Television and terrorism: Implications for crisis management and policy‐making

Because few of us experience terrorism firsthand, the media play an important role in informing us when major incidents occur. Because of its instantaneity and its ability to reach many audiences at once, the electronic media and particularly television can have a significant impact on the various players who become involved in a particular crisis. This article examines the kinds of effects that television can have on four sets of actors most commonly involved in terrorist crises or major incidents: politicians, police, the public and the print media. While some of these effects can be negative, others can be positive. As a whole, however, television tends to diminish the quality of political discourse, with its emphasis on simplification and dramatization. In time of crisis, this can have serious consequences on decision‐makers who depend upon an informed public to understand the issues at stake and the limits on government action. The article ends by examining briefly how these effects relate to the increasing role of the private sector in public safety and security.     

Open-source intelligence and privacy by design

As demonstrated by other papers on this issue, open-source intelligence (OSINT) by state authorities poses challenges for privacy protection and intellectual-property enforcement. A possible strategy to address these challenges is to adapt the design of OSINT tools to embed normative requirements, in particular legal requirements. The experience of the VIRTUOSO platform will be used to illustrate this strategy. Ideally, the technical development process of OSINT tools is combined with legal and ethical safeguards in such a way that the resulting products have a legally compliant design, are acceptable within society (social embedding), and at the same time meet in a sufficiently flexible way the varying requirements of different end-user groups. This paper uses the analytic framework of privacy design strategies (minimise, separate, aggregate, hide, inform, control, enforce, and demonstrate), arguing that two approaches for embedding legal compliance seem promising to explore in particular. One approach is the concept of revocable privacy with spread responsibility. The other approach uses a policy mark-up language to define Enterprise Privacy Policies, which determine appropriate data handling.     

Student–Teacher Relationships Matter for School Inclusion: School Belonging,Disability, and School Transitions

For students with disabilities, the process of school inclusion often begins with a move from segregated settings into general education classrooms. School transitions can be stressful as students adjust to a new environment. This study examines the adjustment of 133 students with and without disabilities who moved from a school that served primarily students with disabilities into 23 public schools in a large urban school district in the Midwest. These students and 111 of their teachers and other school staff rated the degree that students felt they belonged in their new schools and the quality of their social interactions. Results show that students who experienced more positive and fewer negative social interactions with school staff had higher school belonging. Teachers accurately noted whether students felt they belonged in their new settings, but were not consistently able to identify student perceptions of negative social interactions with staff. Implications for inclusion and improving our educational system are explored.     

Modeling the politics of punishment: A conceptual and empirical analysis of ‘law in action’ in criminal sentencing

The empirical sentencing literature has focused intensively on racial equity concerns, but this research added to the literature by analyzing political-contextual sources of punishment. This study developed a functional model of court decision making and used ordinal logit to assess court punishment decisions in 387 counties across seven states. The findings supported established assumptions about individual level punishment determinants, but showed that political environment indicators also predicted sentence severity. Interactions were present as well. In law and order environments Black defendants received enhanced sentences, but in jurisdictions with the largest Black populations, Black defendants faced reduced punishments. With individual and state level effects held constant, the findings from this research reinforced claims that punishment is intensely political.     

Suicide by means of a charcoal grill. Casuistic report with review of the literature

Due to the conversion of the gas supply from city gas to CO-free natural gas and the introduction of the catalytic converter technology for motor vehicles the number of suicides by CO poisoning has decreased considerably. Nevertheless suicides by CO poisoning are still committed once in a while. In the described case from the autopsy material of the Institute of Legal Medicine at Münster, the suicide used a charcoal grill as the source of carbon monoxide.     

Regret,Reconciliation, and Restorative Justice: Introduction to a Special Issue of Social Justice Research

Social Justice Research -