Preventing violent crime

Norms and Attitudes about Being an Active Bystander: Support for Telling Adults about Seeing Knives or Guns at School among Greater London Youth

A detailed understanding of the factors associated with support among youth for reporting a knife or gun at school to an adult is essential to inform violence prevention initiatives. However, no studies have empirically assessed attitudes about support for reporting among secondary school students in Greater London nor perceived norms about such support among peers. Thus, this study explores whether students misperceive peer norms about support for telling adults about seeing weapons at school. Anonymous surveys were completed by 7401 youth (52% female; 43% White; mean age 11.8 years) in school years 4-11 in 45 school cohorts in a greater London borough between 2007 and 2012. Students reported both personal support about reporting weapons to several categories of adults and whether they perceived most other students at their school to support reporting weapons to adults in each category. Most students (64-78% on average) in most cohorts personally thought that students should report seeing a weapon at school to head teachers, police/security guard, teachers/counselors, and parent/other adult relatives. However, 34-44% of students erroneously thought that the majority of their peers did not support reporting to these adults. Perceived norms predicted personal support for reporting, adjusting for the prevalence of actual support at one's school and other factors. Pervasive norm misperceptions about reporting may contribute to a less safe environment.

Violent crime and socioeconomic deprivation in shaping asthma-related pollution susceptibility: a case-crossover design

Background

The objective of this study was to quantify and compare the relative influence of community violent crime and socioeconomic deprivation in modifying associations between ozone and emergency department (ED) visits for asthma among children.

Methods

We used a spatiotemporal case-crossover analysis for all New York City EDs for the months May–September from 2005 to 2011 from a statewide administrative ED dataset. The data included 11 719 asthmatic children aged 5–18 years, and the main outcome measure was percentage of excess risk of asthma ED visit based on Cox regression analysis.

Results

Stronger ozone–asthma associations were observed for both elevated crime and deprivation (eg, on lag day 2, we found 20.0% (95% CI 10.2% to 30.6 %) and 21.0% (10.5% to 32.5%) increased risk per 10 ppb ozone, for communities in the highest vs lowest quartiles of violent crime and deprivation, respectively). However, in varied models accounting for both modifiers, only violence retained significance.

Conclusions

The results suggest stronger spatiotemporal ozone–asthma associations in communities of higher violent crime or deprivation. Notably, violence was the more consistent and significant modifier, potentially mediating a substantial portion of socioeconomic position–related susceptibility.