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Community Violence Prevention
Can we make our cities and neighborhoods safer?
Ann Leymon
December 19, 2024 • Time to read: 4 minutes
Welcome to Balanced Scales, a monthly newsletter sharing high impact summaries of research on criminal justice topics. Do you have a topic you’d like me to cover? Respond to this email and tell me what’s on your mind.
Rooted in Research: Community Violence Prevention
Key Takeaway: We can reduce violence in our communities. It will take a large, multi-faceted strategy to create noticeable change.
The Findings
There are barriers to rigorous research on community violence prevention, but there are promising programs and strategies we can turn to that are rooted in public health, economics, and criminal justice.
The public health approach focuses on strengthening communities through strategic environmental changes, economic investments, and supporting strong social connections.
Focused deterrence is a criminal justice side strategy that has largely positive impact on community safety. However, it should be approached thoughtfully because it can be done in ways that are cause harm to communities experiencing violence.
A third approach works directly with those at risk of violence through mentorship and/or resources.
Why It Matters (what’s the bottom line?)
Better Public Safety and Health: Community violence impacts not just the victims, but the community as a whole. People living in areas with a lot of violence face more mental and physical health problems. The daily awareness that you could be seriously hurt or could witness violence while getting groceries or commuting to work has a psychological toll.
Financial Impact: Violence is incredibly expensive, both to victims and to the criminal justice system that investigates and punishes the perpetrators. Developing these programs at the scale necessary to see a provable impact would also be expensive. Rigorous research is needed to truly know the cost-benefit relationship, but violence prevention is likely to be very cost-effective.
Policy Implication: We need funding to build up infrastructure to support projects that strengthen and protect communities, funding to carry out projects, and funding to evaluate projects to accelerate and broaden the impact.
Need More?
📄 Solving community violence: This article argues that the best approach combines criminal justice system and public health strategies.
Data in Action: A promising community violence prevention program
The Advance Peace program attempts to reduce violence by focusing efforts on people at risk of committing violence, providing mentorship and support.
Looking through this report, it’s clear why it is hard for research to identify impacts of programs like this. There are natural fluctuations in violence over time - seasonally, and in reaction to large events like the Covid-19 pandemic.
Examining the changes in the city by quadrant helps (p. 8) but in this case, a quadrant that didn’t receive the intervention had a larger drop in violence - this makes it hard to attribute the drop in violence to the program.
Descriptive statistics (straightforward calculations) are an important step in understanding how a program might be helping, but more rigorous methodology is essential (and ideally, larger-scale programs that can reasonably be expected to make a provable reduction in violence).
Work in motion: Making communities safer
Last year I submitted an NIJ grant proposing to do a rigorous evaluation of a local violence prevention project. The community itself didn’t get the funding they needed to launch the project, so the evaluation also was not funded.
Because my research framework received very positive feedback from NIJ, I’d love to continue moving on this work if there’s a partner out there! Let’s see how we can adapt my evaluation plan to your project. Book a time to discuss here: calendly.com/annleymon
Thanks so much for reading.
Peace,
Ann