Publications
HFG’s ‘At the Crossroads’ series concludes with the publication of “Behind the Rise in Gun Violence in New York and Other American Cities,” a compilation of the twelve interviews conducted by Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Fellow of Practice Greg Berman with an essay illuminating common themes and practical approaches to ending such violence.
Police responses to recent street protest events in Ferguson, Charlottesville, and Hong Kong are merely the best known examples of incidents in which police respond to peaceful gatherings as if they were riots or fail to prevent a violent development at a stage where it could have been avoided. Policing Protests–Lessons from the Occupy Movement, Ferguson & Beyond: A Guide for Police is a clear and authoritative summary of research on policing practices that either facilitate peaceful protests and other public order events or violate basic rights, engender resentment and in some cases injury among peaceful protesters, and often result in lawsuits costing cities substantial settlements. Written by respected policing scholars Edward Maguire and Megan Oakley, it has been distributed to nearly 1,000 police agencies in the U.S. and abroad. HFG is pleased to make it available for download.
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has taken a terrible toll in lives, illness, and economic devastation. There is another domain in which this disease is having diverse effects—violence—which makes it of special interest to The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, which is dedicated to the production of knowledge in the service of reducing violence. The implications of the pandemic for current and future violence trends are the topic of Violence and the Pandemic: Urgent Questions for Research by Manuel Eisner (University of Cambridge and University of Zurich) and Amy Nivette (Utrecht University). Their thoughtful consideration of the mechanisms that drive spikes in some forms of violence and drops in others suggests timely and compelling opportunities for crucial social-science research that can complement the urgent efforts in the biomedical community to reduce the damage this disease is inflicting on our global community.
The siege of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was only the most recent violent incident demonstrating the enduring threat of the white power movement, a transnational cause that took form in the 1980s but has older historical roots. In this HFG Research and Policy in Brief, The White Power Movement at War on Democracy, University of Chicago historian Kathleen Belew relates the origins of the white power movement and connects its most violent manifestations–from the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 to the 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol—as part of a global, distributed effort to assert and maintain white dominance. In doing so, she exhorts scholars, policymakers, and law enforcement officials to understand and address disparate acts of violence as part of a larger movement.
