Browsing by Subject "homicide"
Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item American jihadi terrorism: A comparison of homicides and unsuccessful plots(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Gruenewald, Jeff; Klein, Brent R.; Freilich, Joshua D.; Chermak, Steven; School of Public and Environmental AffairsWhile the number of American jihadi terrorist attacks remains relatively rare, terrorist plots thwarted by law enforcement have increased since September 11, 2001. Although these law enforcement blocks of would-be terrorists are considered counterterrorism triumphs by the FBI, human rights and civil liberty watch groups have conversely suggested that those who plan for attacks alongside government informants and undercover agents may be unique and essentially dissimilar from terrorists. Underlying this debate is the empirical question of how planned yet unsuccessful attacks and their plotters compare to successful terrorist homicides and their perpetrators. The current study addresses this question by comparatively examining jihadi terrorist homicides and unsuccessful plots occurring in part or wholly on U.S. soil between 1990 and 2014. Data for this study come from the U.S. Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), an open-source database with information on terrorism and extremist crimes. Based on these data, descriptive statistics are provided for several incident, offender, and target variables across three jihadi terrorist violence categories, including homicides, plots with specified targets, and plots with non-specific targets. We find several important differences across categories of terrorist violence, suggesting that unsuccessful plotters and their intended crimes vary from their more successful terrorist counterparts.Item Further Tests of the Influence of Black Mayors on Murders of Police: A Response to Jacobs(2010-05) Kaminski, Robert J.; Stucky, Thomas D.In response to our reanalysis and extension of Jacobs and Carmichael (2002) in which we found no evidence of a Black mayor effect, Jacobs (this issue) critiques our article on theoretical and methodological grounds. Theoretically, Jacobs argues that we did not provide sufficient justification for the inclusion of the percentage of the city council that was Black. Methodological criticisms include failure to include a nonlinear specification of percent divorced, improper temporal ordering, and the inclusion of only a single regional dummy variable. In our rejoinder we clarify the theoretical importance of the percentage of the city council that was Black and we address each of Jacobs’ methodological concerns. In additional analyses, we again find that the effect of the Black mayor variable is not robust to model specification or data employed, which was the point of our original article.Item Lest we forget: a historical analysis of police line of duty deaths in Indianapolis(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Hipple, Natalie Kroovand; Gruenewald, Jeff; Gonsler, John; School of Public and Environmental AffairsPrevious studies on police line of duty deaths are limited by their heavy reliance on traditional data. While the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data have undoubtedly advanced what we know about violence against police, placing line of duty deaths in their social and historical context poses challenges. Further, only a select number of variables are available for event-level analyses from traditional data sources. In this study, we utilise data culled from several open-source materials to present a comprehensive analysis of police line of duty deaths in Indianapolis, Indiana from 1880 to 2014. Descriptive findings for several incident, victim, and offender-level variables are presented, while placing fatal attacks on police within their sociohistorical and situational contexts. Two themes emerging from open-source data are also used to make sense of our descriptive findings. The first theme captures shifting circumstances from public to private line of duty deaths, while the second theme suggests how advancing technologies have been used to benefit police work while also introducing new risks to officer safety.Item A Mixed-Method Analysis of Fatal Attacks on Police by Far-Right Extremists(Sage, 2016-06) Gruenewald, Jeff; Dooley, Kiefer Michael G.; Suttmoeller, Michael J.; Chermak, Steven M.; Freilich, Joshua D.; School of Public and Environmental AffairsSeveral recent high-profile homicides of police officers have brought increased attention to issues of far-right extremist violence in the United States. We still, however, know very little about why (and how) certain encounters between far-right extremists and police result in violence. To fill this research gap, we conduct a mixed-method analysis of far-right antipolice homicides based on quantitative and qualitative data from the U.S. Extremist Crime Database. We begin by categorizing cases based on key aspects of homicide storylines. We then comparatively analyze attributes of event precursor, transaction, and aftermath stages across four storyline categories. Finally, a case study is purposively selected to follow-up on each storyline category to better capture the nuances of fluid homicide processes. Our findings have important implications for identifying triggering events, escalation factors, and other situated sets of conditions and circumstances that contribute to deadly outcomes for police officers.Item Reassessing Political Explanations for Murders of Police(2009-02) Kaminski, Robert J.; Stucky, Thomas D.The article discusses how Jacobs and Carmichael, drawing on the racial threat thesis, argue that the overrepresentation of Blacks among felons who murder police is in part explained by Blacks' conscious or unconscious responses to political subordination by the State. In testing this argument, Jacobs and Carmichael find that their key theoretical variable—the presence of a Black mayor—is inversely related to police homicides and injurious assaults across many model specifications. This article describes a limited reanalysis of Jacobs and Carmichael's homicide data and additional analyses with a larger sample of cities. The findings suggest that the significance of the Black mayor variable may have been an artifact of model specification. Instead, there is evidence that Black city council representation may be associated with reduced homicides of police by Blacks. Further research is needed, however, because of the limited explanatory power of the key factors highlighted in past research.Item