when homes are empty and people are away at work, school, or on errands.

Third, crime is highly concentrated among active offenders. Most of the criminal offending in the population is generated by a small fraction of chronic offenders, such that the incapacitation of one high-volume offender abates an estimated 9.4 felony offenses.

Fourth, just as crimes are highly concentrated among places and people, so are the social costs of crime. A subset of serious crimes generates the most harm. Social costs of crime derived from jury awards, the willingness to pay to avoid specific crimes, costs to victims, criminal justice system costs and from sentences imposed for a given offense all show that violent crimes are the costliest.

Fifth, among criminal offenders, the rate of offending peaks in early adulthood, consistent with the “age-crime curve.”

Sixth, offenders do not specialize in specific offense patterns. Rather, active offenders tend to engage in what could be called a “cafeteria style” of offending and select a lot of different offenses from a menu of options. While some offenders show repeat behaviors, even the most optimistic approaches to estimating offense specialization can only find some modest evidence of offending preferences.

Seventh, criminal offending occurs within social networks, and the most active offenders tend to be clustered within dense criminal networks.

One can debate about which theories explain these facts the best, but the facts are indisputable. They exist across time periods, demographic groups, countries and whether crime is measured by official records or self-reported offending and victimization.

The most convincing rigorous evidence that exists focuses on fostering informal and formal social control.

Evidence-based crime policy should be guided by programs that confront these basic facts. The best evidence to guide policy are programs or interventions that have been experimented with in the real world, are attuned to the distribution of crime and offenders, can be scaled up to the population, are sustainable and are constitutional. We are fortunate that criminology has generated an abundance of experimental and quasi-experimental evidence over the past 70 years for what works to prevent crime. This evidence, however, has been largely absent from the current policy debates on criminal justice reform. A truly progressive criminal justice reform should be guided by evidence, not ideology, anecdote, or magical thinking.

The most convincing rigorous evidence that exists focuses on fostering informal and formal social control. Social control focuses on the constrained view of human behavior, or that society must control places and people to have a lawful society. Informal social control typically refers to the spectrum of actions taken by family, friends, neighbors and schools to maintain norms and rules. Formal social control refers to the exercise of the state to use sanctions or the threat of sanctions to enforce norms to prevent crime and illegal conduct. In conventional terms, formal social control is expressed through the functions of police, prosecutors and judges, and includes the other mechanisms of the criminal justice system.

Informal and formal social control are clearly linked to each other. While community safety is primarily produced by informal social control, high-crime areas are in particular need of formal social control like the presence of effective police and prosecutors when neighbors are unable to regulate the conduct of public spaces. So why have progressive criminal justice reforms in the past several years forgotten about social control?

The current state of progressive criminal justice policy reforms seems to have missed the growth of evidence-based policy generated from several decades of experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations in criminology.

This is a rhetorical question, as I realize there is another view about the causes of crime that focus on crime as a social construct and criminal offending as solely a result of social inequality. Under this worldview, addressing crime requires redressing the social origins of crime. While the social origins of crime, such as concentrated disadvantage, can be viewed as “root causes,” we have few experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations of social programs that address root causes and show appreciable changes in the concentration of crime by place, among active offenders and within offending networks. There are programs and policies that can help reduce social inequalities and help mitigate crime, but they are longer-term investments and not the proximal causes of changes in the crime rate in each period.

Criminal justice reform needs to be tailored to the present facts on the ground. The facts of crime in the moment need to be responded to with efforts that prevent crime and not ignore those efforts in the hope for a more promising distant future. Moreover, there is no logical reason that policies cannot address both the current facts of crime in the population and longer-term efforts to reduce future cohorts from experiencing surges in crime and violence. A criminal justice reform effort that is effective at controlling crime with the minimum use of punishment necessary should be guided by evidence on what drives the crime rate and what can reduce inequalities in the criminal justice system.

A close review of experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations offers support for the following social programs that focus on those at greatest risk of serious criminal offending, the concentration of crime by place and the networked nature of offending: 

Family: Functional Family Therapy, Multi-systemic Therapy and Nurse Family Partnership all are programs that have been demonstrated to work through at least one high-quality randomized controlled trial among at-risk youth. All these programs focus on teaching parenting skills and increasing pro-social thinking among youth.

Schools: School-based programs that have demonstrated efficacy similarly involve teaching thinking skills to constrain aggressive or criminal behavior. Such programs include Life Skills Training, Positive Action and Becoming a Man. These programs focus on social control, helping youth learn self-control and increasing bonds to school.

Places: Summer jobs for at-risk youth are delivered to youth in communities with the highest rates of crime and violence and thus fit within the general framework of establishing social control in places. These programs help keep kids off the streets in the summer with productive things to do. Also, having adults monitor youth in actual jobs is another form of informal social control. Business improvement districts (BIDs), for example, are a social program that involves local businesses organizing in a defined geography and hiring private security guards and CCTV cameras, cleaning crews and place promotion and marketing materials to make a commercial area look and feel safer. The key logic model of BIDs is the focus on reducing physical disorder in places and offering extra “eyes upon the street.” Other social programs that focus on the physical environment and offer evidence for reducing serious crime include vacant lot greening and vacant housing remediation, improving street lighting and nuisance abatement.

Criminal Justice Agencies: Social control from criminal justice agencies may be one of the least popular social programs among contemporary criminal justice reformers, but it is an area where we have arguably the best evidence. This includes support for deploying extra police to crime “hot spots” — when police stay vigilant about crime prevention in crime hot spots, they exert a significant impact on serious crime and violence. The theoretical logic of hot spot policing is also consistent with the offender-specific program of focused deterrence, a multi-stakeholder approach that involves providing direct deterrence messages to individuals with high rates of offending. Rigorous designs that compare cities with and without focused deterrence or groups of offenders that could have been eligible find that when the program is implemented with fidelity, it significantly reduces serious crime and violence. Research from several quasi-experimental studies also suggests that increasing prison time for active offenders also helps prevent crime.

The current state of progressive criminal justice policy reforms seems to have missed the growth of evidence-based policy generated from several decades of experimental and quasi-experimental program and policy evaluations in criminology. Ideally, criminal justice policy reforms should be logically consistent with facts of crime and criminal offenders, tested in the field and implemented gradually.

By contrast, closing down summer job programs, letting physical disorder and mismanagement of places spread in neighborhoods, having the police pull back from high-crime intersections and the criminal justice system failing to hold active offenders accountable are all examples of ways to foster epidemic rises in serious crime and violence. These results were witnessed during the 2020–2021 rise in violent crime in large U.S. cities, but also echo the patterns of other violent crime cycles in American history.

Understanding the basic facts of crime and offenders explains why social programs that foster informal and formal social control and are targeted to those individuals and places at the greatest risk for criminal offending generate sizable reductions in serious crime. We have good evidence for social programs that work to prevent crime and minimize the footprint of the criminal justice system. This evidence base offers good guidance for effective criminal justice reforms. I am hopeful that the evidence generated from experimental criminology on what works to prevent crime can have a greater impact in the future than it presently has received from the policy community.

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Baltimore neighborhood experiences decline in homicides amid citywide surge

Last month, as Baltimore breached 300 homicides for the eighth year in a row, the city’s public safety leaders emphasized a bright spot in an otherwise dismal year: a dramatic drop in shootings in one of the most violent parts of town, reported the Baltimore Banner.

The 33 percent reduction in homicides and nonfatal shootings in the Western District follows Mayor Brandon Scott’s revival of a crime prevention approach known as the Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS), an alternative way of policing the city’s most violent offenders. Citing the Western’s improvement, Scott has declared the city’s crime prevention experiment a success and unveiled plans to take it citywide.

But for many, that explanation for such a sudden drop in those crimes has seemed too good to be true. The Baltimore police union and members of the City Council have questioned whether the drop stemmed from population losses, a heavier policing presence in the district or misleading data.

How could the experiment be viewed as a success after yet another year that saw sustained levels of homicides and other nonfatal shootings? In a common refrain, critics questioned whether the strategy had really reduced crime, or merely shifted it from the Western District into other parts of the city. While some of their questions were easily dismissed by available data, others are more difficult to answer.

A Baltimore Banner analysis of 2022 homicides and nonfatal shootings found little evidence to support most critiques. Theories around the so-called “displacement” of crime from one neighborhood to the next, population loss and whether the reduction is significant only in comparison to a 2021 spike are not supported by the available data, the analysis found. Meanwhile, arguments around the distribution of police resources are harder to untangle.

For their part, Baltimore’s mayor and his allies have broadcast their own confidence in the results, and last month staked longer-term hopes in its effectiveness, laying out plans to aggressively scale up GVRS citywide within two years.

Though the Group Violence Reduction Strategy had been tried twice before its current iteration, the approach represents a complex re-envisioning of traditional law enforcement.

Essentially, the strategy focuses on the relatively small number — hundreds — of people responsible for the bulk of violent crime in the city. With this in mind, the approach connects those leading police investigations with groups providing social services to offer law enforcement targets an alternative path out of violence as opposed to incarceration.

Questions around police department resources and Baltimore’s relationship with a key partner loom over the expansion of the strategy, but the blueprint has found success in other places. Cities like Boston and New Orleans have seen steep drops in gang-related violence after adopting similar focused-deterrence models, while criminologists have credited the implementation of a group violence approach in Oakland in 2012 with precipitating consecutive years of shooting declines and the city’s lowest shooting level in almost half a century.

Even in a city with as stubborn a violent crime problem as Baltimore’s, a significant reduction in shootings was what experts studying gun violence expected to happen. University of Pennsylvania researchers tracking Baltimore’s pilot of the strategy say the Western District’s 33% drop in shootings is just a preview of its potential. If Baltimore can faithfully implement the strategy as it expands – a hurdle it has failed to clear in two previous attempts – residents should expect to see a similarly precipitous decline in shootings citywide, they have said.

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The Crime Report: ‘Hot-Spot Policing’ More Effective When Police Show Respect

Procedural justice principles are compatible with effective crimefighting, according to a study by the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University, according to The Crime Report.

Researchers found that crime significantly declined in high-risk neighborhoods where police were trained to use principles that focus on treating people fairly and with respect.

“Police can simultaneously focus on reform and crime reduction,” they concluded.

The conclusion, which many reform advocates might have considered self-evident a few years ago, is arguably controversial in some quarters now, when rising crime rates have triggered calls for a return to more muscular policing amid a backlash against reforms.

The study, published in the Fall 2022 edition of Translational Criminology, summed up the findings of a three-city research project conducted in at-risk neighborhoods in Houston, Cambridge, Mass., and Tucson.

The idea was to test two different ways of carrying out hot-spot policing, a strategy  introduced in many cities as a more sophisticated targeted approach to crimefighting. Rather than saturate an entire community with law enforcement, officers would be assigned to streets or sections of a neighborhood where statistics showed crime was high.

Hot-spot policing produced a high volume of arrests, but it also generated hostility in communities that considered they were being unfairly profiled.

In particular, one of the essential pillars of policing reform—the need for gaining trust and therefore legitimacy among the people who were being policed—often was absent.

“While there is evidence that proactive policing can effectively reduce crime in hot spots, there are concerns that intensive crime-fighting strategies could have negative effects on police trust,” the researchers explained.

“More generally, there has been a growing narrative that practitioners must choose between reform and police effectiveness.”

The authors wanted to test whether applying procedural justice principles undermined the “hot spot” policing approach. Procedural justice focuses on treating people with dignity and respect, even through comparatively minor details like taking an extra 10 minutes to speak to a community resident who has a problem or complaint.

Patrol officers in each of the targeted cities were separated in two teams. Both teams were assigned to high-crime neighborhoods. One of the teams was given 40 hours of training on procedural justice, and instructed to incorporate “procedural justice into every interaction they had while present in their hot spots, whether it was a casual conversation, a traffic stop, or an arrest.”

Over a nine-month period, which encompassed observing 400 hours of officer behavior, the study found that hot spots where officers had practiced procedural justice principles
“had about 14 percent fewer crime incidents.”

“Importantly,” the study added. “This crime decline came despite procedural justice officers making fewer arrests during the intervention.”

Officers made more than 60 percent fewer arrests than officers in other hot spots who weren’t trained in procedural justice.

The study said behavior of the different police teams in those hot spot areas was “significantly” different.

Those trained in procedural justice “were significantly more likely to give citizens a voice, demonstrate neutrality, and treat people with dignity and respect. They were also significantly less likely to be disrespectful.”

And it produced a change in community-police relations as well. Residents of blocks where procedural justice team had been working were less likely to complain about police harassment or excessive use of force.

The researchers acknowledged that success in introducing procedural justice concepts into real-world policing depended on a number of key factors, including systematic monitoring and supervision.

“We…worked closely with sergeants and supervisors at each site to help reinforce training concepts and encourage the use of procedural justice in the field,” the researchers wrote. “Without this reinforcement and departmental support, we suspect the impacts of training in the field will be much more limited.”

But the authors of the study said their findings offered an alternative to the increasingly prevalent view among tough-on-crime advocates that “soft” justice reforms endangered public safety.

“Fairness and effectiveness are not competing goals,” they repeated, adding that the results of the study are “especially important in the current environment, where violent crime is rising in many large cities.”

The lead author of the study is David Weisburd, distinguished professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University and Executive Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy.

Other authors of the study, entitled, Incorporating Procedural Justice into Hot Spots Policing: Lessons from a Multicity Randomized Trial, included:

Anthony Braga, Jerry Lee Professor of Criminology and Director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab in the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania;

Cody Telep, an associate professor and Associate School Director in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University;

Brandon Turchan,, doctoral candidate in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and a research fellow at the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania;

Heather Vovak, a research scientist at the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC.; and

Taryn Zastrow, a doctoral student in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and a graduate research assistant at the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University.

The project was supported by Arnold Ventures.

To download the Fall edition of Translational Criminology where the study appears, please click here.

This summary was prepared by TCR executive editor Stephen Handelman.

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U.S. has high fatal police shooting rate

The U.S. had a fatal police shooting rate of 3.1 per million in 2019, five times higher than Australia’s rate, and 22 times higher than France, according to a study by Rutgers University., according to James Van Bramer of The Crime Report.

The study, published in the Annual Review of Criminology, analyzed the rates of deadly police violence, including shootings and other violence in 18 countries.

The report finds the treatment of minorities, gun homicides and police training duration as primary factors in countries with the highest rates.

Countries with the highest rates – the U.S., Venezuela, Canada, Australia, Brazil, France and Belgium – are distinguished by their mistreatment of minorities or long-standing grievances and turmoil, said Paul Hirschfield, lead author of the study and an associate professor of sociology and director of the Criminal Justice Program at Rutgers.

“The institution of slavery was so massive in Brazil and the United States that the wounds that it inflicted, the benefits it conferred and the racial hierarchy and ideology that sustained it remained long after abolition and have indelibly shaped the contemporary social and institutional order,” Hirschfield said.

But according to the study, the length of police training greatly impacted the number of fatal incidents.

U.S. police averaged the briefest training period over the 18 countries examined, averaging only five months.

Belgian police, with a fatal police violence rate of 0.35 per million, receive eight months of training, while the National Police in France, with an even lower rate (0.29 per million) of fatal police violence, attend school for ten months.

Meanwhile, Canada, with a fatal police violence rate of 0.9 per million, provides around six and a half months of training for its national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and 24 weeks for the Toronto police, its most extensive municipal force.

The study says that the time used during the training is also essential.

In Brazil and Venezuela, militarized police forces receive extended training. Still, fatal police violence rates are extraordinarily high, partly because training models brutal methods and generally fails to teach restraint, according to the report.

However, gun homicides may be a proxy for another explanation, such as armed and hostile suspects, as the report finds rates of gun homicides and fatal police violence were exceptionally related (.97 correlation).

For example, the study found the U.S. had a high fatal police violence rate (3.4 per million) and a heightened rate of gun homicide (3.7 per 100,000).

In contrast, Australia had a reasonably high fatal police violence rate in 2019 (.7 per million) despite lower rates of gun homicide (.14 per 100,000).

In the U.S., where nearly half of Americans own a firearm, given the strong protections of the Second Amendment, guns play a considerable role in the rates.

However, countries with ethnic tensions and short police training times managed to have lower rates of incidents.

The U.K.’s England and Wales, and Spain had low fatal police violence rates despite ethnic tensions and relatively short classroom training duration, like the U.K.’s England and Wales, as well as Spain., the report finds.

But Spain, like Chile, which caused distrust in their police in the past, managed to keep steady rates.

The study suggests that researchers delve into such cases to examine how countries such as Chile and Spain – rife with rising crime or insecurity, inadequate public resources and secretive national police forces with roots in dictatorships – still manage to avoid high fatal police violence rates.

Hirschfield said these are “rather fertile grounds for refining both explanations of exceptionally lethal policing in the U.S. and theories of international variation in lethal policing more broadly.”

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New algorithm can predict unfair criminal sentences

A new set of algorithms, created by members of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Idaho Justice Project and the University of Pennsylvania, aims to assess the likelihood of defendants being mistreated in court, reports Government Technology, according to The Crime Report. The tool considers details that ought to be immaterial to the ruling — such as the judge’s and defendant’s gender and race — and then predicts how likely the judge is to award an unusually long sentence.

The predictions can suggest when socio-demographic details may sway judgments, resulting in especially punitive treatments. The algorithms’ designers say it’s the first to consider a defendant’s perspective. In a recent report, the group also suggested that potentially wronged defendants could use the second algorithm — the one assessing the likelihood that bias played a role — to argue for reducing sentences that may have been unfair. However, like other predictive algorithms, the tool draws on historical data, which could limit how accurately it can reflect today’s landscape.

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Data shows there is rarely a 'good guy with a gun' at mass shootings

“It’s direct, indisputable, empirical evidence that this kind of common claim that ‘the only thing that stops a bad guy with the gun is a good guy with the gun’ is wrong.” 

Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama.

The lengthy police response to a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and the death of an armed security guard as part of an attack on a Buffalo supermarket last month have drawn fresh scrutiny to a recurring (and uniquely American) debate: What role should the police and bystanders play in active shooter attacks, and what interventions would best stop the violence?

The debate has moved to Capitol Hill as lawmakers consider gun safety legislation that could increase funding for mental health services, school safety and other measures aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people. “What stops armed bad guys is armed good guys,” Senator Ted Cruz suggested in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, echoing many other gun rights advocates over the years.

Researchers who study active shooter events say it can be difficult to draw broad policy conclusions from individual episodes, but a review of data from two decades of such attacks reveals patterns in how they unfold, and how hard they are to stop once they have begun, reports The New York Times.

There were at least 433 active shooter attacks — in which one or more shooters killed or attempted to kill multiple unrelated people in a populated place — in the United States from 2000 to 2021. The country experienced an average of more than one a week in 2021 alone.

The data comes from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, whose researchers work with the F.B.I. to catalog and examine these attacks. Unlike mass shooting tallies that count a minimum number of people shot or killed, the active attack data includes episodes with fewer casualties, but researchers exclude domestic shootings and gang-related attacks.

Researchers caution that some older attacks may be missing from the data, but they feel confident in their overall assessment that shootings are increasing. What is less clear is how to limit the damage of these attacks, given how quickly they unfold and how powerful the weapons used can be.

Most attacks captured in the data were already over before law enforcement arrived. People at the scene did intervene, sometimes shooting the attackers, but typically physically subduing them. But in about half of all cases, the attackers commited suicide or simply stopped shooting and fled.

“It’s direct, indisputable, empirical evidence that this kind of common claim that ‘the only thing that stops a bad guy with the gun is a good guy with the gun’ is wrong,” said Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama, who has studied mass shootings for more than a decade. “It’s demonstrably false, because often they are stopping themselves.” 

Police officers shoot or physically subdue the shooter in less than a third of attacks 

Most events end before the police arrive, but police officers are usually the ones to end an attack if they get to the scene while it is ongoing.

Hunter Martaindale, director of research at the ALERRT Center, said the group has used the data to train law enforcement that “When you show up and this is going on, you are going to be the one to solve this problem.”

Information on police response time is incomplete, but in the available data, it took law enforcement three minutes, on average, to arrive at the scene of an active shooting.

Yet, even when law enforcement responds quickly — sometimes within seconds — or if officers are already on the scene when the attack begins, active shooters can still wound and kill many people.

“Law enforcement could be one minute out, and if that individual is proficient with the weapon system they’re using, they can quickly go through a lot of ammunition,” Mr. Martaindale said. “And if they’re proficient in their accuracy, you could have very high victim counts.”

In Dayton, Ohio, in 2019, an attacker shot 26 people and killed nine outside a downtown bar in the 32 seconds before a police officer on duty shot the attacker. A week earlier, at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Northern California, nearby officers engaged an attacker within a minute of his opening fire, but after 20 people had been shot. Three victims died and the attacker died by suicide.

“There’s not a lot that can be done to stop someone in the opening seconds of harming a significant number of people,” Mr. Lankford said.

And, like in Uvalde, law enforcement does not always bring an attack to a quick end. When a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in 2016, a detective working extra duty shot at the gunman from outside the club. More police officers began arriving less than two minutes later. But the police did not enter the club for several minutes, after the gunman had paused his initial assault. Police officers ended the attack when they shot the gunman three hours after the assault began. Forty-nine people were killed and 53 more were wounded. 

Bystanders stop some attackers, more often

In the wake of deadly shootings, gun rights advocates often push to arm more people, citing prominent examples where a “good guy with a gun” stopped a “bad guy.”

After a gunman shot 46 people in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017, an armed neighbor arrived at the scene and exchanged gunfire with the gunman, injuring him, until the gunman fled.

But armed bystanders shooting attackers was not common in the data — 22 cases out of 433. In 10 of those, the “good guy” was a security guard or an off-duty police officer.

“The actual data show that some of these kind of heroic, Hollywood moments of armed citizens taking out active shooters are just extraordinarily rare,” Mr. Lankford said.

In fact, having more than one armed person at the scene who is not a member of law enforcement can create confusion and carry dire risks. An armed bystander who shot and killed an attacker in 2021 in Arvada, Colo., was himself shot and killed by the police, who mistook him for the gunman.

It was twice as common for bystanders to physically subdue the attackers, often by tackling or striking them. At Seattle Pacific University in 2014, a student security guard pepper sprayed and tackled a gunman who was reloading his weapon during an attack that killed one and injured three others. The guard took the attacker’s gun away and held the attacker until law enforcement arrived.

When a gunman entered a classroom at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2019, a student tackled him. The student was shot and killed, but the police chief said the attack would have had a far worse death toll had the student not intervened. 

One in four attacks ends in a shooter suicide 

In more than a quarter of episodes, the attackers ended the shootings by turning the guns on themselves.

Many attackers died by suicide before the police arrived. At a Binghamton, N.Y., immigration services center in 2009, an attacker shot 17 people, killing 13, before turning the gun on himself. A middleschooler died by suicide after shooting two fellow students and a teacher in Sparks, Nev., in 2013. After shooting 471 people at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas from a hotel room overlooking the festival, the gunman died by suicide before the police arrived to his room.

The share of attackers who die by suicide is most likely a fraction of those who have suicidal expectations, Mr. Lankford said. Based on evidence attackers leave before attacks, like online posts or suicide notes, more say they expect to die. Sometimes they expect to provoke law enforcement to kill them, Mr. Lankford said.

Police officers exchanged gunfire in 2018 with a gunman who shot 12 people at a bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif., before he shot himself.

At Virginia Tech in 2007, a gunman locked doors to the building, initially stalling the police, before attacking students and professors, eventually shooting 49 people. But once law enforcement was able to enter, the attacker shot himself as police officers approached. 

One in four attackers leaves the scene (though most are later caught) 

About a quarter of shootings ended when the attacker or attackers stopped of their own accord and left the scene, then were apprehended or died by suicide at another location.

Many attacks that end when the shooter flees are spontaneous; for example, one may stem from a dispute that escalates when one party pulls out a gun.

In San Antonio in 2019, a man had a disagreement with the staff of a moving company, then opened fire on the company’s workers before running away. The police apprehended him later without incident. Last year, a man who was kicked out of a nightclub in Wichita, Kan., after a fight returned and shot six people, killing one. He fled the scene, and the police arrested him a month later in Phoenix.

Because these kinds of attacks are generally not planned, attackers may be more inclined to flee in hopes of getting away, Mr. Martaindale said.

But many premeditated attacks also ended when the attacker or attackers left the scene. After a gunman shot 34 people in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., he dropped his weapon and fled the school with other students, bypassing police officers who had arrived on the scene but had not yet attempted to intervene. After fleeing, the gunman walked to a Walmart, bought a drink at a Subway and stopped at a McDonald’s before he was apprehended by the police on a residential street.

In El Paso, a gunman shot 45 people, killing 23, in a Walmart before fleeing the scene. The police arrested him down the road without incident.

Why attackers stop themselves is a hard thing to know, but Mr. Lankford, after studying shooters for years, has some guesses. One is that sometimes, shooters plan for a dramatic confrontation with the police that does not happen. Another possibility, he said, is that the reality of their actions sets in.

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An evidence-based profile of mass killers is out there, why isn't anyone listening

Each time a high-profile mass shooting happens in America, a grieving and incredulous nation scrambles for answers. Who was this criminal and how could he (usually) have committed such a horrendous and inhumane act? A few details emerge about the individual’s troubled life and then everyone moves on.

Three years ago, Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology at Hamline University, and James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University, decided to take a different approach, according to POLITICO. In their view, the failure to gain a more meaningful and evidence-based understanding of why mass shooters do what they do seemed a lost opportunity to stop the next one from happening. Funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, their research constructed a database of every mass shooter since 1966 who shot and killed four or more people in a public place, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces and places of worship since 1999.

Peterson and Densley also compiled detailed life histories on 180 shooters, speaking to their spouses, parents, siblings, childhood friends, work colleagues and teachers. As for the gunmen themselves, most don’t survive their carnage, but five who did talked to Peterson and Densely from prison, where they were serving life sentences. The researchers also found several people who planned a mass shooting but changed their mind.

Their findings, also published in the 2021 book, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, reveal striking commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings and suggest a data-backed, mental health-based approach could identify and address the next mass shooter before he pulls the trigger — if only politicians are willing to actually engage in finding and funding targeted solutions. POLITICO talked to Peterson and Densely from their offices in St. Paul, Minn., about how our national understanding about mass shooters has to evolve, why using terms like “monster” is counterproductive, and why political talking points about mental health need to be followed up with concrete action.

POLITICO: Since you both spend much of your time studying mass shootings, I wonder if you had the same stunned and horrified reaction as the rest of us to the Uvalde elementary school shooting. Or were you somehow expecting this?

Jillian Peterson: On some level, we were waiting because mass shootings are socially contagious and when one really big one happens and gets a lot of media attention, we tend to see others follow. But this one was particularly gutting. I have three elementary school kids, one of which is in 4th grade.

James Densley: I’m also a parent of two boys, a 5-year-old and a 12-year-old. My 12-year-old knows what I do for a living and he’s looking to me for reassurance and I didn’t have the words for him. How do I say, “This happened at a school, but now it’s OK for you to go to your school and live your life.” It’s heartbreaking.

POLITICO: Are you saying there’s a link between the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings?

Peterson: We don’t know for sure at this point, but our research would say that it’s likely. You had an 18-year-old commit a horrific mass shooting. His name is everywhere and we all spend days talking about “replacement theory.” That shooter was able to get our attention. So, if you have another 18-year-old who is on the edge and watching everything, that could be enough to embolden him to follow. We have seen this happen before.

Densley: Mass shooters study other mass shooters. They often find a way of relating to them, like, “There are other people out there who feel like me.”

POLITICO: Can you take us through the profile of mass shooters that emerged from your research?

Peterson: There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.

What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group. They start asking themselves, “Whose fault is this?” Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates? The hate turns outward. There’s also this quest for fame and notoriety.

POLITICO: You’ve written about how mass shootings are always acts of violent suicide. Do people realize this is what’s happening in mass shootings?

Peterson: I don’t think most people realize that these are suicides, in addition to homicides. Mass shooters design these to be their final acts. When you realize this, it completely flips the idea that someone with a gun on the scene is going to deter this. If anything, that’s an incentive for these individuals. They are going in to be killed.

It’s hard to focus on the suicide because these are horrific homicides. But it’s a critical piece because we know so much from the suicide prevention world that can translate here.

POLITICO: I’ve heard many references over the last few weeks to “monsters” and “pure evil.” You’ve said this kind of language actually makes things worse. Why? 

Densley: If we explain this problem as pure evil or other labels like terrorist attack or hate crime, we feel better because it makes it seem like we’ve found the motive and solved the puzzle. But we haven’t solved anything. We’ve just explained the problem away. What this really problematic terminology does is prevent us from recognizing that mass shooters are us. This is hard for people to relate to because these individuals have done horrific, monstrous things. But three days earlier, that school shooter was somebody’s son, grandson, neighbor, colleague or classmate. We have to recognize them as the troubled human being earlier if we want to intervene before they become the monster.

Peterson: The Buffalo shooter told his teacher that he was going to commit a murder-suicide after he graduated. People aren’t used to thinking that this kind of thing could be real because the people who do mass shootings are evil, psychopathic monsters and this is a kid in my class. There’s a disconnect.

POLITICO: Do you get criticism about being too sympathetic toward mass shooters?

Peterson: We’re not trying to create excuses or say they shouldn’t be held responsible. This is really about, what is the pathway to violence for these people, where does this come from? Only then can we start building data-driven solutions that work. If we’re unwilling to understand the pathway, we’re never going to solve this.

POLITICO: So, what are the solutions?

Densley: There are things we can do right now as individuals, like safe storage of firearms or something as simple as checking in with your kid.

Peterson: Then we really need resources at institutions like schools. We need to build teams to investigate when kids are in crisis and then link those kids to mental health services. The problem is that in a lot of places, those services are not there. There’s no community mental health and no school-based mental health. Schools are the ideal setting because it doesn’t require a parent to take you there. A lot of perpetrators are from families where the parents are not particularly proactive about mental health appointments.

POLITICO: In your book, you say that in an ideal world, 500,000 psychologists would be employed in schools around the country. If you assume a modest salary of $70,000 a year, that amounts to over $35 billion in funding. Are you seeing any national or state-level political momentum for even a sliver of these kind of mental health resources?

Densley: Every time these tragedies happen, you always ask yourself, “Is this the one that’s going to finally move the needle?” The Republican narrative is that we’re not going to touch guns because this is all about mental health. Well then, we need to ask the follow-up question of what’s the plan to fix that mental health problem. Nobody’s saying, “Let’s fund this, let’s do it, we’ll get the votes.” That’s the political piece that’s missing here.

POLITICO: Are Democrats talking about mental health?

Densley: Too often in politics it becomes an either-or proposition. Gun control or mental health. Our research says that none of these solutions is perfect on its own. We have to do multiple things at one time and put them together as a comprehensive package. People have to be comfortable with complexity and that’s not always easy.

Peterson: Post-Columbine there’s been this real focus on hardening schools — metal detectors, armed officers, teaching our kids to run and hide. The shift I’m starting to see, at least here in Minnesota, is that people are realizing hardening doesn’t work. Over 90 percent of the time, school shooters target their own school. These are insiders, not outsiders. We just had a bill in Minnesota that recognized public safety as training people in suicide prevention and funding counselors. I hope we keep moving in that direction.

Densley: In Uvalde, there was an army of good guys with guns in the parking lot. The hard approach doesn’t seem to be getting the job done.

POLITICO: Do you support red flag laws?

Peterson: Our research certainly supports them, because so many perpetrators are actively showing warning signs. They are talking about doing this and telling people they’re suicidal. But what Buffalo showed us is that just because you have a red flag law on the books doesn’t mean people are trained in how it works and how they should be implementing it.

POLITICO: What has to change to make the laws more effective?

Densley: There are two pieces. One is training and awareness. People need to know that the law exists, how it works and who has a duty to report an individual. The second piece is the practical component of law enforcement. What is the mechanism to safely remove those firearms? Especially if you have a small law enforcement presence, maybe one or two officers, and you’re asking them to go into somebody’s rural home and take care of their entire arsenal of weapons.

POLITICO: What should have happened in Buffalo, given that the state of New York has a red flag law?

Peterson: From what we know, it sounds like there should have been more education with the police, the mental health facility and the school. If any one of those three had initiated the red flag process, it should have prevented the shooter from making the purchase.

It really shows the limitations of our current systems. Law enforcement investigated, but the shooter had no guns at that moment, so it was not an immediate threat. The mental health facility concluded it was not an immediate crisis, so he goes back to school. If it’s not a red-hot situation in that moment, nobody can do anything. It was none of these people’s jobs to make sure that he got connected with somebody in the community who could help him long term.

Densley: Also, something happens to put people on the radar. Even if they’re not the next shooter, something’s not right. How can we help these individuals reintegrate in a way that’s going to try and turn their lives around? That gets lost if we fixate just on the word “threat.”

POLITICO: I was struck by a detail in your book about one of the perpetrators you investigated. Minutes before he opened fire, you report that he called a behavior health facility. Is there always some form of reaching out or communication of intent before it happens?

Peterson: You don’t see it as often with older shooters who often go into their workplaces. But for young shooters, it’s almost every case. We have to view this “leakage” as a cry for help. If you’re saying, “I want to shoot the school tomorrow,” you are also saying, “I don’t care if I live or die.” You’re also saying, “I’m completely hopeless,” and you’re putting it out there for people to see because part of you wants to be stopped.

We have to listen because pushing people out intensifies their grievance and makes them angrier. The Parkland shooter had just been expelled from school and then came back. This is not a problem we can punish our way out of.

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