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Congratulations to our graduating M.A. students, Jordan Cline and Colton Tinsley, on successfully completing their theses and earning their master’s degrees! We are proud to celebrate their hard work and accomplishments alongside their thesis chairs, Drs.

Colton Tinsley successfully defended his thesis, Lessons Learned from Loss: Comparing the Behavioral Pathways to Violence Between Mass and School Shooters, yesterday. Using publicly available data from The Violence Project and other school and mass shooting databases, Colton employed multinomial logistic regression models to examine behavioral differences across mass shootings occurring in public, K–12, and higher education settings.

Dr. Hashimi recently attended the 23rd Eurogang Workshop, held March 11–13, 2026, at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. The workshop brought together an international community of scholars, students, and practitioners to engage with this year’s theme, “Gangs and Guns: What Policymakers Need to Know.

Jordan Cline successfully defended his thesis, The Effects of a Traffic Enforcement Team: A Case Study, this morning. Using publicly available data from the Lincoln Police Department, he ran ITSA models to estimate the effects of staffing reductions in the Traffic Enforcement Unit on stops and stop outcomes.

Dr. Nix was one of several panelists that convened at UNO on April 22nd to discuss Chief Todd Schmaderer’s new book, Synergy of Influence: Leadership, Law Enforcement, and the Media.

Ph.D. students Brenna Dunlap and Trey Bussey were each awarded $5,000 Graduate Research and Creative Activity grants to advance their research projects centered on fatal and nonfatal officer-involved shootings. First, both students will collectively create and clean a dataset to track officer-involved fatal and nonfatal shootings from 2020-2022.