Pegasus Institute

We are pleased to announce our policy advisors! We've worked hard to find the most talented collection of policy minds in the state of Kentucky, and we think we've achieved that. These are the individuals who we lean on to help guide our research and illuminate the important issues that our Commonwealth faces. It was important to us that it wasn't a homogeneous group. We wanted a wide range of regional perspectives, and importantly, political perspectives. Our non-fiduciary, volunteer, policy advisors won't always agree with us, or each other. That wasn't the goal. The goal was to bring multiple perspectives to the table that can help guide and strengthen our work. Center for Academic Excell

The central claim of our initial report on violence in Louisville was that gangs, not drugs, were the primary cause of our vast increase in homicides. Since the publication of that report, some additional research has come to my attention. Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri – St. Louis has a study out entitled; “Documenting and Explaining the 2015 Homicide Rise: Research Directions.” Dr. Rosenfeld examines a number of potential causes for the 2015 spike in homicide, one of them being the expanded use of and market in, opioids. What Dr. Rosenfeld finds however is that it is unlikely that the reversal in homicide trends (from declining to increasing) is