Justin Nix

What I Wish I'd Known Before Grad School | Justin Nix Things I wish I knew 15 years ago

Thinking about grad school next fall? Here are five things I wish I’d known back then.

jnix.netlify.app/post/post35-...

Does De-Escalation Training Actually Reduce Police Use of Force? New Research Reveals a Critical Gap | Justin Nix Our new study found that de-escalation training improved how officers communicate with citizens, but didn't reduce use of force incidents. Here's what that means for police reform.

Short summary of a forthcoming article in Journal of Criminal Justice →

Does De-Escalation Training Actually Reduce Police Use of Force? New Research Reveals a Critical Gap

jnix.netlify.app/post/post33-...

Police Shooting Research Tracker | Justin Nix Recent academic publications on police shootings and use of deadly force

🚨 Work in progress: an automated page on my website that fetches recent academic research on police shootings every Monday. Still fine-tuning but I’m excited to share it!

h/t Claude AI for helping me code!

jnix.netlify.app/police-shoot...

New teaching hack unlocked? | Justin Nix Today was the last day of the semester for my undergrad Police & Society course. In the past, I’ve always done a review for the final, in the form of Jeopardy:1 My classes range in size from 20 to 35 ...

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Looking Back on My Peer Reviews III | Justin Nix I recently surpassed 200 manuscripts reviewed, and you know what that means: time to look back on how many manuscripts I’ve been asked to review, the recommendations I’ve made, and how long it general...

Looking back on my peer reviews, part III

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Police shootings per year, by outcome, included in this dataset. Keep in mind that upward trend is most likely a reflection of better record keeping.

Incredible new dataset on police shootings in the US, courtesy of Tom Clark, Adam Glynn, and Michael Leo Owens for their new book “Deadly Force: Police Shootings in Urban America.” It covers all cities with 100K+ residents and includes both fatal & nonfatal outcomes.
policeshootingsdata.com/data/

The Minnesota Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI): Lessons learned from a decade of SAKI evaluations | Justin Nix Here we describe the processes and quantify the outcomes of the SAKI project in Anoka County, MN – a mid-sized suburban/rural jurisdiction – and make comparisons to the three seminal SAKI evaluation p...

Just accepted for publication!

The Minnesota Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI): Lessons learned from a decade of SAKI evaluations

jnix.netlify.app/publication/...

Chesapeake police lowers age requirement to address staffing shortages The Chesapeake Police Department says the ideal candidate is someone who is 19 and a half or close to turning 21 by the time they complete the police academy.

www.wtkr.com/news/in-the-... 🫠

Where does that upper bound of 12000+ come from? Never seen an estimate that high with any publicly available data. Unless you’re counting people police nonfatally shot?

Unarmed killings are the rarest of these statistically rare outcomes, so it’s harder to pull a signal from the year-to-year noisiness. Plus, more undetermined cases in later years which mucks up the comparisons.

Julie, in your work with GVA, what was your sense of reporting disparities in rural v. urban areas, i.e., how likely is it that the upward trend is mostly rural areas being more likely to report on police killings now vs. 10 years ago?

Police Killings Still Trending Upward post-Floyd | Justin Nix This weekend marks 5 years since George Floyd was killed by Officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department. Expect to see some news stories in the coming weeks wrestling with the question ...

George Floyd was killed 5 years ago. Expect news stories in the coming days that wrestle with why police killings continue unabated, despite all the reforms that have been introduced over the last 5-10yrs.

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Exciting news → The School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at UNO is seeking applications for the Directorship of the Juvenile Justice Institute.

More about JJI here: www.unomaha.edu/college-of-p...

Apply at this link: unomaha.peopleadmin.com/postings/23816

Sam Walker cleared out his office/library a couple years ago, I bet there were some gems in there 😥

Responding to Kang-Brown (again) | Justin Nix Background In his latest commentary on our research note, Jacob Kang-Brown (JKB) raises six concerns (some old, some new). For what it’s worth he also makes clear his point of view regarding the “ques...

FWIW I responded to Jacob’s new concerns here:

jnix.netlify.app/post/post29-...

Reflecting on My Promotion! | Justin Nix A few weeks ago I got my letter from the Senior Vice Chancellor approving my promotion to Professor (beginning next term). It’s a pretty surreal feeling. I’ve worked hard, but I’ve also benefited from...

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Sources of organizational variability in fatal police shootings in the USA - Nature Human Behaviour Neil et al. examine factors associated with variation in fatal police shooting rates across 2,727 US agencies and find that this variation is most strongly associated with differences in social contex...

Full text: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Interesting new paper in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social. The authors conclude that variation in fatal police shooting rates across agencies is "far from random" and "primarily associated with...differences in crime rates, 911 call rates, officers per capita and the prevalence of guns."

99 Problems but a Clean IV Ain’t One: Measuring and Studying Officer-Involved Shootings | Justin Nix Historically, a lack of comprehensive data on police shootings has hindered a nuanced understanding of this critical issue. However, in the past decade, the research landscape rapidly evolved with the...

Check out our latest working piece on police shootings - jnix.netlify.app/publication/...

High-frequency location data show that race affects citations and fines for speeding Prior research on racial profiling has found that in encounters with law enforcement, minorities are punished more severely than white civilians. Less is known about the causes of these encounters and...

High-frequency location data show that race affects citations and fines for speeding | Science www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Corrigendum to “When police pull back: Neighborhood‐level effects of de‐policing on violent and property crime, a research note” Click on the article title to read more.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

DM-FS: A Comprehensive Database on Death-Modulated Fatal Shootings - Scientific Data Scientific Data - DM-FS: A Comprehensive Database on Death-Modulated Fatal Shootings

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Moving targets: an examination of departmental deadly force policies and police shootings at vehicles Abstract. The current study applies variation in departmental deadly force policies by examining constraining and obligating language for a sub-set of poli

🚨New article alert: "Moving targets: an examination of departmental deadly force policies and police shootings at vehicles" with @julie-a-ward.bsky.social . Open-access.
academic.oup.com/policing/art...

Oops: Trump-Musk Cuts Just Wrecked an NIH Org Championed by GOPers Republicans once lavished praise on an NIH center that deals with Alzheimer’s. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are hobbling it. What will they say now?

Scoop --> Trump-Musk cuts just resulted in the firing of numerous top researchers at NIH's center for combating Alzheimer's, sources tell me. They predict big setbacks to fighting dementias.

This cause was once championed by *Republicans.*

Details here:
newrepublic.com/article/1917...

"Funding science is actually a badass thing to do"

www.experimental-history.com/p/funding-sc...

Here are those yearly totals broken down by the "threat_type" and "armed_with" fields in WAPO's data.

According to @washingtonpost.com, 1173 people were fatally shot by on-duty police officers in 2024 - the highest annual total since they began tracking in 2015.

The Minnesota Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI): Lessons learned from a decade of SAKI evaluations | Justin Nix Here we describe the processes and quantify the outcomes of the SAKI project in Anoka County, MN – a mid-sized suburban/rural jurisdiction – and make comparisons to the three seminal SAKI evaluation p...

New preprint!

jnix.netlify.app/publication/...

Understanding what violent street crime, globalization, and ice cream have in common Research Summary In recent years, nutrition researchers have found that ice cream may have as many health benefits as low-fat milk or yoghurt for those with diabetes or at risk of diabetes. Nonethel...

Gary LaFree’s Stockholm Address is a great read: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...