Leap Comments on Violent Arrest

/0 Comments/in /by

UCLA Luskin Social Welfare’s Jorja Leap is quoted in a Los Angeles Times story about a recent violent arrest by police in Los Angeles’ Nickerson Gardens. The incident, shared on social media, has threatened the “delicate fabric” of an LAPD initiative known as the Community Safety Partnership (CSP), which has been credited with crime reduction and improved relations in the Watts housing development, according to the article. Leap, an expert on gangs, said the incident highlights decades of distrust of law enforcement, which still runs deep in L.A. communities, despite program gains. “I think most significantly this points to the gap that still exists between the standard LAPD patrol officer and the CSP officer,” said Leap, lead author of a 2019 study of CSP. “There is an underlying fear in Watts in general … that this isn’t going to last, that the old LAPD will sort of rear its head, and things will go back to the brutalities of the past.”

Read the article

 

Astor Discusses Expectations on School Security Officers During Mass Shootings

/0 Comments/in /by

UCLA Luskin Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke to BBC News about the trial of Scot Peterson, a school security officer who chose to take cover rather than storm into a school building in 2018 to confront a gunman in Parkland, Florida. Peterson stood trial for neglect of a child in relation to his decisions during a mass shooting incident in which 17 people died and 17 more were injured. Recurring tragedies like the Parkland shooting have put law enforcement officers under intense pressure to engage directly with armed assailants, but “is it a reasonable thing to do for somebody who’s not a SWAT team member, or trained in the military?” said Astor, an expert in school violence. Noting that even highly trained police officers call for backup in dangerous situations, Astor said confronting active shooters is too much to expect of school employees. On June 29, Peterson was found not guilty on all counts.

View the story

 

Taylor on Efforts to Reverse Worrisome Trends in Public Transit

/0 Comments/in /by

Brian Taylor, director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, spoke to the New York Times about attempts by transit agencies to reinvent themselves in regions across the United States. In California, weekly ridership on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system is down to 32% of what it was before the pandemic began. As they come to terms with a future that no longer revolves around a downtown work culture, BART officials are considering whether to pivot toward serving more concertgoers and sports fans on nights and weekends. Meanwhile, Kansas City, Albuquerque and Boston have experimented with eliminating fares. Dallas is offering subsidized Uber rides to transit users. And the Washington Metro is investing in housing and retail shops at dozens of its stations. “This is a really challenging time,” Taylor said. “If anyone says that they know the way out of this difficult situation, they’re fooling themselves.”

Read the article

 

Gilens on Medical Debt and the ‘Centuries-Long Suspicion of the Poor’

/0 Comments/in /by

UCLA Luskin’s Martin Gilens spoke to KFF Health News and NPR about hesitation among some members of the Black community to use crowdsourcing sites for help covering medical debt. An estimated 100 million people in the United States are burdened by health care debt, with Black Americans at particular risk — yet they are far less likely to seek assistance from sites such as GoFundMe, the news organizations found. Pride and a reluctance to reinforce negative stereotypes are among the reasons. As Gilens, author of “Why Americans Hate Welfare,” explained, “There’s a sort of a centuries-long suspicion of the poor, a cynicism about the degree of true need.” In recent decades, poverty has been cast as a Black problem, even though there are far more white Americans living in poverty, according to census data. This helped drive a backlash against government assistance programs in the 1980s and ’90s, said Gilens, a professor of public policy, social welfare and political science.

Read the KFF Health News article
Listen to the NPR report

 

A Sweeping Proposal to Reform L.A. City Governance

/0 Comments/in /by

News organizations including the Los Angeles Times, Daily News and Associated Press covered a package of recommendations issued by the Los Angeles Governance Reform Project, co-chaired by UCLA Luskin Professor Gary Segura. The advisory group, created in response to a series of corruption scandals that have plagued L.A. City Hall, called for 10 additional seats on the City Council for a total of 25; two independent redistricting commissions; and a more powerful ethics commission. “As we speak today, there are 260,000 souls in every City Council district in Los Angeles. To say that this stretches the definition of local representation as it was understood by our founders would be an understatement,” Segura said. He called the proposals in the group’s interim report a “starting point, intended to spark a meaningful and actionable conversation that will drive reform forward.”

Read the L.A. Times story
Read the Daily News story
Read the Associated Press story

 

Bau on the Chilling Effect on College Ambitions

/0 Comments/in /by

The education news site Chalkbeat spoke to Natalie Bau, associate professor of public policy and economics, about how the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action might affect students applying for college. Bau shared her research on student motivation after Texas lifted its ban on considering race in college admissions two decades ago. The study found that Black and Latino high school students had better school attendance, higher SAT scores and higher grades, and they applied to more colleges because “now it becomes attainable, so it makes sense to put in that extra effort,” she said. Now that the high court has put an end to race-conscious admissions, some students of color might lower their college ambitions. “Underrepresented minority students might reduce their effort in high school and that might result in lower test scores, lower grades, lower attendance and fewer applications to selective institutions,” Bau said. “That might make this under-application problem worse.”

Read the story

 

Turner Says Regulations Hinder Heat Mitigation Efforts Like ‘La Sombrita’

/0 Comments/in /by
Los Angeles officials are struggling to cope with rising heat in a city where a majority of bus stops lack shelter. A recently unveiled “shade and lighting” pilot effort known as La Sombrita (“little shadow” in Spanish) is a thin, slightly curved sheet of perforated metal attached to a pole. It’s designed to be cost-effective and fit into places where planting trees would be impractical. Alas, UCLA Luskin’s V. Kelly Turner said, “What I see is a shade structure that has been basically whittled down by all the regulations and policies that make it really difficult — and you can call it illegal — to produce shade where needed.” Turner, an associate professor of urban planning and geography who studies how to protect people from extreme heat, told Fast Company that “patchwork, piecemeal interventions” like La Sombrita exemplify that cities have historically not thought about shade as an infrastructure system.
Read the story

 

What Does Subsidized Housing in L.A. Need? ‘More of Everything,’ Lens Says

/0 Comments/in /by

An investigation by ABC7 in Los Angeles regarding long waitlists for government-subsidized housing in the form of Section 8 vouchers reported an average wait of five and a half years. And two of the largest housing agencies recently closed their Section 8 lists due to high demand. “The fact that we have to open the waiting list is an indicator that it’s really crazy, right?” Michael Lens, an associate professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA Luskin, said in an on-camera interview. “We just don’t have the public housing stock, the voucher availability and other forms of HUD-subsidized housing to meet that need, or anything close to it.” Housing affordability data show local rents up 30% in five years. The solution? “More of everything,” Lens said. “We need more vouchers, we need more public-private partnerships to provide … housing choices.”

Read more and watch the story

 

Germany’s New National Security Plan Lacks Specifics, Anheier Writes

/0 Comments/in /by

An analysis by UCLA Luskin’s Helmut K. Anheier of Germany’s new national-security plan applauds the strategy but finds it too vague to be effective. Anheier’s article, distributed through Project Syndicate, notes that in modern times Germany has historically relied on the United States and NATO for protection, projecting itself as a champion of military restraint. “This illusion was shattered after Russia attacked Ukraine, and China, eager to exploit any perceived Western vulnerability, adopted a more assertive foreign policy,” writes Anheier, an adjunct professor of social welfare and public policy who oversees the Berggruen Governance Index. The plan recently issued by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz does not sufficiently address the institutional mechanisms — nor budgetary resources — needed to implement it. “The strategy will most likely remain on the shelf — a well-written account of what could have been,” concludes Anheier, who is also a professor of sociology at the Hertie School in Berlin.

Read the article

 

Kaplan on Men’s Mental Health and Suicide

/0 Comments/in , /by

Mark Kaplan, professor of social welfare, spoke on WJCT News’ podcast “What’s Health Got to Do With It” in an episode dedicated to mental health care for men. The podcast focused specifically on suicide rates for men in the United States, a health care story that has been an “unspoken subject,” according to the show’s host. Suicide for men in the U.S. is an “underappreciated major public health crisis,” said Kaplan, whose work has focused on using population-wide data to understand suicide risk factors among veterans, seniors and other vulnerable populations. Kaplan noted that men die of suicide at a rate four times higher than women, but, he said, “When you look at age specific groups — once you get into older adulthood — the ratio is up, 12 to one.” Citing Centers for Disease Control data, Kaplan said that death by suicide is “strikingly a male phenomena” and that a distinguishing factor is their use of firearms around the world.

Listen to the podcast