Nancy La Vigne is the Director of the National Institute of Justice. She’s a nationally recognized criminal justice policy expert and former nonprofit executive whose expertise ranges from policing and corrections reform to reentry, criminal justice technologies and evidence-based criminal justice practices.
Alexis Piquero is the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. He leads the Bureau’s activities on a range of data collection on matters related to crime and the justice system. Piquero is a nationally and internationally recognized criminologist with more than 25 years of experience.
Episode Description
By the end of March, Education Week had reported that 13 school shootings had already taken place in the US this year, that’s coming off of 2022, which saw 51 school shootings, the most since Education Week started tracking them in 2018. As communities recover and victims heal, experts, educators, and parents all search for ways of preventing gun violence in schools. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guests Nancy La Vigne and Alexis Piquero.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
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By the end of March Education Week, it was reported that 13 school shootings had already taken place in the US this year. That's coming off of 2022, which saw 51 school shootings, the most since education week started tracking them in 2018. As communities recover, and victims heal, experts, educators and parents all search for ways of preventing gun violence in schools. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's Department of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guests today are Nancy Levine and Alexis McKerrow. Levine is the director of the National Institute of Justice. She is a nationally recognized criminal justice policy expert and former nonprofit executive whose expertise ranges from policing and corrections reform to reentry, criminal justice technologies and evidence based criminal justice practices. McKerrow is the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. He leads the Bureau's activities on a range of data collection on matters related to crime and justice. McKerrow was a nationally and internationally recognized criminologist with more than 25 years of experience. Last year, they authored a column in the Tampa Bay Times about school shooting prevention.
John Bailer
So one of the reasons we invited you to join us here was to talk about some of the stuff that you've written. I mean, you both have gotten involved in contributing many opinion pieces, and one opinion piece that you submitted last fall, which included what we know about school safety and mass shootings. And in this column, you talked a little bit about background. And sadly, we've had yet another and recent weeks of school and Nashville had had a horrific outcome where there were young people at school, a place of learning and enjoyment, was corrupted. So you know, I, what was it that when you were working on this piece and thinking about this the start of school last fall? What were some of the things that you were thinking about when you were considering school safety and mass shootings?
Nancy La Vinge
Well, if I can start, I just want to say I know that technically, these are called opinion pieces. But I want to be clear that there's no opinion here at all; those pieces were both grounded in very credible, rigorous research and well vetted statistics. So they weren't our opinions. But they were what we have learned and based on our years of experience and leaving the agency that really well, thank you.
Rosemary Pennington
Education Week has been tracking school shootings since 2018. And they note that they have noticed a rise in these since they started tracking. Has there been a rise from what your agencies can tell in school shootings? Or are we just tracking them better? Or are they more visible? Can you tell us a bit more about that?
Alexis Piquero
Yeah. Okay. So I'll jump in here first. So you know, one of the things I think you correctly pointed out was, quote, unquote, things just started to get tracked. And so we don't have that prior to that particular time period to get a sense of a full range of trend. Second of all, there could be more attention paid to it, because we do have a very different news cycle now, and accessibility to different news sources than we certainly had as kids. And so there is a lot more attention paid to it. The question is, is the incidence increasing relative to what it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago, is the manner in which this is happening or what types of tools I would say weapons that people are using? Those are the kinds of questions I think, you know, when Nancy and I were thinking about those pieces, okay, there are perceptions. And people make perceptions based on whether they’re their neighbors or their media viewing habits. And the question is, what does the data show? And it's more complicated, nuanced than there was a school shooting. And so the question is, where did it occur? Did it occur on campus? Did it occur off campus? Was the person someone who was a former member of the school or a current member of the school? So I think when we look at you know, these figures, we see sometimes on television, and I'm not criticizing the reporting of some very big standard of media reporting. But we have to bear in mind a number is a number, but without knowing how that number is created, we need to unpack that number.
Nancy La Vinge
That's precisely right. And in fact, what do we mean by school shootings? I think the ones that garner the most attention are the mass shootings. But we also know that, you know, firearms are used in school settings, I won't say routinely, but way more often than we think when we think of just the mass shootings, which of course, are the most horrific, and the ones you know, as a mother of two kids who went through the school system, I can really appreciate how it doesn't even matter whether they're up or down, there's enough of them that we're all concerned, and we need to do something about that. And we have built a pretty considerable body of evidence on school mass shootings, specific to K through 12. Right. That's how much research we have, that we can even call the evidence in that definition of mass shootings, and that definition of K through 12 schools. And we've learned a lot and I think that, you know, our struggle is to get that information out into the world, because it exists. And so one of the things that Alex and I want to do in these roles, is really spend a lot of time on communicating, translating, and getting the data and research into the hands of people who can really make differences on the ground, so that we can prevent the next school shooting, and also, you know, mitigate the harms that occur. When do people come on school campuses with firearms?
John Bailer
So that's really great. I mean, the thing that you're trying to give context for understanding this, and, you know, there seems like there's lessons that are learned here, right, that you've got this understanding as precursor to prevention. So one of the things that you mentioned in your article was this existence of an averted school violence database, that the fact that you have been constructed, that your organizations are involved in constructing some of these resources to understand these events, or near events, as the case may be? So perhaps, you could jump right to some of that? What are some of the takeaways that you had from looking at some of the data of these mass shooting events?
Nancy La Vinge
Yeah, um, just to share the effort of the school violence database is a database where school administrators, public safety officials voluntarily share information about near events. And I think that's a very important resource, because we often focus on events that have already occurred, and what can we discern from those. And yet, you know, learning from failure is important, but we can also learn from successes. But I won't say that that resource is what is the foundation for what we know about what works in preventing mass shootings in K through 12 schools. In fact, it has invested over $200 million in various school safety research initiatives in the last decade or so that we have a tremendous volume of research. And what we learned in particular, on mass shootings in K through 12 schools is that, first of all, most people who perpetrate these horrific acts took off their friends and family in some way or another often through social service through social media. And so these friends and family members have a responsibility to report and you know, sometimes it's fellow students, although I think more often than not, these are not full age people that are coming in and committing these crimes. So tip lines can be very helpful where you can report people anonymously, even if it's a loved one, you might not want them to know that you're reporting them. So those can be very helpful. And then there's a lot we're learning around threat assessment, and the good and the bad. It's not a panacea. Threat assessment is where all the gold team members come together social workers, school officials, mental health professionals, and when they discern students who might be prone to engage in various forms of violence, or bullying, that they take a good hard look at that students that case, what their circumstances are, to try to intervene before things escalate the mixed bag and that is, of course, you know, these are youth. We don't want them to be inappropriately profiled. And there's some concern about the students who may be coming to the attention of school officials that might impose biases based on race, gender, etc. So you know, threat assessments hold promise, but need to be used very carefully.
Alexis Piquero
You know, I’ll just add one thing. You can go back to your comment and I think you know, the point you make about averting is very important. And I will make a point with respect to use of force. There's a lot of spotlight for the right reasons put on the police use of force, especially deadly force, but there's also a movement to also collect the many, many times that officers encounter a situation. And never use force, which is actually the great number of times when you think about the number of contacts police have, based on the numbers of calls for service they have, and how many times they actually end up doing something. And the question is what they ended up doing. So there's a lot of now thinking about data collections about averted use of force. And you can learn from that. So what did the officer do in that particular interaction that led him or her to use either less force, or to not use very deadly force? So we have to learn from both those negative outcomes, but just as importantly, are the positive outcomes. And, you know, oftentimes, we think about, you know, the world. And I'll make an analogy here because all of us are used to this, and I'm not trying to be minimalistic. But we all have we all fly planes, planes have accidents, but we still get on airplanes. And so we have to bear in mind, there's a lot of times that pilots do things to avert an accident, and we may never hear about it, because it's not routinely reported. So we have to think about both sides of that outcome, that sometimes things happen. And then sometimes they don't happen. And we've learned from both of those.
Nancy La Vinge
Yeah, that's interesting, Alex. That reminds me of the bias we have in research, right? Where, you know, research findings that are null, where something doesn't have an impact are much less likely to be published. It's kind of that same phenomenon, right? It's not as interesting to report on things that didn't go wrong, you know, so people focus on those events. And I think that's similar. I did want to mention, if we know one thing more than anything about ways to avert school shootings in K through 12 schools anyway, it's that most of the perpetrators are getting their weapons from a home from a family member they're failing on or taking on, which really begs more public awareness around safe storage. It's a no brainer.
Rosemary Pennington
As you were talking, and I think you alluded to this a little bit with the coverage and how we hear a lot of coverage of, you know, when shooting wasn't stopped. But I wonder what we also hear about is like, again, like school shootings all getting sort of lumped together, right, when a school shooting happens, it sort of seems to all be framed in the same way. But there does seem to be a difference between a mass shooting and one that is not, so could you talk through how your agencies define mass shooting and why that matters?
Nancy La Vinge
Yeah, I mean, we don't define it as BJs define mass shooting? No, we do. Yeah. So others in the field define it and typically define it for a mass shooting that results in four or more fatalities. But that doesn't include mass shootings, where you might have three fatalities and a bunch of injuries. So you're not measuring the full effect of those types of acts. And there's also different ways of measuring mass shootings. Even within that four or more fatality category. There's public mass shootings, which is what we think of when you think of school shootings. But there's also five mass shootings, those are cases of maybe the father killing the wife and kids and then turning the gun on himself. And then there's mass shootings that happen in the course of other criminal events. They could be gang related, drug related…it could be a robbery gone wrong with multiple employees at a convenience store, right. So there's even within these definitions, there's definitions, and really zeroing in on those definitions can be helpful because you don't want to develop policy around preventing one type, when it's likely to play out very differently for other categories.
John Bailer
So if you are going to recommend one thing that might be done to help with minimizing risk into the future of these events occurring at schools, what might that be? And since there's two of you, maybe you each get one?
Nancy La Vinge
Well, I gave my answer already, if I could recommend one thing, it would be education around space storage and the hall, gun ownership in American households continues to increase. That's not going away. Oh, it's not just in the home because a lot of these guns are being stolen out of cars. Now, I think that most of the feeling that happens in the context of school shootings, is by the individual from a family member. So it's not just random stuff from somebody's car, but still there's so much more we can do to be responsible gun owners and keep these firearms safe.
Alexis Piquero
Nancy offers a very good preventive tactic on you know, basically accessibility and when you know, when things are accessible, you know, it increases the likelihood that they can be used in certain kinds of ways for me, I would focus more on preventing why people are, why kids are picking up a gun in the first place, and what motivates them to you know, edict harm on other people. And I think that, you know, the more we can spend early in life on telling people there's lots of ways of solving problems…picking up a gun hurting other people is not the solution for anybody at any point in time. So I remember when I was a kid, my dad used to change his oil. We were not very modest grown up. And there was a brand of Motorola called Quaker State, which might be from Ohio, if I think that correctly. Quaker State used to have this logo that said you can pay me now you can pay me later. So if we're not paying attention to eating the subtlest asides, and we have to be careful about over predicting, you know, and under predicting, and it's always hard to predict human behavior and those kinds of things. But more attention to things as early as possible, can help us identify where there are points of intervention in people's lives. But what are these we do, these two things are not mutually exclusive, you can do both of these. And you have to do both of these. Because when that first part that I identified doesn't work, or doesn't work as well, then that second part, Nancy talks about, can work really well.
Nancy La Vinge
Right. And just to piggyback on that, because one of the things that we haven't named explicitly is issues of mental health. Right. Now, I want to be clear about this, because this too, is a very nuanced finding. So we know that nearly all the people who carry out these mass shootings in K through 12 schools, that 92% or higher of them were found to be suicidal, right, which is, I don't know what part of the motivator that is. But that is a real finding. And a lot of these individuals experienced a lot of childhood hardship and trauma. So really taking the long view of this. Absolutely. I agree with Alex, but with that said, my caveat is, that doesn't mean that we should use a mental health diagnosis or as a profiling tool that does not work at all. You know why? Because Americans have mental health issues. A lot of us do. And so we can't use that as a screener per se, but we can understand that that is a predictive factor, and work to prevent and mitigate.
Rosemary Pennington
Well, thank you both so much for being here to talk about this today. We really appreciate it. Thank you.
Nancy La Vinge
My pleasure.
Rosemary Pennington
Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's Department of Statistics and media journalism and film and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter @StatsAndStories, Apple podcasts, or other places where you can find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts on the program. Send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu, or check us out at statsandstories.netnet, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.