More on the evaluation of open carry policies

This builds off the post from yesterday. Both from the Texas Tribune.

- Six Months In, Few Open Carry Complaints.

So far, officials say, the newly allowed open carry of handguns hasn't spawned any major incidents.

“I don’t know of any instances where there has been violence, arrests, disturbances that have taken place,” said Kevin Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association. “I think it’s been amazingly quiet up to this point.”

In February 2015, as the Legislature considered making Texas the 45th state to allow the open carry of handguns, 75 percent of surveyed state police chiefs said they opposed the new law.

James McLaughlin, the executive director of Texas Police Chiefs Association, said that at the time his organization’s members worried that open carry might turn carriers into easier targets.

“If the bad guy goes into a place, the first person they’re going to shoot is a uniformed officer,” he said. “The second person they’re going to shoot is the one they see has a gun.”

But McLaughlin, too, said he had heard of no incidents in which the new law played a major factor.

The Dallas shootings, however, rekindled arguments about revisiting the open carry laws, which state Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, called "Republicans thumbing their nose at law enforcement."

Rep. Larry Phillips, R-Sherman, who helped push open carry through the Legislature, said he and his colleagues did weigh the opinion of law enforcement. Despite the opposition from chiefs, rank-and-file members Phillips spoke to were generally receptive to the bill, he said.

- Black Gun Owners in Texas Decry Racial Bias.

The tensions surrounding black gun ownership have a long historical record in the United States, according to research from the National African American Gun Association. Dating back to the 17th century, French and British colonies have openly prohibited gun ownership among black people and Native Americans. And during slavery and the post-Civil War period, states in the South imposed strict laws against black gun ownership that lasted through the Civil Rights Movement. When California’s legislature banned open carry in the 1960s, it was in response to the Black Panthers openly carrying guns.

Black gun owners also are frustrated with what they see as indifference from their allies. The National Rifle Association, the nation's most powerful gun rights organization, took two days to comment on Castile's death, only posting a statement on Twitter calling the shooting "troubling" and saying it "must be thoroughly investigated" after a swell of online outcry.

“The NRA is an organization that has a bunch of old white guys, and honestly, I don’t think they have the tools and minorities in the organization to address these types of issues,” said Cargill, who said he's a national member of the association. “They don’t have enough diversity in their staff and leadership. Probably, they were afraid to make the wrong statement.”

The NRA did not respond to The Texas Tribune’s requests for comment. A spokesman for the Texas State Rifle Association said in a statement that while the group does not speak for the NRA, "every law-abiding citizen, no matter their race, creed, or sexual preference, has a right to protect themselves."

Racial profiling and gun ownership had emerged as hot-button issues during last year's legislative session when state lawmakers were debating the open-carry law that went into effect in Texas this January.

Amid concerns that minority gun owners would be racially profiled by officers, Sen. Don Huffines, R-Dallas, introduced an amendment that would prohibit officers from stopping someone solely because they are visibly carrying a handgun. The measure, which eventually passed, attracted support from Democrats who said it would help prevent racial profiling. Conservatives said it also was necessary to protect the Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure of legal gun owners.

From the Dallas Morning News: Open carry creates confusion during Dallas police ambush, but supporters say law works

For our look at policy evaluation in the section on public policy: the consequences of open carry in crime scenes.

- Click here for the article.

When rifle shots rang out in downtown Dallas during Thursday night's protest, some of the demonstrators were also carrying rifles.

In the ensuing chaos, one of them was labeled a "person of interest" after police released a photo of him carrying an AR-15 rifle. Others were stopped and questioned by police.

It was not immediately clear Saturday whether any of those who were legally armed delayed or hampered the police response to the shooter, Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, of Mesquite. Dallas police did not respond to questions.

But Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said: "It's logical to say that in a shooting situation, open carry can be detrimental to the safety of individuals."

Johnson, a former Army soldier, was killed early Friday when police used a robot to detonate a bomb near him. That was after he killed five police officers in a rampage through downtown.

It is legal in Texas to openly carry rifles and has been for decades. People with rifles have been spotted at recent public protests across the state.

Rawlings said Dallas police Chief David Brown told him that people running through the shooting scene with rifles and body armor required officers to track them down and bring them to the police department. Whether that was time that could have been spent trying to find and stop the shooter is something police will have to comment on, Rawlings said.

. . . But C.J. Grisham, president of Open Carry Texas, said police should be able to separate the good guys from the bad guys in such a scenario because "the bad guys are the ones shooting."

"If you can't identify a threat, you shouldn't be wearing a uniform," he said.
Grisham said some in law enforcement look at law-abiding gun owners as a threat.
"It's not that difficult to tell the difference between a bad actor and a good actor," he said. "The good guys are going to obey commands, the bad guys are not."

Law enforcement organizations such as the Dallas Police Association have generally opposed the state's new open carry law regarding handguns, which went into effect this year.

 

From the Atlantic: What Caused the Great Crime Decline in the U.S.?

For out look at the public policy process - in this case policy evaluation. Did the "tough on crime" approach have anything to do with it?

- Click here for the article.

In the early 1990s, U.S. crime rates had been on a steep upward climb since the Lyndon B. Johnson presidency. The crack-cocaine epidemic in the mid-1980s added fuel to the fire, and handgun-related homicides more than doubled between 1985 and 1990. That year, murders peaked in New York City with 2,245 killings. Politicians embraced tough-on-crime platforms and enacted harshly punitive policies. Experts warned the worst could be yet to come.

Then crime rates went down. And then they kept going down.

By decade’s end, the homicide rate plunged 42 percent nationwide. Violent crime decreased by one-third. What turned into a precipitous decline started later in some areas and took longer in others. But it happened everywhere: in each region of the country, in cities large and small, in rural and urban areas alike. In the Northeast, which reaped the largest benefits, the homicide rate was halved. Murders plummeted by 75 percent in New York City alone as the city entered the new millennium.

The trend kept ticking downward from there, more slowly and with some fluctuations, to the present day. By virtually any metric, Americans now live in one of the least violent times in the nation’s history.

But the forces that drove the Great American Crime Decline remain a mystery. Theories abound among sociologists, economists, and political scientists about the causes, with some hypotheses stronger than others. But there’s no real consensus among scholars about what caused one of the largest social shifts in modern American history.
So, what happened?

A variety of possibilities are explored - none explains everything.

From Deborah Rhode: Obesity and Public Policy: A Roadmap for Reform

The author looks at existing policy on obesity, evaluates it, and finds it deficient. She analyzes the current state of public policy and offers proposals.

- Click here for the article.

In principle, the United States is deeply committed to finding solutions to the rise of obesity and its health consequences. In practice, however, public policy has fallen short. The Surgeon General and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have pronounced obesity to be a national “epidemic,” and First Lady Michelle Obama has described it as a “public health crisis.” Almost four-fifths of Americans consider adult obesity to be a major public health problem. Yet many policy responses have proven controversial, and those most often recommended have frequently faced an uphill battle at the federal, state, and local level. At the same time that obesity rates have been rising sharply, many jurisdictions have resisted, or rolled back, strategies such as soda taxes or regulation of advertising directed at children.

This Article analyzes leading policy initiatives. It proceeds in three parts. Part I explores the causes and consequences of the obesity problem. Discussion focuses on the complex relationship between environmental, cultural, behavioral, and biological factors that influence weight, as well as the individual and social costs of obesity-related health conditions. Part II looks at the justifications for government intervention and the objections of paternalism that it evokes. Part III explores those interventions that have achieved the greatest prominence, including disclosure requirements, taxes, bans on certain sugar-sweetened beverages, food stamp modifications, zoning regulations, children’s marketing, physical activity initiatives, food policies, litigation, and education.

- Here's a Q&A with the author.

From The Dish: Convicted Of Being A Minor

More for 2306 and our recent walk through the criminal justice system. The link takes to you a story about the unique "status offenses" that apply to juveniles. A recent report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation argues that the consequences of punishing these offenses may not be worth the benefits. 

- Click here for the article.
- Click here for the report.

The Dish highlights this part of the report:

Incarcerating or otherwise removing these youth from their homes increases the likelihood that they will be converted from today’s status offenders to tomorrow’s serious offenders, instead of being shepherded toward productive lives as young adults.

Among other things, research shows that status offenders, as a result of being exposed to seriously delinquent youth in close quarters, are in jeopardy of developing the more deviant attitudes and behaviors of higher-risk youth, such as anti-social perspectives and gang affiliation. While many of the causes underlying a status offenders’ behavior and the effects of incarceration has on their futures are also common to more serious offenders, the stakes are obviously higher for status offenders who have not committed property or person offenses and may be less likely to have previously been associated with seriously delinquent peers. In addition, the confinement of status offenders is expected to increase barriers to reentry into community, home, and school settings, and increase the likelihood that they will be rearrested, re-adjudicated, and re-incarcerated.

In short, there are very compelling reasons to avoid confinement of status offenders. The punishment fails to fit the “crime” since status offenses are simply behaviors that would be legal if committed by adult; alternative approaches are more effective and far less costly; and, as described in the previous paragraph, the futures of these youth would not be jeopardized by the negative impacts of exposure to serious offenders during placement.

Cops in schools = kids in jail

File this under policy evaluation.

The NYT reports on a point made previously in class, that putting police officers in schools makes it more likely that disciplinary issues will turn into criminal issues. This is likely because that is what police officers do - they act on what they perceive to be criminal activity. Placing police officers in school in order to protect the school from mass shootings has an unintended effect.

As school districts across the country consider placing more police officers in schools, youth advocates and judges are raising alarm about what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe is better handled in the principal’s office.

Since the early 1990s, thousands of districts, often with federal subsidies, have paid local police agencies to provide armed “school resource officers” for high schools, middle schools and sometimes even elementary schools. Hundreds of additional districts, including those in Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, have created police forces of their own, employing thousands of sworn officers.

Last week, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, a task force of the National Rifle Association recommended placing police officers or other armed guards in every school. The White House has proposed an increase in police officers based in schools.

The effectiveness of using police officers in schools to deter crime or the remote threat of armed intruders is unclear. The new N.R.A. report cites the example of a Mississippi assistant principal who in 1997 got a gun from his truck and disarmed a student who had killed two classmates, and another in California in which a school resource officer in 2001 wounded and arrested a student who had opened fire with a shotgun.

Yet the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior — including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers — that sends children into the criminal courts.

Policy Evalution in a letter

A public school teacher in New York quits. Policy changes have destroyed the profession of teaching in his opinion. Here's a bt from his resignation letter:

With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to live John Dewey's famous quotation (now likely clich with me, I've used it so very often) that "Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself." This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching "heavy," working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and "data driven" education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.


A long train of failures has brought us to this unfortunate pass. In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education. The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian.

Does online education work?

As you all know, this is a huge trend in education - and something you are all involved in to some degree (that's why I run this blog). Its been promoted as an improvement over in-class instruction because it allows for flexibility for students who have other obligations. It also allows for students to sign up for classes in a range of institutions which not only increases their options, but allows them to be taught be top level professors.

But after a few years of online education, research (policy evaluation) throws cold water on its effects:

First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed.

The research comes form the Community College Research Center at Columbia University.

Policy Evaluation: Is the TAKS Test Making us Stupid?

That seems to be the implicit question asked in the following story from the Dallas Morning News.

Despite high TAKS test scores, students do poorly when asked to read a story and write three short response questions. Fewer then half of Dallas area students can do this adequately even though large percentages pass the TAKS test.

The reason may be that the TAKS is a multiple choice test test that does not measure comprehensive knowledge nor the ability to translate that knowledge logically and sensibly.

Some point blame at the current technological environment with its emphasis on short brief communication and the short attention spans it breeds. But given that school commonly teach to the test, are we under severe financial pressure to demonstrate performance, we might just as well look at the instruction that this environment creates. Don't we now reward short term attention spans and thereby encourage it?

Some educators and testing experts say the low scores reveal a troubling lack of critical thinking and communication skills.

"Can your kids identify and state a main idea? If not, you need to teach them strategies to think through the text," said Patricia Mathes, director of Southern Methodist University's Institute for Reading Research in Dallas. "The real issue is not waiting until high school to teach these skills. If we teach our kids well, they will do well on these tests."

But some classroom teachers are frustrated, saying they teach the material the way they've been trained. Scoring on that section is too tough, they say, and doesn't truly measure what students know.

"The methods we've been told to use fail when it comes to the short-answer test," Rockwall High School English teacher Melissa Nelson said. "We feel like we're banging our heads against the wall."

The teachers are doing what they should be doing given the testing regime in place. If you want to better result, change the tests. If the nature of testing matters, and I thin it does, the shift to longer answers is welcomed, but it comes --literally--with a price. These tests take more time to grade, and time means money. Multiple choice tests can be quickly graded with machines, ask me I know. As with so many things involving education, are we as a society willing to put the time and money into doing what must be done to adequately teach our youth?

Steriods in Texas High Schools

One of the major bills passed in the last Texas legislative session concerned high school steroid use--possibly driven by the issue's notoriety at that time. Now that only two students have tested positive, doubts over the policy's merit are being raised.

Only two athletes tested positive for steroid use among some 10,000 Texas high school students tested this spring, raising doubts about whether state lawmakers will renew the $3 million-a-year project at current levels.

The testing company's preliminary results are based on an estimated 10,407 students who were tested since February, when state officials launched the random steroid-testing program mandated by state lawmakers. National Center for Drug Free Sport is expected to release a formal report later this summer.

Both supporters and critics of the testing program — the largest among high schools in the country — said the results validate their positions.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said Monday he was pleased with the cursory results.

"I pushed this important legislation through the Legislature because I knew it would deter our young people from wrecking their bodies and putting their lives at risk by using illegal steroids," Dewhurst said. "And these test results clearly show the deterrent is working because young people know they can't use illegal steroids without getting caught."

But Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, one of seven state lawmakers to vote against the steroid-testing program, wants it abolished. There are 181 members in the Texas Legislature.

"This is one of those issues that sounds good but has no real impact except wasting taxpayer dollars," Patrick said. "I don't want to diminish the seriousness of steroids, but you can't take a sledgehammer to kill a gnat. Spending $1.5 million per kid is ludicrous."