Jeffrey Butts joins Amos Gelb and LaTrina Antoine with WYRP host Tom Hall in a discussion about the effectiveness of violence interruption programs. Continue reading Do Violence Interruption Programs Work? Some Critical Perspectives
I often wonder, how did we get here — ending August with 357 homicides, on track to be our deadliest year recorded for shooting deaths?… Other cities, like New York and Oakland, Calif., have been where we are today but made improvements. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. A report published last year by John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Research and Evaluation Center, authored by a diverse group of academic consultants, lays out a framework for action I believe we can apply in Philadelphia. Continue reading Philly Doesn’t Need to Reinvent the Wheel to Reduce Homicides | Opinion
“The evidence is mixed,” Butts, who led the 2015 review and subsequent research on interrupters, said. “We need to do more studies.” Continue reading The Evidence for Violence Interrupters Doesn’t Support the Hype
Jeffrey Butts said that while he is encouraged by1 the Biden administration’s public commitment to gun violence research, long hobbled by years of underfunding at the federal level, more attention needs to be paid to community-based programs that don’t rely on police intervention. Continue reading Groups Arise, Spurred by Minneapolis Gun Violence, to Enact Early Interventions
Interview on the Matt McNeil Show in Minneapolis. Continue reading The Matt McNeil Show
Jeffrey Butts interviewed as part of a story about the New York Governor’s announcement of gun violence prevention initiatives. Continue reading Cuomo Declara una Emergencia por la Violencia Armada en Nueva York
“I’m an older white guy. I’m going to stop, I don’t feel threatened,” said Jeffrey Butts, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “There are people whose rational expectation is that (the stop) puts them in danger. They’re going to have different response. It’s amazing to me that we haven’t confronted that and individual police officers don’t think about that. They’re just shocked and angered by someone daring to not comply.” Continue reading US LAW ENFORCEMENT ‘VERY NERVOUS’ ABOUT PROACTIVE POLICING AS GUN VIOLENCE SOARS
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. Continue reading Reducing Violence Without Police: A Review of Research Evidence
Jeffrey Butts interviewed for this story on Fox News, July 30, 2020. Continue reading Alternative Policing: NYC Mayor de Blasio Funding “Violence Interrupters”
Arnold Ventures asked the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice to review and summarize research on policies and programs known to reduce community violence without relying on police. Continue reading Building the Evidence Base for Community-Based Violence Reduction
“It makes me sad to see that some of the issues we identified ten years ago are still hindering the effectiveness of the place,” said Jeffrey Butts, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, who conducted the earlier evaluation. Continue reading Injustice Watch— City Watchdog: Juvenile Diversion Program has Failed to Meet Goals
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. Continue reading Public Safety Trends in MAP Communities and Matched Comparison Areas
Another explanation could be an affordable housing crisis exacerbated by Nashville’s booming economy, said Jeffrey Butts, the director of the Research & Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. This can be particularly true for some neighborhoods. “The social stresses of shared housing and multifamily housing increase the chances that adolescents become frustrated and alienated,” Butts said, creating an environment conducive to more crime. Continue reading Nashville Tennessean—Violent Crime on the Rise as Nashville Grows, but East Nashville Bucks the Trend
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. Continue reading Quasi-Experimental Comparison Design for Evaluating the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety
That longstanding approach was problematic at best, according to Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College. “We’re setting ourselves up for failure when we take a young person who is 14- or 15-years-old, send them hours away from their family, and break all their ties to their communities,” he says. Continue reading City Limits—Program Keeping Convicted Youths Closer to Home Enjoys Success, Faces Cuts
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