A new study concludes that partisan politics, religious fundamentalism, and economic threat influenced local decisions about the death penalty. The study also found that the size of the African American population, which prior state-level studies have found to be associated with use of the death penalty, was not directly associated with the recent decline in the use of this punishment.
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This release was removed on 8 March 2021. For more information, please contact Elizabeth Grisham at egrisham@gmu.edu.
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WASHINGTON (Mar. 2, 2021) A report released today by the George Washington University Program on Extremism reveals new information about the 257 people charged in federal court for playing a role in the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol. The report, This is Our House! A Preliminary Assessment of the Capitol Hill Siege Participants, also provides several recommendations aimed at combating domestic extremism.
The GW Program on Extremism tracked and categorized the people charged so far in the attack and the resulting report provides a preliminary assessment of the siege participants. The events of Jan. 6 may mark a watershed moment for domestic violent extremism in America, Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the GW Program on Extremism said. Individuals came from all corners of our country, with a healthy mix of those with some operational planning and others taking advantage of the moment. This report identifies some clear steps we can take now to identify
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An analysis of law enforcement seizures of illegal drugs in five key regions of the United States revealed a rise in methamphetamine and marijuana (cannabis) confiscations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seizures of the two drugs were higher at their peak in August 2020 than at any time in the year prior to the pandemic. While investigators found that trends in heroin, cocaine and fentanyl seizures were not affected by the pandemic, provisional overdose death data show that the increased drug mortality seen in 2019 rose further through the first half of 2020.
The findings suggest that the pandemic and its related restrictions may have impacted the availability and demand of some, but not all, illegal drugs, and that availability may have increased in summer and fall of 2020 in the five regions included in this study.
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Home Office data shows the number of police officers voluntarily resigning from the force in England and Wales has more than doubled in the last eight years.
Scant attention has been paid to the reason for this mass exodus. Until now. Researchers from the University of Portsmouth studied government statistics, and discovered the numbers of officers voluntarily resigning from the police service is rising - from 1,158 in the year ending March 2012 to 2,363 in the year ending March 2020. The figure amounts to 1.83 per cent of the total police officer population in England and Wales up from 0.86 per cent eight years ago.