2025 Spring Fellow

Rachel Weinberg

Rachel Weinberg is a student at Whitney Young Magnet High School with a passion for volunteering and ending gun violence. Actively involved in advocacy efforts throughout Chicago, she has worked with organizations such as Chicago Students Demand Action and the National Students Demand Action Organization to address the issue of gun violence. Rachel’s interests lie at the intersection of political science, youth leadership, and community organizing through local and national organizations. Her capstone project reflects a commitment to reducing gun violence and school shootings, creating a safer environment for all students.

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Gun Restrictions and School Shootings

Capstone Project

In this policy brief, I look at how gun laws in the United States affect school shootings and what can be done to prevent them.

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All articles by the author

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Policy Briefs by the author

Regulating Generative AI in Criminal Courts

Criminal Justice

February 8, 2026

This policy brief analyzes the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in increasing the efficiency of the current justice system. While examining previous attempts at AI use and its now widespread adoption in the field of criminal justice, this paper evaluates areas of success as well as adverse effects. Although it has been suggested that AI can streamline administrative processes and reduce space for human error, it has the capacity to further augment pre-existing inequities within the criminal justice system. The analysis conducted considers thatAI is yet to harness the trust of the general public and that this technology’s “fairness” can be ambiguous. In response to these concerns and in an attempt to maximize AI benefits, this policy brief emphasizes on the need to establish supervised and open-source AI systems. Human oversight should be considered fundamental in this process, as should education. As a whole, this brief aims to outline the complexities involved with examining the fruitfulness of AI in criminal justice and suggest remedies to its challenges.

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Predictive Policing

Criminal Justice

December 10, 2025

Predictive policing is the forecasting of future crime locations by harnessing the power of information, geospatial intervention models, and evidence-based models in order to reduce crime, enhance public safety, and support proactive prevention. The discipline of crime analysis first appeared in 1842, when the London Metropolitan Police began using pattern recognition to solve and prevent crimes. By 1900, the U.S. federal government began the collection of national data with death rates (homicide rates) and additional metrics, such as prison population rates. This event marked the transformation in the scale and systemization of national data collection.

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Challenges and Limitations of Community Policing in U.S. Law Enforcement

Criminal Justice

October 22, 2025

This brief reexamines the topic of community policy, examining the local safety issues and drawbacks of these methods.

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