Welcome to Balanced Scales, a monthly newsletter sharing high impact summaries of research on criminal justice topics. Here at Leymon Research client projects have kept things moving fast, and the post I had planned for this month needed more time to be ready. In the meantime, I’m re-sharing a piece from last year that is newly relevant, with an update in the Work in Motion section. I appreciate you spending your time reading about this topic.

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.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13548506.2016.1257815

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 a rigorous evaluation of a local violence prevention project. The community didn’t get the funding they needed to launch the project, so the evaluation couldn’t move forward either.

Then earlier this month, my LinkedIn feed was full of posts from police agencies, community organizations, and researchers whose violence prevention funding was suddenly cut (both program funding and research dollars). I bet that if the NIJ proposal and its companion project had been funded, the county would now be scrambling to figure out what - if any - parts of the program could be preserved.

Everybody wants safer communities. When promising programs are cut before they have a chance to show long-term results, it’s not just a loss of potential - it’s a waste of the money and energy already invested. It’s discouraging, and adds a new challenge to those committed to this work.

Private foundations are still supporting this work, and I’m in early stages of a developing a new grant proposal with a local violence prevention partner. It will certainly be a very competitive year for funding these projects, so keep your fingers crossed for us!

Thanks so much for reading.

Look for our next newsletter, coming straight to your inbox on the third Thursday of every month. What would you like to see in this newsletter in the future? What is your community doing to prevent violence? Have you experienced these cuts? Respond to this email and let me know all about it.

Peace,

Ann