Her decision points to a larger political calculus, said Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University. “She has probably made the calculation that she is better off without the police, which is amazing,” he said. “Because the support of the police is, to some extent, code for the support of white voters in Boston.”

“It’s quite possible there will be an increase in these kinds of killings when people who have been working remotely start to return,” said James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University in Boston and one of the nation’s top experts on mass killings.

It follows a lull in mass killings during the pandemic in 2020, which had the smallest number of such attacks in more than a decade, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University. That database tracks mass killings defined as four or more dead, not including the shooter.

The USA TODAY/AP/Northeastern University mass killings database has tracked a dozen mass killings in 2021 that have left 68 people dead and 15 people injured. Three of those events happened in just one week.

Co-led by David Lazer, a political scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, researchers have been conducting surveys of as many as 25,000 people per month, across all 50 US states, as well as collecting information on Twitter use by nearly 1.6 million people.

“What drives the overall suicide rate in the U.S. is gun ownership in the home,” said Matthew Miller, a professor of health sciences and epidemiology at Northeastern University, who has studied the intersection of guns and suicide. “It’s much easier to die when you can reach for a gun than when you can’t.”

“The problem with that model is that an actual risky situation, where an officer might actually be injured, represents 1 to 2 percent of the interactions an officer is ever going to have to do,” said Jack McDevitt, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University.

Jeff Howe is an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University.

WGBH Morning Edition host Joe Mathieu spoke with Northeastern University law professor and WGBH News legal analyst Daniel Medwed about the lawsuit. 

Also joining the conversation is Deborah Ramirez, a law professor at Northeastern University School of Law and chair of the school’s Criminal Justice Task Force.

India said Tuesday that it would authorize a slew of new vaccines, but experts said that the decision was unlikely to have any immediate impact on supplies available in the country. For now, its focus on domestic needs “means there is very little, if anything, left for COVAX and everybody else,” said Brook Baker, a vaccines […]

Brook Baker, a vaccines expert at Northeastern University, said the laudatory message was misplaced. “Celebrating doses sufficient for only 19 million people, or 0.25% of global population, is tone deaf,” he said, adding it was time for WHO and its partners to be more honest with countries.