Grudges & Revenge

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 27th Mar 2023

I have written about the “pull” factors involved in violent offending before e.g., that for some, violence can be an exciting and attractive experience; soccer hooligans enjoy the emotional high that they experience from fighting etc. In this article I want to look at the allure of revenge, and why for some people, there is a need to engage in violent acts against those who they believe have committed injustices against them. I want to focus primarily on planned/premeditated acts of revenge, that happen some time after the “injustice” took place, rather than violent reactions and responses that happen in...Click To Read More

Crime Hotspots & Environmental Factors (Part II)

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 20th Mar 2023

In last week’s article I provided some commentary on a piece that appeared in the Boston Globe (Sunday 12th March 2023), which implied that a short street in Dorchester was responsible for generating a disproportionate amount of crime i.e., the article reported that in 2022, the police were called to this particular street 132 times. As I pointed out in last week’s article, this resulted in 17 incident reports, indicating that the majority of calls were probably for excessive noise, verbal disputes etc., rather than for serious crimes. However, there were two separate shooting incidents that occurred in 2022, along...Click To Read More

Crime Hotspots & Environmental Factors

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 13th Mar 2023

Four years ago, I wrote an article on crime hotspots, that contained the line, “Crime isn’t evenly spread across a geography, it is concentrated in “hot-spots”, even down to the house level e.g., those working in law enforcement will tell you there are homes they are repeatedly called to etc.” (You can access the article by clicking here). The Boston Globe ran the following headline, last week in its Sunday edition (Sunday 12th March): “A tiny street in Dorchester is a magnet for street violence. Police say one house is the source of so much trouble.” The article states that...Click To Read More

Moving from One World to the Next

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 6th Mar 2023

Human beings are by nature optimistic and resilient creatures, and capable of dealing with great changes both physiologically, emotionally and psychologically. I am not saying this in a motivational, “we can achieve anything we set our minds to”, type of way, but more as a scientific observation. Our bodies are very effective at dealing with extreme temperatures. When experiencing rapid drops in temperature our body will engage in vasoconstriction (moving blood away from our peripheries to core areas, keeping major organs warm), and shivering, which generates heat, helping to raise body temperature. This has allowed for people to survive drops...Click To Read More