Tuesday, April 01, 2025

Program that aims to reduce cyclical, retaliatory gun violence saw shootings decline after prevention program in Lansing, MI

Crime and Justice Research Alliance

In a new report, researchers document trends in shooting victimizations in Lansing, MI, before and after implementation of a program geared toward reducing cyclical and retaliatory gun violence and promoting community healing. Overall, shootings in Lansing fell after the implementation of the project, with some variations between years and communities.

The report, by researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) and Michigan Public Health Institute (MPHI), is published by Advance Peace Lansing, a program that uses evidence-based practices to engage with individuals affected by gun violence.

“Violence reduction initiatives such as Advance Peace Lansing must be understood and assessed within the broader context of shooting victimization trends,” says Paul Elam, chief strategy officer at MPHI, who coauthored the report. Elam is an expert whose work is promoted by the NCJA Crime and Justice Research Alliance, which is funded by the National Criminal Justice Association. “These trends offer critical insights into the patterns of shooting in a community, providing a foundational understanding of the problem.”

The Advance Peace Lansing program employs fellows to engage with the people most affected by gun violence. Its first program operated from October 2022 to March 2024, with 15 fellows working in southwest Lansing. A second program launched in July 2024 with 55 fellows working citywide in Lansing. Data collected for the report were provided by the Lansing Police Department and reflect fatal and non-fatal shooting incidents in the city. The report features an overview of shooting victimization trends in Lansing, including frequencies and percentage change by year, quarter, and sector.

Similar to national trends, fatal and non-fatal shootings in Lansing rose from 2019 to 2021, followed by an overall decrease in shootings from 2021 to 2024, with some variation between years. The pattern of shooting trends varied across the four sectors of the city: In the southwest and northeast, non-fatal shootings decreased continuously or saw no change from 2021 to 2024. In the northwest, non-fatal shootings rose in 2024, while in the southeast, non-fatal shootings rose in 2023, then declined in 2024.

The report also notes that:

Similar to national estimates, most victims were male (80%) and Black (82%). Most victims were between 18 and 24 years old, with an average age of 28.
Most shootings occurred between midnight and 4 a.m., and this timing held across sectors of the city and days of the week.
In Lansing, shootings declined 19% in the 24 months after the launch of the first Advance Peace Lansing fellowship (i.e., October 2022 to September 2024): Fatal shootings fell 52% and non-fatal shootings decreased 10%.
In the 24 months after the start of the first Advance Peace Lansing fellowship, shootings fell 33% in the southwest (i.e., fatal shootings declined 38% and non-fatal shootings decreased 33%). In the northwest, shootings declined 6%, in the northeast, they fell 40%, and there was no change in the southeast.
Based on a visual inspection of neighborhoods in the southwest, shootings declined in some of most violent groups of blocks.
In 2024, the Advance Peace Lansing team implemented a process for identifying cyclical and retaliatory shootings. That year, 25% of fatal shootings and 14% of non-fatal shootings were identified as cyclical and retaliatory in nature.

“The Advance Peace Lansing Peacemaker Fellowship is committed to ending gun violence and promoting neighborhood safety and social cohesion by investing in the healthy development and well-being of individuals at the center of gun violence,” notes Julie M. Krupa, assistant professor and associate director of undergraduate studies in MSU’s School of Criminal Justice, who coauthored the report. “Our analyses serve as an important step toward understanding the potential for our program to reduce gun violence.”

The program plans to build on this foundation with more comprehensive and rigorous studies to determine how to deepen understanding of how community-based violence interventions can contribute to safer communities.

Among the limitations of the report, the authors note that although their results are promising, they are based on descriptive analyses that do not account for potentially confounding factors. In addition, because base frequencies for shootings, particularly fatal shootings, were relatively low, the authors suggest that percentage change be interpreted with caution.

Incidences of urban U.S. hate crime declined slightly in 2024, but anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim crimes continued to rise

Crime and Justice Research Alliance

Police reports of hate crimes in 42 major U.S. cities declined 2.7% in 2024, hovering around modern records, according to preliminary data from a new multi-city survey by an emeritus researcher from California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB). But anti-Jewish hate crimes rose 12% and anti-Muslim hate crimes increased 18%, part of an upward trend.

“Multi-year overall hate crime trends remain elevated around modern records as hate crimes related to religion register another year of consecutive double-digit percentage increases,” according to Brian Levin, professor emeritus of criminal justice at CSUSB and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism there. Levin’s work is promoted by the NCJA Crime and Justice Research Alliance, which is funded by the National Criminal Justice Association.

At least 3,268 hate crimes were reported in 2024 across 42 major cities, including New York City; Los Angeles; Chicago; Boston; Portland, OR.; Washington; and Philadelphia, a decrease of about 2.7% from the record high in 2023 (when there was a 12% overall rise), according to Levin. (This small overall decline, as well as those of some subgroups, likely falls within the margin of error.) The 10 most populous cities saw an even larger decline, putting them about even with the rate in 2021 but 140% higher than 2014 totals, largely as a result of a decrease in Chicago.

However, these findings tell just part of the story. Anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate crimes continued to rise, correlated to the timing of the Israel-Gaza war, Levin found.

Hate crimes against Jews accounted for the largest representation in last year’s adjusted sub-sample (Los Angeles excluded), at 25% of the total. Annual records for anti-Jewish hate crimes were broken in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, and appear to have broken in Boston, Austin, and Pittsburgh. Anti-Muslim hate crime rose 18% in 2024 for the fourth consecutive year.

Other ethnicity-related hate crimes fell in 2024, though most within margin of error:

Hate crimes against African Americas fell slightly, from 456 to 453 in 2023.
Hate crimes against gay men dropped 8% after rising 33% in 2023.
Anti-Latino hate crime, which hit a record in 2023, declined 5.5% (with Los Angeles excluded).

Anti-Asian hate crimes, which rose significantly at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, fell more than 14% in 2024 in 29 cities, but to levels far higher than before the pandemic.

“The online narrative of threatening stereotypes around religious minorities, the LGBTQIA+ community, immigrants, and others, both individually and as part of a broad conspiracy, has correlated in recent reporting periods to records in hate crimes toward those groups, but no more so than with hate crimes related to religion, which rose for a fourth consecutive year and were accelerated by the Gaza War.”

The research was wholly underwritten by the author, who receives no compensation or assistance from outside entities.

ED nurses report radio silence when it comes to guidance for care of pregnant patients in states with abortion bans

UMass Amherst research believed to be the first to examine medical-legal communication among emergency nurses post-Roe v Wade

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Lead author — image:
Lisa Wolf, associate professor at the UMass Amherst Elaine Marieb College of Nursing, does research on how to make the emergency health care environment safer for nurses and patients.
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Credit: UMass Amherst

Expressing frustration, anger and moral distress, emergency department (ED) nurses interviewed in states with abortion bans say they are getting no information or guidance from nursing leaders or hospital administrators on how to provide care to obstetric patients, according to new, multidisciplinary research by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“Basically, the nurses felt like they were set adrift with no guidance, no support, no backup, and they were concerned for their patients,” says Lisa Wolf, associate professor at the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing and lead author of the paper published in the Journal of Nursing Administration.

The new research is expected to inform discussion at the American Organization for Nursing Leadership 2025 annual conference in Boston, which runs through April 2.

The lack of communication impacts the quality of care – even whether pregnant patients get care at all – and represents a stark contrast from the usual protocols in an ED, adds Wolf, a longtime ED nurse whose research focuses on making the emergency environment safer for patients and nurses. “In an emergency department, if we change how we do EKGs or how we do stroke care, there’s like 150 ways that that information is communicated – and immediately,” Wolf says.

Wolf and co-author Lynnette Arnold, a linguistic anthropologist at UMass Amherst, found that confusion reigns over the wording and interpretation of legislation in the 12 states with total bans on abortion, seven states with bans under 18 weeks, and 22 with bans after 18 weeks. All the states provide an exception if the life of the pregnant patient is in danger, and some of the states also allow medical intervention for the “health” of the pregnant person, in the case of rape or incest, or a fatal fetal condition.

Nurses told the researchers that some ED doctors refuse to provide even clearly legal reproductive health care for patients, such as prescribing Plan B, a contraceptive pill that remains legal in all states. “The nurses were talking about calling around to three different emergency departments to try to get Plan B for patients who are sexual assault victims because the physicians in their hospital won’t write the prescription, even though it’s legal and not an abortion,” Wolf says. “So there’s a lot of moral distress.”

What struck Arnold was the virtual silence even among the nurses, due to the political nature of the issue and the potential for legal and professional repercussions. “The overwhelming takeaway for me was the communicative isolation that nurses faced. They were essentially operating in the same kind of informational vacuum that all the rest of us are. And there wasn’t a lot of that kind of horizontal communication among nurses that can sometimes fill the gap of institutional communication.” Some of the more experienced nurses used “work-arounds.” One strategy was what Arnold called “reading the room for allies” to try to figure out who is safe to talk to about reproductive care. “So they’re reading things like who has a rainbow pin, or who’s wearing Chuck Taylors [sneakers] and pearls to signal that they’re going to vote for Kamala Harris,” Arnold says.

One nurse in the study put it this way: “It’s political, it’s religious. It just kind of stems on a bunch of issues you don’t really want to talk about at work.”

The lack of protocol and communication leaves pregnant patients in a precarious situation. “They’re not coming in for elective abortions,” Wolf emphasizes. “What is showing up in emergency departments are pregnancy complications – cardiomyopathy, preeclampsia, miscarriage, fetal demise, sepsis.”

Living in “obstetric deserts” has led to more pregnant patients showing up in EDs – where nurses are not necessarily trained in obstetric emergencies – because it’s often the only place they can seek health care. “There are more people who are pregnant because they can’t get abortions,” Wolf says. “And there are more pregnant people who are having complications, and the only place that they can go, at least prior to the second trimester, is an emergency department, because a lot of OB practices in those states will not see you in the first trimester because they don’t want to get tangled up in any accusations of causing an abortion or a miscarriage.”

Arnold and Wolf recruited nurses for the study over social media. In one-hour Zoom sessions between March and May in 2024, they interviewed 22 ED nurses – 19 of whom worked in a state with care-limiting legislation. More than 45% of the ED nurses worked in the Southwest; 41% in the Southeast; 9% in the Northeast; and 5% in the Midwest.

This is the third study Wolf, who is also director of Emergency Nursing Research at the Emergency Nurses Association, has undertaken about the ED nurse experience since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. The first study, published in 2023 in the Journal of Emergency Nursing, explored the impact of a post-Roe environment on how ED nurses cared for people in obstetrical emergencies. The second one, published in Nursing Ethics in 2024, examined the question of moral courage among ED nurses caring for patients amid bans on abortion and gender-affirming care.

Wolf says the current study shows ED nurses have grown more confused, wary and angry. “We’re pretty sure that what we’ve said here is accurate and representative, although maybe not 100% generalizable,” Wolf says. “We had interdisciplinary triangulation. We had subject matter triangulation. We had geographic triangulation.”

Lynnette Arnold is an assistant professor in the UMass Amherst Department of Anthropology. She works to create interdisciplinary conversations about the social power of language.

Credit

UMass Amherst

Journal

JONA The Journal of Nursing Administration

DOI

10.1097/NNA.0000000000001562

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Medical-Legal Communication Among Emergency Nurses in States With Abortion Bans Implications for Nursing Leaders

Article Publication Date

31-Mar-2025

BARBARA BUSH

Scientists solve “cocktail party” mystery of bat echolocation

When emerging at night by the thousands, bats avoid colliding by changing how they move and echolocate

Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

Greater mouse-tailed bat (Rhinopoma microphyllum) — image:
The Greater mouse-tailed bat flies through the night sky, searching for insects
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Credit: Photo by Jens Rydell

Aya Goldshtein, Omer Mazar, and Yossi Yovel have spent many evenings standing outside bat caves. Even so, seeing thousands of bats erupting out of a cave and flapping into the night, sometimes in densities so high that they appear liquid, astounds the scientists every time. But until recently, the bat biologists were even more baffled by what they didn’t see. “The bats don’t run into each other,” says Goldshtein from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, “even in colonies of hundreds of thousands of bats all flying out of a small opening.”

A “nightmare” cocktail party

How bats don’t fatally crash into each other every night when they squeeze out of caves to forage was a scientific mystery. Many bats perceive their world mostly through echolocation: they emit a call and listen for the reflected echo, which in turn allows them to “see” what is around them. But if many bats are echolocating at once—such as when a whole colony emerges from a cave in the space of a few minutes—then the calls of others should drown out the important echoic information that bats need. Scientists call this loss of acoustic information “jamming” and they expect that bats should collide because of it.

And yet, aerial accidents outside caves are so rare, “you’re almost excited when you witness one,” says Goldshtein.

For decades, scientists have tried to figure out how bats solve this “cocktail party nightmare” in which ambient chatter deafens you to the voice you need to hear. For example, they examined how bats echolocate in groups. In the laboratory, scientists observed that individual bats in a small group each echolocated at a slightly different frequency, which in theory should reduce jamming. Was this the solution?

Yovel says that past studies like these are important stepping stones, but they have fallen short of providing a compelling answer to the cocktail party mystery because of a crucial missing piece. “No one had looked at this situation from the point of view of an individual bat during emergence. How can we understand a behavior if we don’t study it in action?”

Stepping into the bat cave

For the first time, Goldshtein and colleagues have collected data from wild bats emerging from a cave at dusk. They used a combination of high-resolution tracking, developed by Ran Nathan and Sivan Toledo, ultrasonic recording, and sensorimotor computer modeling—all of which allowed the researchers to step into the bats’ sensory world as the animals squeezed out of the cave opening and flew through the landscape to forage.

The team, which was led by scientists from Tel Aviv University, studied greater mouse-tailed bats in Israel’s Hula Valley. Over two years, they tagged tens of bats with lightweight trackers that recorded the bats’ location every second. Some of these tags also included ultrasonic microphones that recorded the auditory scene from the individual bat’s point of view. Each year, data was collected on the same night that bats were tagged.

A caveat: the tagged bats were released outside the cave and into the emerging colony, meaning that real data were missing at the cave opening when density is highest. The team filled in this gap with a computational model that was developed by Omer Mazar and simulated emergence. The model incorporated data collected by the trackers and microphones to recreate the full behavioral sequence starting from the entrance of the cave and ending after bats had flown two kilometers through the valley. “The simulation allows us to verify our assumptions of how bats solve this complex task during emergence,” says Mazar.

Sidestepping a sonic dilemma

And the picture that emerged was remarkable. When exiting the cave, bats experience a cacophony of calls, with 94 percent of echolocations being jammed. Yet, within five seconds of leaving the cave, bats significantly reduced the echolocation jamming. They also made two important behavioral changes: first, they fanned out from the dense colony core while maintaining the group structure; and second, they emitted shorter and weaker calls at higher frequency.

The researchers suspected that bats would reduce jamming by quickly dispersing from the cave. But why did bats change their echolocation to a higher frequency? Wouldn’t more calling only increase the problem of jamming and therefore collision risk? To understand that result, the authors had to approach the scene from a bat’s point of view.

Says Mazar: “Imagine you’re a bat flying through a cluttered space. The most important object you need to know about is the bat directly in front. So you should echolocate in such a way that gives you the most detailed information about only that bat. Sure, you might miss most of the information available because of jamming, but it doesn’t matter because you only need enough detail to avoid crashing into that bat.”

In other words, bats change the way they echolocate to gain detailed information about their near neighbors—a strategy that ultimately helps them to successfully maneuver and avoid collisions.

The authors emphasize that this unexpected result for how bats solve the cocktail party dilemma was made possible by studying bats in their natural environment as they perform the relevant task. “Theoretical and lab studies of the past have allowed us to imagine the possibilities,” says Goldshtein. “But only by putting ourselves, as close as possible, into the shoes of an animal will we ever be able to understand the challenges they face and what they do to solve them.”

Evening bat emergence [VIDEO] |

Video showing the evening emergence of thousands of Greater mouse-tailed bats, as they take to the sky in search of insects. The video shows rare collisions of bats in mid air.