Cross-Site Evaluation of the OJJDP Community-Based Violence Prevention Demonstration Program

November 28, 2016
by Kathleen A. Tomberg and Jeffrey A. Butts

with Hannah Adler, Laila Alsabahi, Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill, Michelle Cubellis, Sheyla Delgado, Douglas Evans, Alana Henninger, Jennifer Lynn-Whaley, Marissa Mandala, Megan O’Toole, Jennifer Peirce, Emily Pelletier, Caterina Gouvis Roman, Maggie Schmuhl, and Caitlin Taylor

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) provided funds to the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (JohnJayREC) to conduct a process and outcome evaluation of the Office’s Community Based Violence Prevention (CBVP) demonstration in five cities across the United States. Programmatic grants in the CBVP demonstration varied in amount, but were typically $2 million per city. The funds usually supported projects for two to four years between 2010 and 2014.

The John Jay evaluation measured the possible effects of the CBVP initiative using a very rigorous standard—i.e. large-scale changes in violent crime and detectable improvements in attitudes about violence among the general public. Given the different approaches used in the five CBVP cities, the variations in their program designs and implementation efforts, and the different types of data available to researchers in each city, it was not possible for the evaluation to draw strong conclusions about the effects of the CBVP demonstration as a whole. In each city, however, researchers identified some potentially beneficial effects of the interventions implemented as part of CBVP. This report describes the efforts of each city and the lessons learned during implementation of CBVP.