Avoidable disasters are both saddening and baffling. In 2022, 159 people, mostly in their 20s, and 30s were crushed to death in Itaewon’s narrow alleyway amid South Korea’s first pandemic-restrictions-free Halloween celebration. What is particularly sobering about this tragedy is that although many people called police hotlines as crowds became cramped and static, their calls went unheeded for hours. Rather than order independent investigations into the catastrophe (as of January 2024), the President of South Korea at the time focused on superficial issues such as asking the public to refer to the disaster as an “accident” (which it was not, it was an avoidable disaster) and the casualties as “the dead” (who are casualties indeed, instead of victims of a preventable tragedy). In this paper, we examine how officials’ complacency about public health and safety dangers, ineffective disaster prevention, and preparedness systems, as well as the government’s chronic lack of prioritization of public health and safety may have contributed to the disaster. Furthermore, we discuss the importance of creating integrated public health and safety protection systems to prevent similar tragedies from happening.

We present and test a model examining the role of organizational and psychological resources that enable employees’ high-quality service provision in public safety jobs. Through a two-study design conceptualized in the principle of reciprocity of social exchange theory, we recruited 120 firefighters and 119 police officers and found that service quality was positively associated with their trust in the administration, training, and staffing sufficiency. We also found that police officers’ prosocial motivation, as a psychological resource, amplifies the relationship between trust in administration and service quality. The beneficial role of prosocial motivation in police officers’ service quality appears to counter recent research suggesting that prosocial motivation has a dark side in demanding contexts. Our findings contribute to and highlight essential connections between distinct resources that positively impact the service quality of firefighters and police officers in dangerous and emotionally demanding job roles.

The U.S. criminal justice system is defined and fueled by foundations and principles that uphold harmful power dynamics such as white supremacy, further destabilizing communities that face intersecting structural barriers. This paternalistic system is characterized by the imposition of punishments—including fees, fines, penalties, and deprivation of freedom and even life—that are meted out disproportionally to people of color and people living in poverty. More often than not, policymakers and justice practitioners fail to solicit the views, experiences, and expertise of community members and justice system-involved individuals, leading to policies and practices crafted under the auspices of promoting safety that undermine community stability instead. Consistent with Square One ’s charge to “reimagine how we create justice,” this paper describes approaches that communities around the country employ to craft, lead, and participate in their own public safety strategies. The paper will offer examples of crime prevention work, investment and divestment efforts, and policy reform initiatives developed and guided by people most likely to experience crime and the heavy hammer of the traditional justice system. This paper will explore the promises, strengths, and challenges associated with each approach, presenting a range of creative strategies for residents—in partnership with the broader community of advocates, activists, and researchers—to adapt, own, and implement.

Although more than 100 billion dollars is spent each year on policing, we know very little about what works, and still less about whether the benefits of various policing policies and practices outweigh the costs. In particular, although there has been some important work done to assess the effects of various practices, and even to monetize some of the benefits of reducing crime, there has been virtually no attention paid to the other side of the benefit-cost equation: the social costs that particular policing practices potentially can impose. In February 2017, the Policing Project at NYU School of Law held a conference aimed at jumpstarting the use of benefit-cost analysis to assess policing practices, and to begin to tackle the many methodological challenges to doing so. Here, we provide an overview of the existing literature, identify the serious gaps that remain, and sketch out a research agenda for moving forward.

Tropical box jellyfish include some of the world's most venomous animals, leading researchers and the media to wonder whether changes in climate may drive these species into sub-tropical waters. The discovery, therefore, of small box jellyfish in the waterways of the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast of south-east Queensland raised concern. This pygmy species proved to be new to science, separated from other species in the genus Chiropsella by its very small size; its semi-circular phacellae; very shallow, coalesced gastric saccules; its peculiar, long pedalia where the ‘palm’ is greatly reduced and the non-opposing ‘fingers’ branch off together at the same level; and a knee-like bend of the pedalial canal. The residential canal/river habitat of this species of chirodropid raises the question of whether this area is also suitable for habitation by the larger, more virulent chirodropids such as the so-called ‘deadly box jellyfish’, Chironex fleckeri. This new species, Chiropsella saxoni sp. nov., brings the total number of chirodropid species described from Australian waters to five.

In 2004 the US Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, sponsored a National Summit on Campus Public Safety. The summit brought together various stakeholders including campus police and security officials, local police chiefs, college and university faculty and administrators, federal officials, students and parents, and community leaders to address the issues and complexities of campus safety. Delegates to the summit identified key issues in campus safety and security, which included establishing a national center on campus safety, balancing traditional open environments with the need to secure vulnerable sites, improving coordination with state and local police, reducing internal fragmentation, elevating professionalism, and increasing eligibility of campus police and security agencies to compete for federal law enforcement funds. Focus on “active shooters” on campus, resulting from the Virginia Tech incident, should not diminish attention placed on the broader, more prevalent safety and security issues facing the nation's educational campuses. Recommendations resulting from the summit called for establishing a national agenda on campus safety, formation of a national center on campus public safety, and increased opportunity for campus police and security agencies to compete for federal and state funds. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2007;1(Suppl 1):S47–S50)