Details on Colorado’s public health approach to gun violence. Vigorously pursuing non fatal shootings as a way to help stop future violence. And, since it's Thanksgiving week, we'll end with tetration
Firm details on Colorado’s public health approach to gun violence.
The Youtube video linked first below is from a panel discussion and question/answer put on by the Colorado Health Institute featuring (among others) the director of CDPHE's Office of Gun Violence Prevention (OGVP) and the director of the group that the OGVP seems to have been working with lately, the Trailhead Institute.**
If you want to get a sense of what the director of the OGVP sees as the direction he'd like the office to go in and what his philosophy is, it's worth a watch. You can say the same for the Trailhead Institute.
What I would like to focus on in this post is to finally (since I now have more of a sense having seen what the panelists discuss) flesh out what exactly a public health approach to gun violence is, especially in the sense that those doing this work here in Colorado mean by the term.
If you watch the video with an eye for what the people relevant to Colorado policy mean by the term "public health approach to gun violence", you should start at about the 6:50 mark.
I took some notes while I watched and will abstract it for you. There are 4 steps:
1. What does the data say about the problem: what do we know, what do we not know. The symposium that OGVP and the Trailhead Institute held started here in a big group by asking these questions about gun violence. At this point they broke into 4 groups to divide the problem of gun violence up. The groups approached the following: suicide, community violence, mass & targeted violence, and domestic violence.
2. These groups then looked at what they termed the "risk factors and protective factors"; i.e. things that increase or decrease one's "exposure" to firearm violence (to use public health's catchy term for it--more below on that).
3. At that point the groups then considered the strategies to prevent injury and death from firearms. This would include prevention of violence up through the act of violence itself to stop, say, a gang retaliating after one of their members got shot. They mentioned in the video too, the importance here of choosing "evidence based" strategies.
4. Scaling and evaluating the proven strategies across communities and populations is the last step. In other words, how can they take what they think will work and start making programs and policies to implement the strategies identified on a larger scale (with ongoing evaluation of said programs being part of this step).
These steps closely follow the regular "public health approach to violence prevention" you will find on the CDC's page linked second below. That webpage gives you a deeper reference on the framework because the steps outlined by OGVP and Trailhead in the video are essentially the same.
As a framework, it has some sense to it. There is an internal, logical consistency here. There are also some serious problems I would like to outline.
Let me make an analogy. Pretend that I built a house. Spared no expense. Nicely put together, great use of space, and all of the internals that make a house work well and last.
Except, I'm going to put this wonderfully built house on a shaky foundation. Maybe one of my footings is deep enough, but it's not plumb. The other footing is above the frost line (and apt to move). One of my footings is a 6" rock I found on the building site.
I think you know where this is headed. You see, the issue with systems and philosophies is that they are quite dependent on the assumptions that you make and the underlying ideas you build on (things you assume straight off that are true, your a priori assumptions and axioms). Regardless of their sophistication and logical consistency, if the underpinnings are shaky, the rest is questionable.
To wit, how sure are we that the strategies we might use to prevent gun violence are an actual solution? In other words, what is the evidence we're basing an approach on? Similarly, how certain are we in the factors that protect or "expose" someone to gun violence--are they broadly applicable across populations and geography?
In a similar vein, and secondly, I want you to notice one great big assumption undergirding this entire apparatus: violence, gun violence being a type of said group, is not a disease, nor is it a pollutant. I have heard more than once public health people working in this sub-field use nomenclature such as "exposure to gun violence" as if it were the same as sitting in a room next to an open radioactive source.
I take this to be quite understandable attempt to lasso a complex problem and force it into a more manageable state. The problem is that this metaphor is too big a leap by half.
Violence and guns are not (as I have covered before) contaminants nor diseases for a variety of reasons. If we take an approach that attempts to panel-beat them into that shape, I think we are ultimately going to struggle to make progress, if we don't outright fail.
None of this would be a problem normally. Frankly, if you watch more than a few minutes of the panel discussion you'll see a group of academics making noise. Learned people stringing together words. Academics excel at this; it's what they do (and this comes from someone who is somewhat an academic for his living).
If things stopped there, it wouldn't be too concerning. It would be social science frippery.
If you've followed politics long enough, however, you'll know how this story ends. It ends with the media and politicians adopting the words and recommendations of these people WITHOUT ALSO ADOPTING THE CAVEATS AND BOUNDARIES THAT ARE ON THEIR CONCLUSIONS.
I hope that with enough knowledge of the words that underlie the process that I (and you too if this is a passion) can be able to speak the language and become an effective advocate against that very sort of thing.
I will continue to write and follow the "public health approach to gun violence" and I hope you stay with me on it.
**Both groups having appeared in a previous post (see here).
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/about/publichealthapproach.html
Vigorously pursuing non fatal shootings as a way to help stop future violence.
And while we're on the topic of violence/crime prevention, I wanted to share an approach that I think has some definite merit: focusing resources on chasing down people that shoot others even if that shooting doesn't result in death.
Decreasing crime rates need not always look like more cops, less cops, more money, less money, social workers accompanying cops, etc.
Novel approaches to reducing crime exist, we just need to allow ourselves to be open to them. I was intrigued by the idea in the article linked below and I think it's got some real merit to it.
The article details how Denver Police Department is working hard to run down non-fatal shootings as a way to chip away at murders and other violence. Quoting the article:
"In 2020, responding to an uptick in gun violence, the city’s police department adopted the uncontroversial but unusual approach of seriously trying to solve every nonfatal shooting. Officials created a new unit, the Firearm Assault Shoot Team, or FAST, devoted solely to the task. Over the last three years, FAST has cleared hundreds of shootings, arresting suspects or issuing warrants for their capture at nearly triple the department’s previous rate for these violent crimes. The effort has shown that when detectives have the time, resources and commitment, they can resolve most shootings."
This makes sense to me: I think you could rightly figure that someone that shoots at another human would likely do it again and doesn't particularly care who is hurt or killed in the process. In other words, someone that shoots at someone else needs to not be on the streets.
And all it takes from our police is a shift in focus. A reassignment and a willingness to give detectives the time and resources to prioritize nonfatal shootings.
To further bolster this claim, I'm going to include another quote from the article with the embedded links left intact so you can follow up on the study if you'd like (I've mentioned it in other posts, but it doesn't hurt to revisit the topic):
"Inconsistent policing of gun violence also undermines any role the justice system plays as a deterrent, since evidence shows the certainty of punishment is more important than its severity for discouraging reoffending."
That is, when we ignore violence, we're likely to have more of it.
I'll be eager to see if and how much promise DPD's new strategy hold. Teasing out the effect of any one policy is a dicey proposition no matter what, but my intuition tells me that vigorously pursuing nonfatal shootings will have an effect across the board on crime. Again, people that commit one crime are likely to make it a habit.
Now, if we could just convince people to cooperate with police efforts, DA's to file charges, and judges to be harder on bail, we'd be set.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/10/30/nonfatal-shootings-police-clearance-rates-denver?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Related:
A well known DNA expert at Colorado Bureau of Investigation faces an investigation herself for her work.
Sketchy details at this point, but if it follows the tracks laid by other, similar cases in other states, this is not good. And not good for multiple reasons.
https://denvergazette.com/news/murder-dna-colorado-bureau-investigation/article_8b3361d4-7cfd-11ee-b4d2-6b6d3621e642.html
How do you entertain yourself if you’re a mathematician?
Since this is a holiday week, this'll be the last one for a few days. I'm taking some extra time off to be with family. I hope you get a chance to relax some this week and be with family.
In my usual tradition of a post before a break, this one will be something for fun and not related to politics.
Did you ever wonder what mathematicians do to entertain themselves? Or at least what this physics teacher thinks they do?
They do things like what you see in the video below. They invent new mathematical operations and then figure out the consequences of those operations.
You see, for mathematicians, the standard is not that your ideas make the right predictions and/or that they be borne out by experiment as it is for scientists. For mathematicians the standard is that their ideas must be internally consistent and logical.
That means that as long as you don't stray from your fundamental axioms and have internal logic, you're good.
It need not be applicable. It need not describe a single real thing.**
Tetration is one of those things.
I recently came across a couple videos that popped up on my list of suggested videos in Youtube and one of them is linked below. In it you'll see one of the quicker and more approachable descriptions of the mathematical operation of tetration.
At the end of the video the young man poses a question but doesn't answer it. In case you're curious, the answer is no. To put a finer point on it, the answer is in the screenshot attached.
If you are a little more adventurous and willing to stretch a bit, I attached a link to a quick internet explainer page on tetration that's a step above layman's terms.
To give you a sense of what I was talking about above, the axioms (the defining relations too) are at the top of the page and then a budding mathematician would use these and his or her cleverness to come up with the list of properties that are further down the page.
Happy Thanksgiving and back at it soon!
**The list is too long to write out here, but you would be surprised to find how many seemingly meaningless and esoteric mathematical ideas actually find physical relevance a generation (or two, or three, or five) later, however.
https://andydude.github.io/tetration/archives/tetration2/ident.html