The response to mass public shootings such as those in Parkland, Pittsburgh, and Las Vegas has become depressingly predictable.

“Every time there’s a mass shooting, we say the same things, and people argue past each other, and then we do nothing,” says Michael Rocque, a criminologist and an assistant professor of sociology at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝. “And then the next one comes along.”

Part of the problem with the public conversation around such shootings, says Rocque, is that it’s fueled by politics and perceptions, both poorly supported by data.

“I see all kinds of research that uses slightly [divergent] terms, or you’re not really sure where the data come from,” he says. “There is no systematic, comprehensive data set that we can all draw on.”

But that will change during the next three years, and Rocque is one of three researchers who are making it happen, thanks to a nearly $499,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Michael Rocque, shown here at a December 2016 planning meeting for the college’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance, is one of three researchers who will use a federal grant to study mass shootings in the U.S. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Titled “The Nature, Trends, Correlates, and Prevention of Mass Public Shootings in America, 1976-2018,” the team’s NIJ-funded project comprises six ambitious research goals — including a forecast of the severity of mass public shootings in years to come.

“Every time there’s a mass shooting, we say the same things, and people argue past each other, and then we do nothing.”

Principal investigator for the project is Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, a prominent authority on violent crime. Working with Fox as co-principal investigators are Rocque and Grant Duwe, director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Department of Corrections.

“The most important object of this grant,” says Rocque, is to illuminate mass public shootings with data that is publicly accessible and broadly accepted, and whose provenance is clear. (There is no standard definition of a mass public shooting at the moment. The definition used by Rocque and his colleagues is representative: an incident in which four or more victims are fatally shot in a public location within a 24-hour period, and not in the context of other criminal activity.)

“If we’re having a conversation about data rather than anecdotes, then I think we’ll be in a better place,” he says. “We can actually build some strong empirical evidence, a foundation to actually start talking about these things. And maybe we can move forward in a way that actually helps make society safer.”

In addition to the shooting-severity outlook, here are the proposed research outcomes for the project:

• detailed descriptions, comprising dozens of variables, of more than 140 mass public shootings since 1976;
• an evaluation of the impact of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban on the incidence and severity of mass shootings;
• an evaluation of the effects of state-level gun legislation, such as concealed-carry laws, on the incidence and severity of such shootings;
• an assessment of the extent to which mass public shootings reflect the copycat effect, which is when an individual seeks to emulate a crime, and “contagion,” when a crime provokes a rash of similar offenses;
• and a comparison between completed mass shootings and thwarted shooting plots.

Rocque, who in addition to his ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ position is a senior research adviser for Maine’s Department of Corrections, has studied mass shooting incidents for years, starting with an article on school shootings that he wrote for the campus paper when he was an undergraduate at the University of Maine.

He studied under Fox at Northeastern, where he earned a doctorate in 2013. And, he says, “Grant Duwe and I have worked together on a couple projects related to our work in corrections.”

“If we’re having a conversation about data rather than anecdotes, then I think we’ll be in a better place,” says Michael Rocque, here teaching his course “Thinking Sociologically with Numbers” in 2015. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

The NIJ project “just came together as an interesting way to help advance our knowledge of the phenomenon, but also allow us to work together on a different project,” Rocque says. The trio’s proposal was one of four, including two others related to mass shootings, that were approved in a funding round dedicated to firearms violence.

Much of the data for the project already exists but needs to be augmented with additional research or analyzed in a new way. For instance, the set of shooting descriptions will be based on data that Duwe has compiled, with the research team determining what variables should be added.

“We’ll have to do some digging [to create] what will basically be a huge, comprehensive data set on the assailant, the victims, their background, the location, and how and where the shooting was reported” in the media, including social media, Rocque explains.

“It’s possible for mass public shootings to be both a gun problem and a mental health problem.”

Similarly, predicting the severity of future mass public shootings will be done by applying a statistical technique called power law distribution to existing data about the number of shooting incidents and the number of victims.

Through newspaper op-eds as well as the traditional academic channels, Duwe, Rocque, and Fox have already deployed data to address common (mis)perceptions about mass shootings. Writing in Politico in October 2017, that, despite what feels like a recent onslaught of such shootings, their frequency hasn’t changed much since the 1980s and ’90s.

What has changed, he wrote, offering cold comfort, is that shootings have instead become more deadly — the numbers of victims and of deaths have increased.

“The actual number of incidents seems to be relatively stable,” says Rocque. “But you wouldn’t know that, in part because people use different definitions of mass shootings and in part because the media seemingly have given it more attention of late.”

Rocque’s first article on mass shootings appeared in the campus paper when he was an undergraduate at the University of Maine.

Rocque, who is a familiar presence on op-ed pages in Maine and beyond, and Duwe last February challenged the notion that “mass shooters are not disproportionately mentally ill” (a phrase widely disseminated following the Parkland tragedy).

Writing in the , they cited research showing that, in fact, the opposite is true: More than half of mass shooters either had been diagnosed with or had shown signs of mental illness before the attack. That’s more than triple the rate of mental illness among American adults.

On Oct. 9, 2017, people pray at a makeshift memorial in Las Vegas, Nev., for victims of the mass shooting in the city eight days earlier. (AP Photo/John Locher)

But Rocque and Duwe also cautioned that most people with mental illness are not violent and that calling mass public shootings “strictly a mental health problem rather than a gun problem” is also wrong. “It’s possible for mass public shootings to be both a gun problem and a mental health problem,” they wrote.

In the current political climate, it seems all but impossible to agree on ways to curtail mass public shootings. Yet such agreement definitely won’t be possible without a common foundation of data to build upon.

With that foundation, says Rocque, “we can start to get past, hopefully, some of these conversations that are so political and so personal, and get to a place where we can better understand these events and why they happen.”

Michael Rocque, assistant professor of sociology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

“It’s hard to think of anything more interesting than why people commit crimes,” says Michael Rocque, a criminologist who joined ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ this summer as an assistant professor of sociology.

Rocque brings a distinctive perspective to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ sociology: He previously served as director of research for the Maine Department of Corrections. An important part of his DOC work was evaluating the department’s tools and programs — for instance, Maine’s new, nationally unique approach to the incarceration of first offenders aged 18 to 25.

The program is designed around the fact that our brains typically aren’t fully mature until our mid-20s, says Rocque, who still serves as an unpaid adviser to the DOC. In the new program, these young offenders are “actually housed in a juvenile facility and given access to a lot of programming not present in the adult system. The program is getting a lot of attention.” ()

Read more profiles of tenure-track faculty new at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ in 2014:

• Brett Huggett, assistant professor of biology
• Katharine Ott, assistant professor of mathematics
• Geneviève Robert, assistant professor of geology
• Nathan Tefft, assistant professor of economics

Intellectual interest drives Rocque’s criminology career, but so does a sense of mission. “Something that appealed to me about working at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ was that the department was looking for someone interested in race, crime and justice,” says Rocque.

How those themes intersect is a compelling focus for him, especially the inequalities in law enforcement and the criminal justice system. “I’m driven by a desire to assist in the quest for social justice,” he says. For instance, Rocque is part of a research team that just finished an analysis of racial bias in the application of the death penalty.

“We live in the United States — it’s supposed to be a democracy, equal rights for all,” he says. “You hope that it’s not just, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, blacks who kill whites are much more likely to be given the death penalty,’ and the research just gets put away.

“You hope that your research is used to make the world a better place.”

Along those same lines, Rocque wants to help build bridges between scholars and the people on the front lines of the criminal justice system.

Criminologists believe they could make a difference — but, as Rocque says, “not a lot of practitioners have the time to look through the journals, nor are they necessarily well-versed in the language and analyses used.

“There needs to be an intermediary,” and that’s a role he strives to fill. In his time on staff at DOC, for instance, Rocque produced a departmental newsletter that included digests of new research pertinent to the work of the department.

A Maine native, Rocque studied at the University of Maine and the University of Maryland, and earned a doctorate at Northeastern University. In his dissertation, he took several theoretical explanations of “desistance” — the tendency of criminals to commit fewer crimes and eventually stop as they age — and argued that each, in its own way, represents the process of maturation.

For instance, so-called social-control theorists point to common life transitions as the moderating factor, he explains. “Men will be hell-raisers, and then getting jobs or getting married will turn them around.”

Another theory, which subsequent research showed to be the most compelling, explains desistance as a product of internal factors, rather than external.

“Over time, people start to think of themselves in a different way,” Rocque explains. An offender’s self-image might transition from being a badass “to someone who wants to contribute to society or to a family man. That identity shift changes their behavior.”

Rocque’s own identity as a person dealing with crime from the right side of the law emerged early, in the form of a fascination with the novels starring teen detective “Brains” Benton. Later, he says, “I did look into becoming a detective. But when I was an undergrad, I learned of the criminology concentration in the sociology department.

“And I fell in love with how this type of field works.”