Do something! Northern Star's fight against school violence

James Fuller, director of operations at the non-profit Northern Star, explains why the organization was formed 

by Gregory Saville

I first met James Fuller a few years ago at a dinner in Dallas after co-teaching a leadership program with a colleague. He shared how he and a group of ex-military veterans had embarked on a bold mission: tackling the pressing issue of school violence and shootings. James passionately described why he took on this tough, uncertain journey. You can hear his full story in the video above.

Their non-profit, Northern Star: Community and School Safety Initiatives, is focused on offering free anti-violence and school development programs. As their website puts it, their vision is to “Unite under a common mission to combat community and school violence at its roots.”

They were looking for some training and specialist expertise in crime prevention, CPTED, socio-emotional learning, and a range of other school safety approaches to offer schools across the nation. 

There could be no higher cause in this journey and we agreed to provide some research and training to help. 

 

School shooting data shows alarming increases 
Chart courtesy of Rogova247, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

SCHOOL VIOLENCE

There is no shortage of strategies and research on school violence and shootings. On this blog, we have been writing about school safety for over 15 years. We’ve had school safety experts like Tod Schneider from Oregon, my blogs on school CPTED lighting, Mateja’s blog on crime in European schools, and sexual assault in schools, and a New Zealand teacher’s work to involve students in their own crime prevention.

Then there was the International CPTED Association school guidebook called CPTED in Schools, co-edited by school safety expert Gerard Cleveland.

Sudbury Secondary School
My high school with new renovation and updated architecture - photo Google Earth

SO MANY STRATEGIES, SO LITTLE IMPLEMENTATION

The problem is not a lack of viable strategies. It is a way to put them into action. In the field of urban planning, there is a CPTED concept known as the urban village versus the urban fortress. 

The idea is that there are hard and soft styles of architecture and planning. In a school setting it is the difference between a school that looks like a prison – tall gates, barbed wire, CCTV, armed guards – and a school that looks like a village – open campus design with ample natural surveillance and opportunities to prevent crime.  

I pointed this out in an interview with NPR a few years ago about school redesign: “the best practices can take a decade or two to permeate through the public narrative.” 

Northern Star is not willing to wait. The key for knowing which style is most appropriate comes down to the school context and the quality of their safety plan. That is where the Northern Star methodology is different from other prevention approaches. 

The urban fortress versus the urban village - we cannot allow our schools to become fortresses but we must still create safe environments

INCLUSIVITY

The first thing I noticed about Northern Star is their inclusivity. They brought in school violence experts, mental health specialists, educators, criminologists, women’s empowerment leaders, researchers, law enforcement, and many others. They are an impressive group clearly committed to mitigating the plague of violence and shootings in one of the most vulnerable places in society – the school.

The Northern Star approach is similar to the collaborative neighborhood plans in SafeGrowth, except they are focused specifically on schools and school violence. They base their Community-based School Safety Action Plan Development and Implementation methodology on a bedrock of evidence-based strategies. 

Accordingly, they are regularly apprised of findings from powerful databases such as the K to 12 School Shooting Database by criminologist David Reidman, assistant professor at Idaho State University and also the Averted School Shooting Database, initially funded by the Department of Justice COPS Office 

It has been a pleasure to work with this group over the past year, along with other colleagues, helping them develop their unified action plan. 

Does nudging work in social media

Hectic, stress-inducing airports can nudge calm behaviour. The Long Beach airport in California uses quiet areas, plenty of greenery, and a playful environment

by Larry Leach

In my last post, I related the concept of nudge. In relation to SafeGrowth, the concept from behavioral economics suggests that human choices and decisions are triggered as much by physical designs as by education, legislation, or enforcement. 

While there are scientific disputes about nudge theory, there is little doubt the concept has mileage in contemporary community-building, whether the community is physical or virtual. This will increasingly become concerning as augmented and virtual reality devices expand. 

The concept of CPTED has always been led by a form of nudging. We see it in 1st generation CPTED. You improve the beautification, cleanliness, and image of an area and you nudge offenders away from that location by making it difficult for them to offend with impunity! 

In 2nd Generation CPTED, you engage neighbours in local cultural, art, and music festivals, and nudge them towards caring more for their community as they get to know each other – what sociologists call collective efficacy. Research shows how collective efficacy can nudge crime out and positive activities in. 

 

Portland enhances collective efficacy by nudging people outdoors to common street gardens where they can socialize and meet neighbours in a positive way

NUDGING IN THE WILD WEST OF CYBERSPACE

If nudging works in the physical environment, what about cyberspace? I recently attended Calgary’s Cyber Summit with Law Enforcement and Cyber Security with companies from all over the world. Can the concept be used online since it is humans who mostly control social media?

Popular opinion is that social media is a cesspool! It’s destructive to mental health and can lead to crime. It continues to be a Wild West when it comes to regulation and the damage filters into the real world.

Those developing social media do not always understand the psychology of impulse behavior and its negative effects. Or perhaps their motives are only about sales or power and not about the harmful impact on daily life? Either way, the damage has been done. That means it’s up to us to carefully choose and decide how we should behave.

Can we use the concept of nudge to influence online behaviour?  Cyber security experts have been attempting to nudge their clients to adopt cyber security habits like using 2-step verification to protect our identity or installing security updates at a regular time. 

Cybersecurity experts are constantly attempting to nudge safer online habits

In other cases, it is possible to add “trigger words” to your preference sections of apps to filter out what you see. Your preference sections are probably filled with swear words, but you can choose to filter out other words that emerge with online scams. 

 

CYBER POWERBROKERS

What else might we do to limit the impact of negative nudging and enhancing civil behavior online? Perhaps we can assemble a community of informed online users who advocate filtering out trigger words that contribute to harmful behaviors? That would prevent negative nudging before it began. Perhaps we can prevent cyber threats like spoofing, deepfakes, and phishing by populating our preferences to avoid risky trigger words? 

We are waiting for the regulations of lawmakers, or the voluntary compliance of platform owners and powerbrokers, to figure out how to govern cyberspace. People should take the powerbrokers out of this equation and democratically decide how to govern each other online. 

There are obviously pros and cons to filtering words, but we need to have this important discussion about how cyber nudging can help, or hinder, our online experience. 

 

It is practically impossible to find any social space where people are not fixated on their phones or their computers - online behaviour matters in the real world

NUDGING A SAFER, MORE CIVIL WAY?

Are we capable of producing online communities that are there for the community and not for profit? These would be communities that don’t use your personal information for profit.

We should start with some stronger guardrails from our favorite online platforms. Imagine if each of us could adhere to the simple principle of being the positive change you want to see in the online world. If the owners of a platform put up their own guardrails, then the community would not need to call out the bad behaviour. Perhaps we can find some responsible platform owners and showcase how they focus on setting the example of what we all want to see in our online world? 

I am not advocating for a perfect, everyone-should-be-happy scenario. I am advocating for careful attention to the cyber nudges that cause harmful behaviour and responsible guardrails to protect the online community. What about more serious consequences for those who do harm for profit (scammers, deep-fake fraudsters, ID thieves)? 

An online community of civil discourse.
Showcasing responsible platform owners.

How about more information about the negative triggers that nudge behaviour in harmful directions (like suicide and harassment)? We already label the harms of tobacco. What about the online harms?  

How about creating a savvy user-base who participates in civil discourse. If this user-base ever comes to pass, we will offer up a quotation attributed to both Nobel Laureate writer George Bernard Shaw and US Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It is a concept we also teach in our SafeGrowth classes - it is possible to disagree without being disagreeable. That is the basis of a civil society. Otherwise, we end up with what we see online every day.