CINA Distinguished Speaker Series- Christopher Koper and Beidi Dong: Understanding and Countering Mass Violence in America

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The CINA Distinguished Speaker Series features leading experts from fields related to the disruption of criminal activities across the physical and cyber spaces. Join us on Thursday, February 20th for a discussion about patterns in mass violence, including new research on threat identification and its potential to enhance prevention and response to future acts.

Understanding and Countering Mass Violence in America

Abstract

This presentation will highlight recent and ongoing research by the presenters and their colleagues on the topic of mass violence in the United States. The presenters will first discuss findings and recommendations stemming from a recent workshop on understanding and countering mass violence that was held by George Mason University and Carnegie Mellon University with funding from the National Science Foundation. Drawing on findings from the workshop, the presenters will highlight recent trends in mass violence and examine the potential to prevent mass violence through widespread adoption of multi-disciplinary threat assessment teams, extreme risk protection orders, firearms policies, and other efforts to identify and disarm high-risk individuals. The presenters will then highlight research they are developing that could potentially assist federal, state, and local authorities in monitoring patterns and trends in mass public attacks and devising preventive and responding strategies. This ongoing work seeks to refine the National Threat Assessment Center’s (NTAC) threat assessment model using comprehensive data on completed and thwarted mass public attacks, new data-driven typologies of mass public attacks, and the development of classifiers to differentiate threats that have the potential to cause the greatest harm.

Presenter Biographies

Dr. Christopher S. Koper is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University and the Principal Fellow of George Mason’s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy.  He specializes in issues related to policing, firearms policy, program evaluation, and evidence-based crime policy. He earned his Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland in 1995 and held research positions at several non-profit think tanks and universities prior to joining the faculty of George Mason in 2011. Professor Koper is the co-editor of Criminology and Public Policy (the policy journal of the American Society of Criminology) and was a principal investigator of the George Mason University-Carnegie Mellon University workshop on Developing an Evidence-Based Approach to Understanding and Countering Mass Violence in America.

Dr. Beidi Dong is an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida in 2015. He received post-doctoral training in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania between 2015 and 2017. His research interests include firearm violence and policy, youth gangs and peer networks, community violence and health, and life-course criminology/criminal careers. With his interdisciplinary background, Dr. Dong links theories, methods and practices of public health with those of their criminal justice counterparts to enhance public safety.

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