Shooting incidents reported in each New York City census block group were divided over the population to create yearly rates of shooting incidents. Researchers then ranked all CBGs based on their rates of shooting incidents and identified the 50 CBGs with the highest rates in each year from 2015 to 2021.
Vital City — Balancing Deterrence and Prevention: The Role of Research
Prevention is different than deterrence, and it uses other tools and resources. It lowers risks and builds assets. Risks are obstacles to safety that often metastasize across individuals and increase harm to entire communities, including substance abuse, antisocial peers, unemployment, and family violence.v
CONCEPTUALIZATION, IMPLEMENTATION, AND MANAGEMENT OF THE NEW YORK CITY MAYOR’S ACTION PLAN FOR NEIGHBORHOOD SAFETY
New York City officials responded to adverse conditions in NYCHA developments by launching the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety in 2014. The initiative was designed to enhance the social and physical environment of housing developments in ways that improve public safety.
Reducing Violence Without Police: A Review of Research Evidence
Arnold Ventures asked the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice to review and summarize the research evidence for policies and programs that reduce community violence without relying on police.
Reported Crime in MAP Communities Compared with Other NYC Areas
While effects are modest and largely found in misdemeanor offenses, this rigorous test of the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety indicates that New York City’s effort to improve the safety of public housing communities was beginning to show benefits by the end of 2019. Based on these findings, the results of MAP are promising.
Who Pays for Gun Violence? You Do.
Gun violence affects far more people than those wounded directly. Victims’ families suffer mental, emotional, and financial costs as well. The cost of gun violence extends beyond the immediate medical consequences and the public pays.
Easily Overstated
Policymakers, advocates, and even some researchers claim that youth confinement rates across the United States dropped in recent years due to changes in policy and practice. Such claims remain unproven, but voters and elected officials are inclined to accept them as factual because they are offered by reputable agencies and repeated in news media sources. Without reliable evidence, however, the notion that state-level youth confinement rates fall primarily in response to progressive policy reforms is merely appealing rhetoric.
Public Safety Trends in MAP Communities and Matched Comparison Areas
Was the presence of the MAP initiative in some NYCHA developments associated with greater improvements in crime and victimization outcomes compared with the same outcomes in NYCHA developments not involved in MAP? The results presented here do not answer the question in full, but they offer an early look at efforts by the research team to generate more precise answers. Additional analyses are needed to rule out competing explanations and to examine the complex series of relationships among all the study’s variables. Based on the preliminary findings in this report, however, the results of MAP to date may be considered promising.
Measurement Plan and Analytic Strategies for Evaluating the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety
This second in a series of reports about the evaluation of the New York City Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP). This Evaluation Update: summarizes the goals and methods used to evaluate the Mayor’s Action Plan; describes the quasi-experimental design used to test the outcomes and impacts of MAP as well as the data sources assembled by the research team and how they are used; and portrays a logical framework the research team used initially to identify causal pathways through which various elements of MAP were intended to achieve their desired effect.
Quasi-Experimental Comparison Design for Evaluating the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety
To evaluate the New York City Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP), an initiative to improve the safety of public housing developments, researchers estimated the counterfactual (no intervention) by selecting a set of comparison housing developments not involved in the initiative. The study relied on the statistical method known as propensity score analysis (PSA) to select the comparison group.
Recidivism Reconsidered
Recidivism is not a comprehensive measure of success for criminal justice in general or for community corrections specifically. When used to judge the effects of justice interventions on behavior, the concept of recidivism may even be harmful, as it often reinforces the racial and class biases underlying much of the justice system. We encourage justice systems to rely on more flexible and more responsive outcome measures. Community corrections agencies should encourage policymakers to rely on outcomes related to criminal desistance and the social integration of people on probation or parole. Measures focused on social development and community wellbeing are more useful for evaluating the effects of justice interventions, and they are less likely to distort policy discussions.
Positive Outcomes
Measuring positive outcomes in youth justice requires a shift away from recidivism as the sole indicator of program effectiveness. A youth justice system embracing the PYD approach would gauge its success by tracking positive youth outcomes, such as the formation of strong and supportive relationships, academic engagement, labor market readiness, and improved socio-emotional skills.
Repairing Trust
As part of an ongoing evaluation of the Cure Violence strategy, researchers found the program was potentially associated with less support for the use of violence and greater confidence in police. In a series of neighborhood surveys, young men in areas with Cure Violence programs were less likely to use violence to settle personal disputes and more likely to rely on law enforcement.
The Effects of Cure Violence in the South Bronx and East New York, Brooklyn
Promising evidence that the public health approach to violence reduction championed by Cure Violence may be capable of creating safe and healthy communities.
"A recent evaluation of the NYC program is perhaps most convincing. It was a very sophisticated analysis, done by experienced researchers using police data, hospital data, interviews and surveys. It showed not only reductions in shootings by up to 63 percent, and a change in norms (towards rejecting the use of violence). It also showed that the program resulted in an increase in confidence in police. We’ve heard from several people that this study convinced them even more that the Cure Violence approach really worked." - Gary Slutkin quoted in the Washington Post - June 18, 2018.
Young Men in Neighborhoods with Cure Violence Programs Adopt Attitudes Less Supportive of Violence
Young men living in neighborhoods with Cure Violence programs reported significant reductions in their willingness to use violence compared with men in similar areas without programs. Regression analysis explained 20 percent of the total variance in violence-related norms with significant reductions in willingness to use violence among young men in Cure Violence areas (–14%) and no significant change among residents in matched comparison neighborhoods.
Savings Rate
YAP services generate considerable savings by reducing the need for commitment and out-of-home placement among court-involved youth. Based on average lengths of stay in out-of-home placements in Florida and the actual placement settings used for committed youth in this study, we estimate that the State of Florida saves more than $2.7 Million in avoided placement costs for every 1,000 youth referred to YAP rather than DJJ probation.
Local Measures
None of the cities involved in the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention were able to track violent crime trends in a way that could have allowed researchers to evaluate the effects of the initiative over time and in specific neighborhoods.
Street by Street
While one of the strengths of OJJDP’s CBVP model was its emphasis on adaptation to local context and needs, the variation across program sites posed serious challenges for the evaluation and made it impossible to assess and compare outcomes in each city.
Durable Collaborations
The National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention generated important changes in five communities participating in the initiative (Boston, MA; Detroit, MI; Memphis, TN; Salinas, CA; and San Jose, CA). Survey respondents reported a number of potentially valuable outcomes.
Reclaiming Futures and Organizing Justice for Drug-Using Youth
When researchers examined new survey findings from communities that participated in the Reclaiming Futures initiative over a ten-year period, the data suggest that communities with the strongest engagement in Reclaiming Futures tend to have more positive perceptions of their youth justice and substance abuse treatment systems, including key facets of administration, collaboration, and overall system quality. In communities where the survey scores increased significantly during the early years of Reclaiming Futures, improvements were sustained through 2015. Thus, robust implementation of Reclaiming Futures may be associated with lasting improvements in system operations.
Stargate Theatre Company
Stargate Theatre Company began in 2013 as a theatre-making, workforce readiness, and literacy project for justice-involved youth. For seven weeks each summer, a small group of young men meets at least four days per week to write, rehearse and perform a collaboratively crafted play in an Off-Broadway venue in New York City.
Respondent-Driven Sampling: Evaluating the Effects of the Cure Violence Model with Neighborhood Surveys
The John Jay College evaluation of Cure Violence includes methods for estimating a critical intermediate stage in the program’s theory of change. The study measures changes in violence-related attitudes and values of young men (age 18-30) in at-risk neighborhoods and compares areas with and without Cure Violence programs. This requires the study to conduct surveys among a population of hard-to-reach and hard-to-recruit research subjects, which is when “respondent-driven sampling” is most useful.
Perceptions of Violence
The Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College is assessing the implementation and effects of Cure Violence programs in New York City. One element in the project involves in-person surveys with young men (ages 18-30) in many of the neighborhoods implementing the strategy. This report contains results from the first four neighborhoods involved in the study.
Staying Connected
When justice systems are “realigned,” youth are supervised by local agencies and placed with locally operated programs rather than being sent away to state facilities. New York’s “Close to Home” (or C2H) initiative is a prominent example of youth justice realignment. With primary support from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and additional funds from the Pinkerton Foundation, the Research & Evaluation Center reviewed the design and implementation of the initiative.
Strengthening Youth Justice Practices with Developmental Knowledge and Principles
Youth justice is a challenging environment in which to implement a rigorous PYD approach. The insights and lessons of developmental science do not translate easily into the day-to-day tasks of youth justice systems, which often focus on control and compliance. Youth justice practitioners require assistance as they apply developmental principles. The Positive Youth Justice (PYJ) Model was developed to meet this challenge. It provides a simple framework for designing PYD-compatible interventions for justice-involved young people and for supporting youth justice reforms.
Jeffrey Butts 