This study examines temporal variations in the spatial influence of environmental features, such as bars and vacant buildings, on criminal behavior across microlevel places. Specifically, 17 environmental risk factors and their spatial influences are identified for calendar year 2014 street robberies in Jersey City, NJ. To explore temporal variation, risk factors and their spatial influences on crime are identified across 12 discrete 2-hr time intervals. The results demonstrate that the risk factors for street robbery varied across the course of a day. In fact, mapping the most vulnerable places for street robbery revealed that while many of the same environmental features remain high risk throughout the day, their influence varied. These results suggested that there was a temporality to robbery and that it is likely due to the interaction between physical vulnerabilities from the built environment and social behaviors of people at these places. This demonstrates the importance of considering the temporal dimension of criminal behavior as results show that people use and interact with their environment differently throughout the course of the day.
Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) is a spatial analysis technique used to diagnose environmental conditions that lead to hazardous outcomes. Originally developed for applications to violent crime analysis, RTM is utilized here to analyze Dr. John Snow's data from the 1854 cholera outbreak in London to demonstrate its potential value to contemporary epidemiological investigations. Dr. Snow saved countless lives when he traced the source of the cholera outbreak to a specific water pump through inductive reasoning, which he communicated through maps and spatial evidence. His methods have since inspired several fields of scientific inquiry. Informed by the extant research on RTM, we speculated that it could have helped test Dr. Snow's hypothesis about cholera and empirically identified the sole source of contaminated well water. We learned that it could and, although it was not available to Dr. Snow in the 1800s, we discuss RTM's implications for present-day research and practice as it relates to the analysis, prevention and treatment of cholera and other public health threats around the world.
Hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs) are multidisciplinary programs that use a health/public health approach to violence intervention by intervening with victims of violence at the time of injury and leveraging hospital- and community-based resources to address the underlying risk factors for violence. Much of the evidence for the impacts of HVIPs comes from qualitative research, yet there are few reviews of the efficacy of these approaches, and none that focus specifically on the HVIP context. This paper fills this gap by reviewing the common qualitative elements of published HVIP evaluations, and discusses their strengths, challenges, and relative applicability for researchers and practitioners alike. It then sets forth a research agenda, making a case for further (and more varied) qualitative HVIP evaluation research.
The following chapter provides an overview of approaches and tactics commonly used in programs developed to counter radicalization and violent extremism, with a particular emphasis on the role of risk/threat assessments used within existing programs. The purpose of this chapter is to understand to what extent existing radicalization prevention, deradicalization, and disengagement programs are using some form of individual-level risk assessment for terrorism or other forms of violence, or if any psychological assessments or interventions are used. The results indicate that the overwhelming majority of current programs do not explicitly include individual risk assessments. This is a critical oversight, one which hampers the potential efficacy of disengagement efforts.
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