August 2017 - Page 20 of 30 - searchfortruth.info

Integrated United States Security Database (IUSSD): Data on the Terrorist Attacks in the United States Homeland, 1970 to 2011

February 18, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

About This Report and the Global Terrorism Database

The authors of this report are Gary LaFree (START Director, UMD), Laura Dugan (START Associate, UMD), Erin Miller (GTD Project Manager). Questions about this report should be directed to Gary LaFree (garylafree@gmail.com).

The initial collection of data for the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) data was carried out by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services (PGIS) between 1970 and 1997 and was donated to the University of Maryland in 2001. Digitizing and validating the original GTD data from 1970 to 1997 was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Justice in 2004 (PIs Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan; grant number: NIJ2002-DT-CX-0001) and thereafter in 2005 as part of the START Center of Excellence by the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), Office of University Programs (PI Gary LaFree; grant numbers N00140510629 and 2008-ST-061-ST0004). Data collection funding for GTD from 1998 to 2007 was supplied by the DHS S&T Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences

Countering Radicalization in America

February 18, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

Summary

• The recent surge in the number of American Muslims involved in terrorism has led U.S. authorities to question the long-held assumption that American Muslims are immune to radicalization, and to follow the example of other Western democracies in devising a comprehensive counterradicalization strategy.

• Radicalization is a highly individualized process determined by the complex interaction of various personal and structural factors. Because no one theory can exhaustively explain it, policymakers must understand the many paths to radicalization and adopt flexible approaches when trying to combat it.

• The role of religion in the radicalization process is debated, but theories that set aside Ideology and religion as factors in the radicalization of Western jihadists are not convincing. Policymakers who choose to tackle religious aspects should do so cautiously, however, cognizant of the many implications of dealing with such a sensitive issue.

• Policymakers need to determine whether a counterradicalization strategy aims to tackle violent radicalism alone or, more ambitiously, cognitive radicalism.

Ad Hoc Arsenals PSSM Practices of Selected Non-state Actors

February 18, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

The physical security and stockpile management (PSSM) of small arms and light weapons and their associated ammunition is a topic of growing interest to researchers and policy-makers. In recent years the Small Arms Survey and other research organizations have examined national (government) PSSM practices and international standards. These analyses have shed new light on the strengths and shortcomings of existing controls and the dangers associated with poor PSSM. With some notable exceptions,1the PSSM practices adopted by armed groups have received far less attention. Yet their arsenals often contain similar weapons and ammunition to those of government arsenals and cause similar problems when not properly secured or maintained. The small arms and light weapons held by armed groups pose multiple threats. Weapons that are lost or stolen from poorly secured stockpiles can fuel conflict and violent crime, both locally and abroad. Poor stockpile management practices can also lead to or fail

When Did Prisons Become Acceptable Mental Healthcare Facilities?

February 17, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

INTRODUCTION

We can no longer ignore the massive oppression we are inflicting upon the mentally ill throughout the United States. Over a century ago, Dorothea Dix began a movement to improve the deplorable conditions of mentally ill prisoners. Despite her success in changing the country’s perception and treatment of the mentally ill in prison, we are now right back where we started in the nineteenth century. Although deinstitutionalization was originally understood as a humane way to offer more suitable services to the mentally ill in community-based settings, some politicians seized upon it as a way to save money by shutting down institutions without providing any meaningful treatment alternatives. This callousness has created a one-way road to prison for massive numbers of impaired individuals and the inhumane warehousing of thousands of mentally ill people.We have created conditions that make criminal behavior all but inevitable for many of our brothers and sisters who are mentally ill. Instead of treating them, we are imprisoning them.

Reducing a Suicidal Person’s Access to Lethal Means of Suicide

February 17, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

Reducing the availability of highly lethal and commonly used suicide methods has been associated with declines in suicide rates of as much as 30%–50% in other countries. The theory and evidence underlying means restriction is outlined. Most evidence of its efficacy comes from population-level interventions and natural experiments. In the U.S., where 51% of suicides are completed with firearms and household firearm ownership is common and likely to remain so, reducing a suicidal person’s access to firearms will usually be accomplished not by fiat or other legislative initiative but rather by appealing to individual decision, for example, by counseling at-risk people and their families to temporarily store household firearms away from home or otherwise making household firearms inaccessible to the at-risk person until they have recovered. Providers, gatekeepers, and gun owner groups are important partners in this work. Research is needed in a number of areas: communications research to identify effective messages and messengers for “lethal means counseling,” clinical trials to identify effective interventions,

Radicalization of Teacher Education Programs in the United StatesNine Essays

February 17, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

Introduction

These nine essays chronicle prominent examples where the advancement of radical agendas has displaced the development of subject-content mastery in America’s schools of education.Institutional racism, redistributionist ideology, resisting oppression, and equipping teachers with the tools to transform their students’ perspectives each of these factor heavily into the entrenched indoctrination to which many education school candidates must prepare to expose themselves. Reading lists of prospective teachers are top-heavy with near-cult figures for the Left, such as Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire and revisionist historian Howard Zinn. The examples described in this paper are steeped in these and other agendas. Proponents of these agendas are not difficult to find within education school communities. And at national and regional conferences held by organizations like the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy and the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME), workshop titles and painted banners proclaim their intentions in bold strokes.

Terrorist Precursor Crimes: Issues and Options

February 17, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

Summary

Terrorist groups, regardless of ideological ilk, geographical location, or organizational structure, have certain basic needs in common: funding, security, operatives/support, propaganda, and means and/or appearance of force. In order to meet these needs, terrorists engage in a series of activities, some of which are legal, many of which are not. Terrorist precursor crimes, offenses committed to facilitate a particular attack or promote a terrorist campaign’s objectives, are thought to be often carried out far away from the primary theater of conflict associated with a terrorist group. Much of the precursor activity, especially with regard to crimes conducted for the purpose of fundraising, takes place in wealthy Western countries, including the United States. Precursor crimes, known and/or alleged, include various fraud schemes, petty crime, identity and immigration crimes, the counterfeit of goods, narcotics trade, and illegal weapons procurement, amongst others. The implications of domestically occurring terrorist precursor crimes on the current threat environment, and specifically the United State’s security posture, are not fully understood

Private Ordering Essay

February 17, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

Abstract

The sharing of regulatory authority with private actors ("private ordering") has lengthy historical precedent and, in recent years, has been rapidly expanding in scope, domestically and abroad. Nowhere is its expansion as prevalent as in the commercial, financial, and business sector ("commercial private ordering"), such as the recent entrusting by the U.S. government to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private nonprofit corporation, with the task of controlling the Internet domain name system and the assignment of Internet protocol numbers, or the entrusting by the Securities and Exchange Commission to the privately organized Financial Accounting Standards Board with the power to promulgate public accounting standards.

Whereas traditional private ordering derives its legitimacy from costly procedural safeguards (essentially the same as those protecting the legitimacy of administrative agency rule-making), the purported legitimacy of commercial private ordering derives from separate premises: that the goal of commercial regulation is efficiency, and that private institutions can operate more

Police Civil Liability Lawsuits In California

February 17, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

INTRODUCTION

This paper provides an overview of police civil liability issues in California under federal law (42 U.S.C. section 1983) and state law. Preliminary matters such as whether to remove the case to federal court, the pre-lawsuit claim requirement, and the applicable statute of limitations are discussed first. After reviewing the threshold liability issue of duty, including whether a “special relationship” with an officer arises, the paper turns to claims involving detention, arrest, search, use of force, retaliation, and discrimination. Liability issues arising out of cases involving taking a person into protective custody under Welfare and Institutions Code section 5150 are discussed in some detail in light of the recent cases of Hayes v. County of San Diego and Sheehan v. City and County of San Francisco. California civil rights laws that arise in police civil liability cases, such as Civil Code sections 51.7 and 52.1 and the California Constitution, are also discussed. The paper then turns to the defenses of

The Relationship Between Number Of Toys, Infant Distractibility, And Mothers’ Teaching Utterances

February 17, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship among the number of toys in an infant’s play environment, infant’s distractibility, and how often a mother teaches her infant during a play session. This study takes samples from videotapes of 12-month old children playing with their mothers during a 5 minute free-play situation. Twenty-two mother and infant pairs were selected for this study based on their previous participation in a language study. The measures used in this study were: (1) the number of maternal teaching utterances to her infant; (2) the total number of utterances that mother used during the playsession with the child; (3) the number of toys that were visible in the room; (4) the factors that distracted the infant during the play session; and (5) the type of toy the infant choses to engage with.

Media Attention to Terrorist Attacks: Causes and Consequences

February 16, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

Political movements that engage in terrorism typically have too few material resources personnel, funds, or territory under their control to achieve their goals through legitimate political action or large-scale organized violence (Fromkin, 1975). Terrorist attacks are part of an indirect strategy for achieving their political objectives by influencing an audience (Crenshaw, 1981). These terrorist groups differ in the audiences that they seek to influence and in the messages they seek to communicate to their chosen audiences (Kydd & Walter, 2006). Some use terrorism to convince opponents to concede to their demands. Other terrorist groups seek to provoke authorities into engaging in indiscriminate repression, which will undermine support for the government and justify the use of terrorist violence. Some use violence to demonstrate to current and potential supporters a capacity to deliver powerful blows against their opponents. Media attention is an important vehicle by which terrorists communicate with their audiences, and

Cover Feature: High-Rise Plumbing Design

December 24, 2018August 9, 2017 by admin

The reemergence of our core cities as more active and vibrant communities brings pressure and challenges to those who design buildings and their systems. !e density of buildings, tra"c, the scarcity of land, and a competitive spirit among developers are all factors that work together to push modern buildings higher. Sometimes, we envision high-rise buildings as towering sky- scrapers. While this is the romantic and not always incorrect vision, a “high” rise can be as short as eight to 10 #oor levels. !e National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) de$nes a high-rise building as a building with an occupied #oor that is 75 feet above the level where the $re$ghting apparatus would stage $re$ghting operations. !at low threshold requires several speci$c features to be designed into buildings to promote life safety and allow for emergency responders to safely and quickly access the higher levels of the building, thereby saving lives and considerable invested resources. With that fairly simple de$nition, all high-rise

Psychosocial Interventions In Workplace Mental Health Promotion: An Overview

February 15, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

SUMMARY

A review based on the DataPrev final report concerning workplace mental health promotion is presented. Out of 4865 studies identified in a comprehensive bibliographical data search, 315 were selected for abstract screening and 79 were included in the final review. The studies were categorized in terms of their aims/expected outcomes and evaluated for quality on the grounds of their design and type of analysis. The most frequent aims were stress reduction and better coping, followed by increased job satisfaction and effectiveness, mental health enhancement and reduction in mental health-related absenteeism. In the 79 intervention studies, 99 outcome variables were measured using 163 instruments, mostly developed for the study purposes. Different intervention categories turned out to be used to attain the same aim, with skills training being the most popular (other approaches included improvement of occupational qualifications and working conditions, physical exercise, relaxation and multicomponent interventions). Among the few intervention programs that were implemented and evaluated in two or more studies, the Stress Inoculation Training

Characterizing Structural Relationships in Scenes Using Graph Kernels

February 15, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

Abstract

Modeling virtual environments is a time consuming and expensive task that is becoming increasingly popular for both professional and casual artists. The model density and complexity of the scenes representing these virtual environments is rising rapidly. This trend suggests that data-mining a 3D scene corpus could be a very powerful tool enabling more efficient scene design. In this paper, we show how to represent scenes as graphs that encode models and their semantic relationships. We then define a kernel between these relationship graphs that compares common virtual substructures in two graphs and captures the similarity between their corresponding scenes. We apply this framework to several scene modeling problems, such as finding similar scenes, relevance feedback, and context-based model search. We show that incorporating structural relationships allows our method to provide a more relevant set of results when compared against previous approaches to model context search 1 Introduction A growing demand for massive virtual environments combined with increasingly powerful

Update on Geospatial Patterns of Precursor Behavior among Terrorists

February 15, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

Introduction

As part of the Terrorism and Extremist Violence in the United States (TEVUS) database integration effort, researchers at the Terrorism Research Center in Fulbright College at the University of Arkansas and University of Oklahoma have been adding: 1) federal terrorism court cases and associated data and 2) incident and precursor geospatial data from these court cases to the American Terrorism Study (ATS) in order to examine geospatial patterns in terrorist behavior and determine if the patterns identified in earlier studies have changed significantly. The ATS allows examination of a number of different units of analysis. Analyses may examine: (1) characteristics of federal terrorism court cases; (2) the characteristics of persons indicted in each court case or involved in incidents, otherwise referred to as indictees; (3) characteristics of incidents and planned incidents; and (4) precursor activities that lead up to the incident and are necessary to carry it out and/or achieve the goals of the persons or groups.

Evil Done Vulnerability Assessment: Examining Terrorist Targets Through Situational Crime Prevention

February 15, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

Background

Historically, a major focus of the government and society has been placed on public safety and crime prevention at the individual or micro-level; more recently, however, the focus has been placed upon protecting large clusters of society at the macrolevel. Following the events of September 11th, 2001, national attention has been captivated by terrorism and terrorism prevention. Between 1970 and 2011, there have been 104,689 documented cases of terrorism around the world, 2,362 of which occurred in the United States. These terrorist attacks have resulted in 228,526 fatalities, 299,202 injured persons, and billions of dollars in property damage (Global Terrorism Database, 2012). Parallel to this time of increased focus on terrorism prevention, adequate funding to support new departments or increased terrorism prevention efforts in existing departments was unattainable (Leson, 2005). It was, and still is, unrealistic to expect local, state, or federal authorities to fund additional personnel and equipment in addition to their daily costly behaviors