NOTE: Faculty, if you are interviewed and quoted by news media, or if your work has been cited, and you have an online link to the article or video, please let us know. Contact us at news@csusb.edu.
Al Mariam, a professor of political science and a constitutional lawyer, wrote an opinion piece on the Trump administration and U.S. aid to African countries in The Hill, a publication that covers politics and public policy.
Mariam wrote: “Mick Mulvaney, the director of the White House Office of Management Budget confirmed that the Trump administration is set to make ‘fairly dramatic reductions’ in the U.S. foreign aid budget. This announcement will likely disappoint and alarm many in the foreign aid industry. There is already talk that proposals for significant cuts will face a ‘wall of resistance’ in Congress. But serious discussion of U.S aid, particularly in Africa, is long overdue.”
The article was published March 9, 2017, and can be read at “Trump's suspicion of foreign aid to Africa is right on the money.”
Research on how people make friends by psychology professors Kelly Campbell and Matt Riggs, along with student Nicole Holderness, was cited in ElPais.com, a publication based in Madrid, Spain, recently. The research, “Friendship chemistry: An examination of underlying factors,” published in The Social Science Journal in early 2015, was mentioned in an article examining why some people seem to get along so well so quickly.
Read the complete article, in Spanish, at “Bastan décimas de segundo para reconocer a quien se va a convertir en su mejor amigo.”
Most of criminal justice professor Brian Levin’s students were small children when an act of terror on Sept. 11, 2001, thrust the United States into a global war on terrorism, The Sun reported. However all of his criminal justice students at Cal State San Bernardino are able to recall that horrific December day when an act of international terrorism found its way to the Inland Empire.
San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan was a guest speaker Thursday talking to Levin’s students about the crippling attack at the Inland Regional Center on Dec. 2, 2015, and how law enforcement has refined how they do policing in a time when mass shootings appear to happen with more frequency. The article, which appeared in other Southern California News Group newspapers, was published March 9, 2017. It can be read at “San Bernardino Police chief speaks to CSUSB students about Dec. 2 terror attack.”
The Sacramento Bee contacted Levin for his thoughts for an article about the California Highway Patrol sending to the Sacramento District Attorney a 2,000-page report that recommends charges against 100 people related to violence at last June’s clash between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists. The incident, the largest and most violent clash at the Capitol in years, prompted discussion between the city and the CHP over how to handle future protests and raised questions about whether law enforcement should have been more aggressive at the time.
Levin, director of CSUSB’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, said the completion of the report and forwarding of it to prosecutors “is a positive development” and that a more forceful response at the time could have made the violence much worse. “If the police had gone in and made arrests at that time, it could have gotten even more out of control,” said Levin, a former New York Police Department officer. “If police went in to extract one felon or misdemeanant, it could have put at risk other protesters or counter-protesters or law enforcement.”
The article was published March 9, 2017, and can be read at article at “Prosecutors sift through mountain of files, videos from last June’s California Capitol riot.”
An article in The Washington Post noted that hate crimes against Muslims shot up 67 percent in 2015, according to FBI statistics released at the end of last year, and hate crimes overall since then appear on track to outpace that year, according to new statistics compiled Levin at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. Preliminary hate crimes statistics for half a dozen state and local jurisdictions across the country show a precipitous rise in 2016, a trend that appears to be continuing into 2017, Levin said Wednesday.
“Hate crimes in New York City are up 113 percent from the same period last year,” he said. In Chicago, there was a 24 percent increase in 2016; in Seattle, 25 percent. …
“What I think is happening is we’ve seen a normalization of faith-based bigotry and it’s translating in a variety of different ways, one of which, unfortunately, is hate-crime spikes,” he said.
The article was published March 10, 2017, and can be read at “Imam: There's an atmosphere of intolerance that says, 'That's okay, that's acceptable now.'”
The work of Levin and the center was highlighted in a VOANews.com article about hate crimes, including attacks against American Jews and Muslims, spiking in several key U.S. cities in 2016, underscoring an upsurge that started during the presidential campaign and has continued unabated. Previously unpublished data by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism show that hate crimes in at least seven major urban centers, including New York City, Chicago and Columbus, Ohio, registered double-digit increases last year. Levin said it remains to be seen whether the surge he’s seen in these seven U.S. areas will be reflected in overall national trends.
The article was published March 9, 2017 and can be read at “Hate crimes in U.S. are rising, particularly in big cities.”
Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat & Chronicle reported that a downward trend of anti-Semitic crimes has apparently changed, with increases in the bias-driven incidents in 2016 and a recent spate this year of bomb threats and Jewish cemetery vandalism. '2015 marked the end of ... a long-term decline in anti-Semitic hate crimes,' Levin told the newspaper on March 7.
Earlier on that date, the Louis S. Wolk Jewish Community Center of Greater Rochester was evacuated and shut down after an early-morning e-mailed bomb threat. That threat came only a week after vandals toppled headstones at a Jewish cemetery in northwest Rochester. The newspaper’s report took a wider view of anti-Semitic incidents that have occurred nationwide since the beginning of 2017.
The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism has studied four metropolitan areas — New York City, Chicago, Seattle, and Montgomery County, Maryland — and found year-to-year increases ranging from 20 percent to 42 percent from 2015 to 2016. (Much of the law enforcement data for 2016 is still unreported.) Levin said that the perpetrators of hate-based crimes fall into three categories: the ideologically driven, like anti-Semitic neo-Nazis; the psychologically troubled; and those driven by revenge or other less subjective motivations.
The article was published March 8, 2017, and can be read at “JCC threat a symptom of a rise in hate crimes.”