JJIE Hub: Programs — Youth Gun Violence Prevention

Policing Guns and Gun Violence: a Toolkit for Practitioners and Advocates

Law enforcement strategies intended to prevent gun violence have alienated communities and resulted in gun carrying and "self-help" violence. Black men are at the highest risk of being victims of gun violence and are the most likely to be arrested for illegal possession of a gun. Policing guns is a complicated problem for police departments and communities that want to minimize the use of arrest, incarceration, and harmful contact with the criminal justice system, while also producing high levels of public safety. Some departments are creating a greater array of options for how to manage guns and gun violence. This toolkit from the National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC) provides evidence-based recommendations for improving the relationship between policing practices and persistent gun violence.

SMART Approaches to Reducing Gun Violence Smart Policing Initiative: Spotlight on Evidence-based Strategies and Impacts

This report from the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and CNA focuses on the reduction of gun violence through the SMART policing initiative (SPI), which allows police agencies to work with academic researchers to evaluate and identify solutions for specific crime issues. In this case, they researched which gun reduction strategies are most effective. This report analyzes the 9 of 35 SPI-funded agencies that targeted gun violence. It reviews their evidence-based strategies. A few of the common strategies implemented to reduce gun violence were to target persistent gun violence hot spots and prolific offenders, conduct advanced problem analysis, and engage in a wide range of collaborative partnerships. The SPI provides a foundation for an ongoing conversation about the next steps to improve prevention, intervention, and suppression methods.

Gun Violence Among Serious Offenders

In this problem-oriented guide for police, the Community-Oriented Policing Services (COPS), outlines evidence-based methods for preventing local youth gun violence. Evidence has shown that gun violence is most concentrated among serious youth offenders who already have a history with the justice system; it is usually gang or crime-related and clusters in specific neighborhoods at specific times. Since youth gun violence varies by location, this guide is intended to give police departments ideas on how to frame analyses, determine measures, recognize intervention, and select the appropriate responses for the characteristics of youth gun violence in that jurisdiction.

The guide then reviews two types of responses to youth gun violence, offender-oriented and place-oriented. Offender-oriented responses include inter-agency efforts to expedite state offenses to the federal level, while also offering community support. Place-oriented responses include increased patrolling of high-crime areas during high-crime times. The guide concludes with an overview of past interventions and responses that have proven ineffective; such as the practice of buying back guns, and the practice of suppressing gangs without providing services for the gang members to better their lives.

Multiplying Outcomes in Place-based Initiatives: How Community Safety and Early Childhood Development Practitioners Can Collaborate with Community Development

The realization that children are heavily impacted by their immediate environments has grown significantly in recent years. This means that by mitigating the factors and facilitating community development, we have the potential to significantly improve the conditions and outcomes for children and our society as a whole. This study by Prevention Institute highlights the benefit of their Collaboration Multiplier framework in achieving desired shared outcomes including; improved economic conditions in neighborhoods, improved access to affordable housing, reduced trauma in the community, improved social connections, and networks, and lowered rates of violence among others.

Support and Outreach White Paper: Changing Traditional Social Service Frameworks to Address the Unique GVI Population

The presence of service organizations, not even necessarily anti-violence organizations, has an impact on violent crime. This is the finding from the National Network for Safe Communities White Paper outlining the Group Violence Intervention (GVI) approach. Tailoring legitimate support and outreach toward a city's GVI population can help prevent harm to individuals and communities at large. Follow through and honesty are imperative for increasing the likelihood of people closest to group violence taking up services. The white paper outlines best practices based on the implementation of this strategy in over 60 cities since 2009.

Raising Youth Voices: Designing a Social Norm Campaign

Changing the narratives and transforming the minds of youth in the community is essential to the reduction and elimination of youth based violence in our communities. The University of Louisville Youth Violence Prevention Research Center (YVPRC)’s Pride, Peace, Prevention campaign aims to educate the youth about Black history and build positive racial identities that help transform minds and shift the dominant narratives on the black identity within the country.

Revitalizing Communities to Prevent Youth Violence

A new approach to preventing youth violence, greening, is discussed in the latest update from the University of Michigan’s Youth Violence Prevention Center. Greening attempts to address crime by beautifying local neighborhoods. The University of Michigan found that greening in neighborhoods results in a 38% decrease in youth assault-related injuries. Overall, greening promotes an interconnected, prideful community that decreases the likelihood of youth violence.

Choose to Change: Your Mind, Your Game — University of Chicago Crime and Education Labs Research Brief

This research brief from the University of Chicago Crime and Education Labs shows promising preliminary results for the Choose to Change (C2C) program. C2C is a program in Chicago that seeks to decrease gun violence by providing behavioral and mental health support to young people. The program is a six-month intervention that offers mentoring services to target each individual’s specific needs. Through tailored Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), youth can process their trauma and create a new set of  healthy “decision-making tools.” Although the program is fairly new, the brief summarizes promising impacts on increased school attendance and a decrease in misconduct incidents. C2C serves high-need communities that have many youth with an increased risk of becoming involved in gangs or crime.

Reducing Risk for Youth Violence by Promoting Healthy Development with Pyramid Mentoring: A Proposal for a Culturally Centered Group Mentoring

In this article from the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, Gregory Washington and colleagues discuss the need for culturally relevant mentoring programs designed specifically for young, at-risk Black men. Research consistently supports that experiencing violence has traumatic effects on children. Poor and oppressed African-American communities have some of the highest rates of gun violence in the United States. The victimization caused by exposure to such violence has been shown to correlate with increases in interpersonal violence and aggression. Further, the systemic oppression of and discrimination against African Americans by the majority American culture has led to a condition of cultural alienation. This condition makes it very difficult for young Black men to access the wealth of knowledge handed down through tradition from elders to youth; they miss out on culturally relevant methods for aiding healthy psychosocial development and identity formation.

Traditional American theories on healthy youth development have origins in Eurocentric ideals that do not often translate to the uniqueness of the African American experience in the United States. Thus, it is necessary to design, implement, and evaluate systems that incorporate culture, context, and multi-generational knowledge to the cause of developing healthy identities in young African-American males. Taking inspiration from Pablo Freire’s work with the poor and oppressed in Brazil, Washington details how Pyramid Mentoring (PM) can be a culturally relevant program that incorporates an Afrocentric worldview to teach Black children healthy socialization skills in a familiar way.

Cure Violence: Creating a World Without Violence

This primer outlines the methods and success of Cure Violence, an organization that has been working for over 20 years with local partners to reduce violence in the United States and around the world. Cure Violence was ranked 10th in NGO Advisor’s 2018 report on the top 500 NGOs in the world and 1st among NGOs devoted to preventing violence. Violence meets the standard definition for disease. Recent evidence shows violence spreads like a contagion. This discovery allows organizations like Cure Violence to use proven, contagion-stopping methods from the public health sector to stop the spread of violence. The Cure Violence model is evidence-based and has been replicated in many different locales and cultures.

In the US, communities in Baltimore saw a 44% decrease in shootings and a 56% decrease in killings after the Cure Violence program was implemented. In Chicago, communities where Cure Violence was present, saw a 41-73% reduction in shootings and killings with a full 100% decrease in retaliatory killings. In New York, 63% fewer shootings, more than a year without shootings or killings, and improved police relations resulted throughout multiple communities with Cure Violence. Globally, hot spots in Port of Spain, Trinidad saw a 67% decrease in attempted murders and a 33% decrease in armed persons reports following Cure Violence implementation. Communities in Cape Town, South Africa where Cure Violence was active had 53% fewer shootings and 31% fewer killings. The United Kingdom Youth Prison Program application of Cure Violence methods decreased group attacks by 95% and had a 51% reduction in overall violence.

Cure Violence staff work with local partners to develop culturally appropriate means to interrupt violence at its source. It offers services for youth and families that help alleviate some of the economic and emotional difficulties that can be prevalent in violence-prone areas. With citywide scaling, hospital response programs, and rapid reduction models, Cure Violence has become one of the best known methods for reducing the spread of violence in the United States and on five continents around the world.

Evaluation of Baltimore's Safe Streets Program

In this report, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health evaluates the Baltimore Safe Streets program, a replication of the Chicago Ceasefire initiative from the late 90s. With support from a US Department of Justice grant, the Baltimore City Health Department (BCHD) implemented the program in some of its most violent neighborhoods between 2007- 2009(Elwood Park, Madison-Eastend, and Cherry Hill).

The evaluation covers implementation of the program, effects of the program on fatal and nonfatal shootings, community attitudes toward gun violence, as well as participant perception and effects of the program. Through detailed records of incidents mediated by outreach workers (Credible Messengers), the teams were able to mediate a total of 276 incidents. Of these incidents, 88% of the individuals involved had a violent history, and 75% were gang members, with weapons at the scene in almost 2/3 of the incidents. Outreach workers estimated that 84% of the incidents would have otherwise resulted in shootings, and believed that 69% of the incidents were fully resolved with a further 23% temporarily resolved.

The results of the evaluation show significant decreases in homicides and nonfatal shootings. However, two of the original four program sites showed the most decrease in gun violence. These two sites also mediated three times the amount of disputes per month than the other two. The authors suggest further research on implementation and organization strategy to improve such programs in the future.