JPRC

From the JPRC Director’s Desk: Q&A with Dr. Frank Straub

Grace Westermann

From the JPRC Director’s Desk: Q&A with Dr. Frank Straub

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In Everett, Washington in 2018, a young man planned an attack on his high school. He had drawn up plans to shoot students and use explosives at the school. Fortunately, his grandmother read his plan before he carried it out. She contacted authorities, who, following an investigation that uncovered a rifle and several hand grenades, arrested the 18-year-old. The individual is now serving a 22-year sentence for attempted murder.

Such instances of averted school violence, while chilling to learn about, represent a success story from one important perspective: The plan was short-circuited and never came to fruition, saving human lives and suffering. How can we learn from these averted school attacks? How can this sort of information be used to create safer schools?

To answer these and other questions, we asked Dr. Frank Straub, the Senior Director of Violence Prevention Research and Programs at Safe and Sound Schools to respond. Previously, Dr. Straub served as the founder and director of the National Policing Institute’s Center for Targeted Violence Prevention where he developed the Averted School Violence (ASV) Database. Dr. Straub also served for over 30 years in federal, state, and local law enforcement, leading agencies in New York, Indiana, and the State of Washington. During his time with the New York City Police Department, he was Deputy Commissioner of Training and Assistant Commissioner for Counterterrorism. He is the author of numerous publications on averted school violence and many other topics, including, A Comparison of Averted and Completed School Attacks from the Police Foundation Averted School Violence Database.

Why should we study averted acts of violence against schools?

The rationale behind Safe and Sound Schools’ Averted School Violence Project is that we can learn about how and why intended school attacks were stopped. By studying such averted school attacks, we can better identify failure points in safety systems, recognize those policies and practices that may have led to a foiled act, and thereby invest more wisely in school safety. From a practical standpoint, averted incidents occur more frequently than completed attacks, giving us a bigger sample to learn from. We identify and analyze completed attacks as well. The ultimate goal, of course, is to prevent future attacks.

Any surprises when comparing completed versus averted acts of school violence?

Surprisingly, our data indicate more similarities than differences when we study averted and completed targeted school attacks. For example, averted and completed attacks occur with more frequency in suburban and rural communities than in urban communities. Public high schools with less than 2,000 students are the most frequent targets of current or recently former students, ages 14–18, who plan or carry out targeted school attacks.

One critical difference between averted and completed attacks is how leakage is handled. Leakage occurs when others know about the planned attack before it occurs because the intended perpetrator has told someone, posted a threat online, and so on. Unfortunately, in completed acts, either this leakage was not reported, or if it was reported, no one acted on it. As we are learning from averted incidents, as in the example from Washington above, leakage did lead to the planned attack being foiled. Maybe it was a friend, a family member, or another student, but someone reported this leakage to the local or school police, or to educators, so that someone intervened.

One of the “surprises” we are seeing now is that persons planning targeted school attacks are getting younger, and more and more of the planners are engaged in online extremist and/or violent ideology.

We caution, however, that the ASV data is based on incidents we identify in the public domain (usually news reports or social media) or that educators or others in the school community report to us. We know we are missing instances of school violence that were averted but went unreported, which is why we want to really encourage publicity of the database and increase reporting.

What insights does the ASV data provide for school-based behavioral threat assessment teams?

Behavioral threat assessment teams are critical to identifying high-risk/high-need students and preventing targeted school attacks. One of the important lessons we’ve learned is that behavioral threat assessment teams represent the first step in what can be a long process of intervention and management of high-risk adolescents in a community context. These multi-disciplinary behavioral threat assessment and management teams have an opportunity to identify concerning behaviors, intervene, and therefore stop intended acts of violence.

But what is concerning? What should get their attention? ASV provides critical information regarding the motivations, behaviors, and methods of persons who planned and or completed the more than 300 incidents of school violence recorded in the database. It’s a good source of information on the types of behaviors that intended attackers were exhibiting on their pathway to violence.

How has the ASV data been used to address needs?

We learned from our data on averted and completed school violence that the high-risk/high-need student that comes to the attention of a behavioral threat assessment team has to be managed in the community as well as the school. Even more critically, these individuals can be lost between systems—school, mental health, law enforcement, juvenile/criminal justice, and other agencies—particularly when they leave school and fall from everyone’s radar.

These data, in part, led to a new program, Prevent 2 Protect, a collaborative effort by Michigan State University’s Department of Psychiatry and Safe and Sound Schools to prevent adolescent involvement in school violence. In Michigan, high-risk/high-need students identified by school behavioral threat assessment and management teams can be referred to Prevent 2 Protect. If the student meets our criteria, they receive a full psychiatric evaluation, an in-depth assessment of criminogenic factors, and a needs assessment. The student and their families receive an individualized care plan and then work with our community-based intensive support teams—a case manager and a mentor—who help the student and their caregivers navigate support and intervention systems longitudinally. We are thrilled that the state of Michigan has invested in providing this program to its state’s educational community for the next five years.

How can schools and police departments contribute to the ASV database?

School personnel, law enforcement, mental health practitioners, students, parents, and other members of school communities can enter an incident into the Averted School Violence Database. Reports can be made anonymously, or the persons can provide contact information, which allows the ASV team to follow up (confidentially) and obtain additional information.

What barriers are you facing in this work?

Funding has posed challenges over the years. However, we have received increasing financial support from the Motorola Solutions Foundation. Michigan State University’s Prevent 2 Protect project is also providing financial support through September 2027. The funding has allowed us to rebuild the website and database, which will facilitate user access and improve data analysis and reporting.

Increasing the number of averted incidents reported to the database by practitioners in the field remains a challenge. Most of the incidents were identified by the ASV team in the media or in social media.

What can the Justice and Prevention Research Center (JPRC) do?

The JPRC can continue to help promote the Averted School Violence project and encourage members of school communities to report incidents of averted and completed school attacks to the database. This article is a great start. We also welcome the JPRC as a research partner as we move ahead to make schools and communities safer.

What is the Regression Discontinuity Design and How Can it be Used to Evaluate Crime and Justice Interventions?

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One of the by-products of having evidence-informed policy is that it brings increased attention to the nature and quality of evidence. Alas, the foundation of understanding “what works” is built on those individual evaluation studies that test for the effects of interventions. It would make life so much easier if all the evaluation designs for the question “Did the intervention work?” all came to same answer. One could choose the cheapest and quickest method and be done with it. But that is not the case. Entire books have been written and courses developed that expound on the strengths and weaknesses of each evaluation design and how confident (or skeptical) we should be of their results.

One evaluation design that has been highly valued by many methodologists is called the Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD). It is considered by some of the evidence-based clearinghouses, such as the What Works Clearinghouse in education, to be among the strongest designs that can be implemented to understand the impact of an intervention. However, the RDD is not well understood by many people, including researchers, and it is rather underused in justice settings. But some have advocated that it should be used more often to assess interventions relevant to crime and justice. Why?

Well positioned to answer this and other questions, is the JPRC research team working on a project to promote RDD in justice settings. The team, led by Jonathan Nakamoto, and including Alexis Grant and Trent Baskerville, received internal WestEd support to learn how RDD is being used in the field and to promote it to increase awareness and use. To date, the team has coauthored a brief, a short article, and made several conference presentations on RDD.

Jonathan Nakamoto, Alexis Grant, Trent Baskerville

Could you explain the basic principles of RDD and why it is considered a powerful design?

RDD is a quasi-experimental design that takes advantage of situations in which a numeric score is used as the sole assignment criterion for an intervention. Let’s say, for example, youths above a certain score on a risk instrument get the treatment; youths below do not. Here is a figure that can help show the situation best—as the graph indicates, individuals who score low on a risk instrument, say a 49, would be expected to have differences across many characteristics when compared to someone with a much higher score, say 89, but we would not expect systematic differences between those scoring a 49 and those scoring a 51. The beauty of RDD rests in its ability to credibly approximate the counterfactual—what would have happened in the absence of the intervention—by comparing those individuals who are just above the cutoff against those just below the cutoff.

Risk Assessment Score

A regression model is used to analyze the data in RDD. Although the participants are not randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, the assumption holds that those just above the cutoff are not systematically different from those just below the cutoff. Thus, any discontinuity in the regression line at the cutoff point (as seen in the figure) can be attributed to the effect of the intervention, not to underlying differences between the groups. Graphing the data as in the figure can be particularly helpful when using RDD, and a visible change at the cutoff is indicative of a treatment effect.

What has the JPRC project found out so far about the use of RDD designs in justice settings?

Despite their potential for rigorously evaluating the impact of interventions and policies, they have been infrequently used in justice settings, according to our team’s review of the literature. We have identified 68 published or available studies relevant to crime and justice that used RDD. However, only about 40 of these were directly relevant to law and the justice system; many were studies of education or employment policies to determine their impact on crime outcomes. Unfortunately, we do not have data on what the potential number should be, but it is our view that RDD has been used less often than possible.

Our studies indicate that RDD is most often used retrospectively to examine a policy that has already been implemented. This is one of the strengths of the design in that RDD can be done if there is access to a data file that has data specifically on the assignment variable (e.g., a person’s score on a risk instrument), their outcomes, and knowledge of the cutoff policy.

Can you provide a specific example or case study in which RDD has been successfully implemented within a justice setting?

One example in which RDD was used in a justice setting comes from Cologne, Germany, published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies in 2022. This was one of the clearest prospective uses of RDD. Christopher Engel and his colleagues worked with judges and probation staff in the juvenile court to develop a scorecard, based on judges’ ratings ranging from 0 to 28, to assign juvenile risk. Youths scoring 13 or higher were assigned to the intensive probation program, and those scoring 12 or lower were assigned to regular probation. The RDD analysis showed that the intensive probation program reduced recidivism by 10 percentage points at 6 months and 30 percentage points during the longer follow-up (1–3 years) for youths around the scorecard cutoff of 13 points.

What are some of the challenges or limitations you see in applying RDD in justice settings?

One of the main challenges to RDD is identifying situations in which treatment is assigned solely on the basis of an assignment variable—with a clear and precise cutoff point that is strictly enforced. In many justice situations, the assignment to treatment or control may not be as transparent and clear-cut as is required by RDD. There are usually many factors that influence whether one person receives an intervention, and another person does not. Even when RDD is implemented, there may be covert manipulation around the cutoff in which individuals who were close to the cutoff may have their scores artificially manipulated so they indeed receive the treatment. Additionally, the general findings from RDD are limited because they are valid only to observations around the cutoff. Conclusions from RDD studies may not be applicable to individuals who scored further away from the cutoff.

How is your project promoting the use of RDD in the field?

We’re using a variety of methods to increase awareness of the benefits and applicability of the method for evaluation and decision-making. We’ve put out publications [linked above] and are working on two more briefs and a peer-reviewed journal article. We are also holding a roundtable on RDD at November’s American Society of Criminology annual meeting with several of the researchers who have used this method, to learn more about its applications in the field.

From the JPRC Director’s Desk: Q&A with Judge William Thorne

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December 7, 2023

Native or Indigenous persons are overrepresented in justice system involvement. For example, Indigenous persons are disproportionately overrepresented at each stage of the system process, including arrest and incarceration, whether juvenile or adult. Despite progress in reducing the total number of incarcerated populations, the overrepresentation of Native and Indigenous persons in the system, particularly when compared to white persons, remains resilient. How can these disparities for Native persons be addressed?

To answer this and other questions, we asked William Thorne, retired Utah Court of Appeals Judge and a member of the Pomo/Coast Miwok Tribe, to respond. Judge Thorne is a member of the WestEd Board of Directors and serves on the Board of Trustees for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. In 2016, Judge Thorne was presented with the Distinguished Service Award by the National Center for State Courts. You can learn more about his reputation and years of service from an article marking his retirement from the courts.

What impact did structural racism have on you as a Native/Indigenous person growing up?

I grew up in a small town in Northern California where my mom taught us what we had to do daily. She told us we had to be at least two to three times better than others to succeed. She also used to make us do things like this (and we didn’t understand at the time, but I do now): Mom made us empty our pockets out in the car before we went into stores so nobody would ever accuse us of taking something. That was the background that we grew up with. You felt like you were always on stage, and somebody was always watching. My mother told us that you could never assume that somebody wasn’t paying attention to what you were doing at all times.

What do you believe are the causes of the deep disparities by which Native persons are involved in the justice system at much higher rates than their proportion of the population?

There are several factors, but one overlooked cause is the law itself. For example, if a Native commits a crime on an Indian Reservation, it becomes a federal offense. And the federal guidelines are much harsher than state guidelines. If a Native American and a non-Native person commit a burglary together, the non-Indian would go to state court whereas the Native/Indigenous person would be tried in federal court. And assuming they are both convicted, the federal sentencing guidelines are much harsher than the state guidelines. Well, that in and of itself can explain some of the disproportionality between the two groups in terms of statutes and how that needs to be modified. There are also concerns about the demographic composition of juries as well as cultural factors that dictate that a person must admit to wrongdoing (rather than plead not guilty and await a trial) and economic factors that limit the resources available to post bond—many homes on reservations do not have “titles” that permit a bondsman from issuing a bond in reliance on the property to guarantee appearance or even hire attorneys. Other factors include the lack of family support structures that would be easily recognizable to persons deciding upon appropriate sentencing terms, lack of cross jurisdictional agreements to monitor probation, etc.

What can policymakers and criminal justice professionals do, if anything, to mitigate these disparities?

I think there are choke points in the system where there is tremendous discretion that officials have. For example, law enforcement has the discretion to let somebody go with a warning as opposed to arresting them. Prosecutors have the discretion to charge and how high to pile the charges and then whether to plea bargain those down, for example, to a single charge or a deferred prosecution. That kind of discretion is immense, and nobody tracks that, at least that I’ve ever seen. Judges’ decisions about sentencing, even if you have strict guidelines, there’s still room to depart for certain good cause. But that good cause again is based on White middle income norms and values, so that you don’t measure the activity or the strength of the individual or extended family. As policymakers and criminal justice professionals, we need to take into consideration the nuclear family and the extended family and community with its overall strengths as vehicles for healing.

Are there innovative strategies in the tribal justice system that the U.S. justice system needs to learn from?

From my experience, and I don’t know each part of the system, I know there are successes in Native communities in different places. Nobody shares that information or that knowledge. An example is a program run by Native Americans that went from 487 kids in foster care down to single digits. This program is called “My Two Aunties,” and in tribal communities, your auntie is somebody who put their arm around you, fed you, washed your clothes, made sure you had a warm place to sleep, but also was not afraid to grab you by the ear and shake her finger in your face if that’s what you need. Somebody who’s on your side, somebody who will call you to account, but you know has your back.

If we could figure out how to do that … to treat people as if they’re our relatives and not as strangers. One of the things in the non-Native system is fairness is measured by treating everybody at arm’s length—that is, treat them all the same. Well, in tribal communities, we’re taught to treat everybody as if they are family. You’re invested in their success. You’re not just going to quote strict sentences but give them a fair chance. You’re going to do whatever you can to help them succeed. Not a free pass. But what is it going to take to help you succeed. I have a friend who runs a child welfare program for Native Americans, and she’s trained her workers to ask not “what’s wrong with you?” but “what’s strong with you?” We can build on those strengths and fill the gaps by not embracing a deficit orientation and take the strengths that Native Americans have into account.

That may be Pollyanna. But I think that has the basis of saying here’s how you succeed at a local level. We find programs, people’s stories of success, and we start to pull it out and learn from it. Discover the factors that work and then share. Most of the people who work in the system (at least in the in the child welfare system) aren’t doing it for the money, prestige, or high pay. They do it because they want to help, but we need to empower them to help and not just be another cog in a system.

What can JPRC do to move the needle in directions beneficial to Native Americans? 

JPRC is helping to move the needle by highlighting this need and engaging in its research work. I applaud your team for conducting the studies you do, and I always look forward to the results.

National Bullying Prevention Month: Interview With Dr. Trevor Fronius of the WestEd Justice and Prevention Research Center

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October 13, 2023

Students deserve to attend schools in which they feel safe and supported. As such, bullying prevention is an essential component of any school safety initiative.

In observance of National Bullying Prevention Month, WestEd checks in with Trevor Fronius, a Senior Research Associate with the WestEd Justice & Prevention Research Center. Fronius works on research and evaluation projects related to criminal and juvenile justice systems, violence prevention, school safety and climate, and other prevention areas.

In this Q&A, he describes the state of bullying before and after the COVID-19 pandemic—and what school communities can do to address it. The Q&A picks up from a 2019 blog post Fronius coauthored with Darius Taylor, Current Trends and Promising Practices in Bullying Prevention.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, had the rates of bullying been on the decline?

In 2019, nearly one of every four students (22%) experienced bullying of some form over the course of the school year. Sadly, only 46 percent of those students actually reported the bullying to an adult, and that number is even more drastic among Black students (61%). While these numbers are simply unacceptable, students and schools across the country were experiencing a decline in overall bullying rates compared to the prior decade (28% in 2009).

How did remote learning impact rates of bullying?

Students were exposed to greater levels of potential electronic bullying—16 percent of schools reported cyberbullying as an issue occurring at least once a week in the 2019/20 school year—while experiencing tremendous social isolation and lacking access to in-person social-and-emotional learning and development.

As students returned to classrooms, schools were met with increased student behavioral problems, including student violence and bullying. In a May 2022 School Pulse Panel survey, for example, more than 80 percent of schools reported that the pandemic “stunted behavioral and socioemotional development” among students, and 37 percent reported that bullying increased due to the pandemic or other reasons. Undoubtedly, we will see these numbers bear out as we gather more data from students in the coming years.

What can school communities do right now to eradicate bullying?

It is imperative that we equip students, families, and school staff with the tools and resources they need to address the social-and-emotional learning and development loss in recent years and bolster support for our children who are at an increased risk for experiencing bullying.