Amos N. Guiora

School violence is a multidimensional public health crisis affecting children, families, schools, and communities. Yet conventional evaluations of school safety programs rely heavily on incident counts, suspensions, and law enforcement contacts, overlooking community perceptions, prevented incidents, and differences in local priorities. This editorial proposes a community-centered evaluation framework using the Analytic Hierarchy Process to integrate stakeholder judgments concerning the probability, severity, and manageability of school safety hazards. Pairwise comparisons and mathematically grounded aggregation procedures produce community-defined risk profiles against which prevention programs can be assessed. The framework aligns with public health approaches emphasizing surveillance, risk and protective factors, participatory intervention design, and evaluation across social-ecological levels. Its proposed implementation includes developing locally tailored models through school district site visits, deploying them through a web-based platform, and collecting longitudinal data to compare perceived program effectiveness across communities. By translating community engagement into measurable priorities, effectiveness scores, and cost-benefit assessments, the framework could support more defensible resource allocation, more responsive prevention strategies, and greater inclusion of communities disproportionately affected by violence.

Despite calls for community-oriented policing and the recognition that it results in improved relationships between the police and community as well as improved public security outcomes, police-community relations are arguably at an all-time low. Part of the challenge in achieving enhanced police-community relations is a disparate understanding of what each party wants and what each party can provide as well as prioritizing these factors. We present a project that worked to improve police-community relations through a conflict resolution process using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The project was conducted with a group of police officers serving an urban, predominately African American community and representatives of the community over a period of several workshops. The workshops identified the goals, criteria, and objectives of each party as well as the perception of the other party’s goals, criteria, and objectives. The results of the meetings, the priorities generated, and similarities/divergences between them are presented.

Although the events of the past year are in many ways unprecedented, they have resulted in circumstances that are common throughout history. The rise of a global pandemic has led to suffering in many forms, political powers shifting, militant coups rising, and countries facing protests as civil unrest becomes more prevalent. In these uncertain times, political leaders and the role of militaries have been even more scrutinized, revealing flaws that might have remained undetected if it was not for circumstances going awry. These current events have caused us to reflect upon incidents of the past when commanders have faced the uncertainty of how to complete their mission. History is wrought with instances in which the commander, despite having a “Plan B,” still fails to succeed in his role, thus resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary lives lost. Specifically, this article focuses on three death marches—The Long Walk of the Navajo, The Bataan Death March, and Holocaust Death Marches—and the international law of command responsibility. In comparing and contrasting these three historic events through the lens of this law, we analyze the imposition of a commander’s criminal liability when unexpected events occur and he or she is called upon to make difficult decisions. In doing so, we also provide a historical backdrop of each commander’s ethical, moral, and tactical decisions, allowing us to explore what else could have been done, and who should be held liable for the actions of the commander’s soldiers. Ultimately, we call on national leaders and military commanders alike to evaluate our uncomfortable contemporary reality, look back in history, and ask themselves one question: am I truly prepared to make the right decisions when things go wrong?

This manuscript presents a methodology whereby policymakers can assess the United States’ influence in the world. This submission differs from most scholarship on the topic in that it develops a return on effort score which takes into consideration the US goals and priorities. In terms of methodology, this manuscript applies the Analytic Network Process to develop relative priorities associated with the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal framework while considering key drivers (military and economic) across combatant commands and regions. This study’s conclusions will assist US military and policy practitioners in allocating resources and capabilities across the world to maximize the US influence relative to its goals.