Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.
Dr. David Eisenman: I’ve been doing research for 25 years on public health and the health impacts of disasters. That includes mass violence.
A public health approach has been successful in reducing other forms of violence, like child sexual abuse and domestic violence. We thought we could apply that to this form of violence that we’re seeing so much in our country, which is mass violence, targeted violence, things like school shootings.
We had a study funded by the Department of Homeland Security. The premise was that in targeted violence, mass violence, about half the time the perpetrator “leaks” their plans and intentions. Family members or close friends know about it in advance, but often they don’t know how to stop it. Or when they do try to stop it, they turn to a system that really can’t respond adequately.
International prevention programs provide avenues for these “intimate bystanders” to get help for this person and prevent an attack. But these programs are not widely available in the U.S.
So we were going to learn from intimate bystander reporting programs in other countries. What was successful about them? What were the challenges and the obstacles? What needed to be in place for them to work? We would bring back some common lessons and work with professionals that were setting up these intimate bystander reporting programs across the United States.
We were also bringing those lessons back for the Department of Homeland Security itself, which was invested in this work. Targeted violence, whether it’s school shootings or lone wolf terrorist attacks, shares common factors, with similar opportunities for prevention. And so we, professionals in this field, felt that a lot of terrorism could be understood as a form of the targeted violence that would otherwise be taken out on a school or a Walmart — but which, in this particular event, might be taken out on a group of people identified by their religion.
One morning last March I saw an email with a stop work order from the Department of Homeland Security. We had to stop the project right then and there. We had to lay off staff immediately. The papers we were writing, we had to stop. And the plans for further research just stopped. And that was it, end of project. We never got our results out to the world.
This was a very exciting field that we thought was going to make a difference in the United States in reducing violence, in a time where we’re seeing increases in targeted violence. And we’ve lost that.
Dr. David Eisenman directs the Center for Public Health and Disasters at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic.
The post He Looked for Ways to Stop Mass Violence appeared first on New York Times.
