Focused deterrence (FD) is a frequently cited intervention for preventing violence, particularly against violent urban gangs. The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) believes it could be effective in the UK, ...based primarily on research conducted in the US. However, we contend that these studies have inadequate methodological designs, lack of rigorous testing, and small sample sizes. Therefore, the evidence supporting focused deterrence as an effective method, particularly outside the US, is inconclusive. The aim of the protocol is to better understand the potential effects of FD in the context of the UK, using a multisite evaluation experimental design to more closely investigate the evidence of its likely impact.
We planned a realist randomised controlled trial. The design is focused on a multisite trial consisting of two-arm randomised experiments in five locations. Each trial location will test their implementation of a core programme specified by the funder. The multisite nature will allow us to understand differential impacts between locations, improving the external validity of the results. Participants will be randomly selected from a wider pool of eligible individuals for the intervention. We estimate a sample size of approximately N = 1,700 individuals is required. Based on this pooled sample size, a relative reduction of 26% would be detectable in 80% of trials. The trial is coupled with a formative process evaluation of delivery and fidelity. The formative evaluation will use a mixed methods design. The qualitative aspect will include semi-structured cross-sectional and longitudinal interviews with programme leads, programme delivery team, and programme participants, as well as observations of the meetings between the programme delivery team (i.e., community navigators/mentors) and programme participants. The quantitative data for the formative evaluation will be gathered by the sites themselves and consist of routine outcome performance monitoring using administrative data. Sampling for interviews and observations will vary, with the researchers aiming for a higher number of individuals included in the first round of cross-sectional interviews and retaining as many as possible for repeat interviews and observations.
This protocol outlines the process and impact evaluation methodology for the most extensive multisite evaluation of focused deterrence to date in the UK. Spanning five distinct sites with seven trials, the evaluation includes a cohort of 2,000 individuals, marking it as the only multisite trial of focused deterrence. Employing an integrated realist evaluation framework, the study uses qualitative and quantitative research methods. The anticipated findings will offer pivotal insights for formulating future violence prevention policies in the UK. They are also expected to contribute significantly to the corpus of literature on violence prevention and intervention evaluation.
Protocol registration: ISRCTN: 11650008 4th June 2023.
Although scholars have discussed in depth about the evaluation content and the construction of evaluation index system of emergency management and crisis management, a unified and standardized ...interpretation of system construction concepts and empirical research on the performance evaluation of urban emergency management is still lacking. In view of this, this paper is based on the theory of the crisis life cycle, with the four phases of urban emergency management and the content of the task as a clue, constructed a performance evaluation index system containing 12 primary indicators and 44 secondary indicators, and centered on the emergency management work situation of S city. The study reveals that emergency management underperforms in S city, with a score of 5.948, qualifying as the “defined level”. The “prevention and preparedness stage” receives poor evaluation, indicating a significant bias for crisis response instead of prevention. The report suggests the improvement of emergency material stockpile planning, the formation of grassroots emergency response teams, the emergency management publicity, and special emergency drill plans, etc., with a view to providing reference for city managers to comprehensively review and evaluate the emergency management system, and to promote the construction of a more systematic, complete and scientific urban emergency management system.
COVID-19 and Labour Law: Belgium Alexander De Becker
Italian labour law e-journal,
04/2020, Letnik:
13, Številka:
1S
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Belgium has closed its shops. Furthermore, it made a distinction between essential and non-essential services. Non-essential services have to introduce telework at home or to close in case that is ...not possible. Essential services have to respect the social distancing of 1,5 meter.
Most tree risk assessment methods task the assessor with the evaluation of a tree's likelihood of impact (i.e. likelihood a target is present during failure) when determining the probability that an ...adverse event will occur. While this is generally accomplished qualitatively based on visual cues; during the 15 to 20 minutes an assessor is at a location, site occupancy, a key component of likelihood of impact, is most accurately measured using traffic counters. The use of traffic counters reduces risk assessment bias and increases reproducibility, though commercially-available devices may be cost-prohibitive. This work addresses one potential barrier to traffic counter adoption through the creation of a low-cost vehicle and pedestrian counting system. The study compares the accuracy and consistency of our homemade traffic counting system to estimates derived from a commercially available system, as well as vehicle and pedestrian counts tallied with a hand clicker. Vehicle and pedestrian counts from the commercially available systems (p = 0.004 and p < 0.001, respectively) correlated well (r = 0.846 and r = 0.896, respectively) with the hand-tallied counts, but the homemade counters were not correlated with either. However, pedestrian counts from the homemade counter became inaccurate as afternoon temperatures went above 31.7°C.
With the unprecedented new capabilities introduced by modern broadband wireless networks, public safety (PS) agencies are increasingly depending on such networks for their mission-critical ...communications. One of the key enablers for this adoption is the device-to-device (D2D) communications, where mobile devices can connect directly between each other, without the need for a base station (BS) nor a switching core to handle and route the traffic. This feature is a vital communication backup in case of a network infrastructure failure or a natural disaster. In this paper, we analytically quantify the cellular network performance during massive infrastructure failure, where some terminals can play the role of low-power relay nodes forming multihop communication links to assist farther terminals outside the reach of the healthy network coverage. Namely, we analytically determine the D2D effect in alleviating the damage caused by the disaster. This paper is based on stochastic geometry analysis and presents a novel analytical methodology that is applicable to wide scenarios of network conditions and parameters. This methodology is verified through Monte Carlo simulations for practical network parameters based on the latest Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) recommendations.
This paper addresses the growing recognition of occupational stressors impacting the mental health of public safety personnel (PSP) and their families. While numerous programs support PSP well‐being, ...limited attention is given to family members, who navigate increased worry, social isolation, and the challenge of supporting a psychologically injured spouse. Drawing from the functional disconnection/functional reconnection (FD/FR) framework, this paper introduces FD/FR family—a proactive model tailored to PSP families. Rooted in Stoicism, this innovative adaptation extends the application of FD/FR concepts to benefit not only PSP members but also their families. FD/FR family advocates temporarily setting aside personal reactions and improving emotional processing to enhance communication, flexibility, and mitigate vicarious trauma and mental health deterioration. This paper offers PSP family‐specific examples and urges future research to identify essential FD/FR components accepted by both PSP and their families.
Screening for public safety positions (e.g., police officers, fire fighters, military service members) is a difficult and challenging task. Notably, the military has been widely criticized because of ...the general lack of an empirically based system or program for mental health screening. The purpose of the present study is to describe the use of statistical prediction rules for this task. Prediction rules were derived and validated using U.S. Air Force (USAF) recruits in basic military training (N = 50,322). Items from the Lackland Behavioral Questionnaire were used as predictors. General attrition (discharge for any reason before completing term of service) and disciplinary offenses (including criminal charges) were used as outcomes. For trainees in the top 2% or 1% of the general attrition prediction rule, 63% and 68% were discharged before they completed their first 4 years. The base rate was 25%. Similarly, for trainees in the top 2% or 1% of the disciplinary offenses prediction rule, 35% and 39% had a significant disciplinary offense over the following 4 years. The base rate was 15.5%. The results suggest that we may be able to use biographical data inventories and statistical prediction rules to identify a small percentage of trainees in public safety fields with significant mental health or behavioral histories who are at elevated risk for general attrition and disciplinary offenses.
Public Significance Statement
This study shows that it is possible to use a screening questionnaire to identify a small percent of trainees in basic military training who are at elevated risk for disciplinary offenses and early discharge from the military. These individuals can be seen for follow-up interviews, and appropriate recommendations and referrals can be made.
Accurate recognition of potential threats in baggage is critical for public safety. In X-ray scans, objects are often stacked randomly and exhibit a translucent state. This makes the appearance of ...the prohibited items to be overlapped by a large amount of background clutter, which gives rise to severe class-agnostic feature entanglement and weakens their discriminative properties. Existing frameworks deal with this challenge by directly applying a foreground attention map or a background deattention map to entangled features. However, this setting suffers from two limitations: 1) it is extremely difficult to precisely distinguish foreground or background in entangled latent space and 2) they overlook the intrinsic differences that overlapping and occlusion bring to feature learning. To trounce these limitations, we contribute a novel foreground-background-specific feature learning framework (dubbed ForkNet) for overlapped prohibited item detection. Specifically, ForkNet first employs two individual backbone models to extract foreground features and background features, by inserting task-specific heads at the end of them. After that, a feature disentanglement module is devised to proactively remove redundant background information hidden within foreground features by analyzing their similarity along channel and spatial axes. Finally, feed the refined foreground features into a regular prediction head for object detection. Extensive experiments on five challenging datasets (SIXray, OPIXray, PIXray, PIDray, and CLCXray) show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts (achieving 90.0% mAP, 90.9% mAP, 73.8% mAP, 66.8% mAP, and 62.0% mAP, respectively) while running at a high speed of 6.4 FPS.
Wide-ranging large carnivores pose myriad challenges for conservation, especially in highly fragmented landscapes. Over a 13-year period, we combined monitoring of radio collared pumas (Puma ...concolor) with complementary multi-generational genetic analyses to inform puma conservation in southern California, USA. Our goals were to generate survivorship estimates, determine causes of mortality, identify barriers to movement, and determine the genetic and demographic challenges to puma persistence among >20,000,000 people and extensive urban, suburban, and exurban development. Despite protection from hunting, annual survival for radio collared pumas was surprisingly low (55.8%), and humans caused the majority of puma deaths. The most common sources of mortality were vehicle collisions (28% of deaths), and mortalities resulting from depredation permits issued after pumas killed domestic animals (17% of deaths). Other human-caused mortalities included illegal shootings, public safety removals, and human-caused wildfire. An interstate highway (I-15) bisecting this study area, and associated development, have created a nearly impermeable barrier to puma movements, resulting in severe genetic restriction and demographic isolation of the small puma population (n ~ 17-27 adults) in the Santa Ana Mountains west of I-15. Highways that bisect habitat or divide remaining "conserved" habitat, and associated ongoing development, threaten to further subdivide this already fragmented puma population and increase threats to survival. This study highlights the importance of combining demographic and genetic analyses, and illustrates that in the absence of effective measures to reduce mortality and enhance safe movement across highways, translocation of pumas, such as was done with the endangered Florida panther (P. c. coryi), may ultimately be necessary to prevent further genetic decline and ensure persistence of the Santa Ana Mountains population.
The wide expansion of community supervision has resulted in large-scale reliance on probation officers to facilitate change among both youth and adults. This is especially true for supervising ...high-risk populations, such as gang-involved individuals. To understand how probation officers balance the dual goals of public safety and rehabilitation, in-depth interviews with 12 youth and adult officers in Oregon were conducted. Results revealed that both groups had a shared understanding of gang pathways and desistance barriers. However, they held differing views on the factors that drive success and compliance. Youth officers utilize therapeutic philosophies and emphasize restoration through community resources to help youth desist from gang activity. Adult officers endorse law enforcement philosophies, emphasize accountability and personal choices, and center punitive strategies when using interagency collaboration. This study contributes to the literature on role perceptions and decision-making, and suggests that continuity of care in supervision philosophies can yield more successful outcomes for high-risk youth and adults.
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