By University of Pennsylvania Crime and Justice Policy Lab and California Partnership for Safe Communities

Violence reduction in the U.S. is benefitting from excellent research (and ongoing research agendas) into specific interventions that can be evaluated and replicated. However, more is needed. The fact that so many cities continue to struggle with serious violence despite record investments in new programs indicates that the field needs a broader approach. WHAT’S MISSING? There is a crucial gap holding back the field of violence reduction: an understanding of not just what programs or strategies to adopt, but how to manage and govern on the city level to reduce serious violence. This was the primary conclusion of a 2022 expert convening. Running a rigorous violence intervention program in a particular community is very challenging. Assembling, implementing, and sustaining an effective city-level strategy is an even more complex and difficult task. The challenge of developing successful citywide strategies is enormously important, often ignored, and a large part of why cities are failing to sustainably reduce violence. The convened group comprised several important perspectives: people who have led city violence reduction offices (Jeremy Biddle, Sasha Cotton, Reygan Cunningham), people who help cities and city partners develop their violence prevention capacity (Vaughn Crandall, Fatimah Loren Drier, David Muhammed) and academic experts (Anthony Braga, Shani Buggs, Rodrigo Canales, Daniel Webster). The group was led by the University of Pennsylvania Crime and Justice Policy Lab (CJP) and the California Partnership for Safe Communities (CPSC), working with key leads from the White House Community Violence Intervention Collaborative and the Ballmer Community Violence Reduction Initiative (CAPS). (See Appendix A for more on the convening. This document describes the group’s conclusions and exploration of the current gap in research, implementation, governance, and ongoing management that challenges the violence reduction field, including suggestions of three areas where investment and effort could make a near-term impact: RESEARCH: Ongoing study of how cities structure, manage, and govern violence reduction efforts to establish baselines against which to assess near-term efforts and make long-term progress. Key action research questions, which could be applied to particular cities or systematically across cohorts, include: How are cities currently structuring their violence intervention efforts? Where does management and government authority for producing reductions in community violence reside? To what extent are citywide violence intervention efforts informed by basic analyses of community violence? What are the shortfalls for the ways in which cities use current analyses of their problems? How can cities build internal capacity for problem analysis and governance structures to ensure these analyses are used? What role does city government-based infrastructure play in administering and managing violence intervention strategies? What role does community-based infrastructure play in administering and managing violence intervention strategies? How are these government and community efforts resourced—monetarily, administratively, in terms of personnel, and over time? What key management capacities can be identified that correlate with success, or lack thereof, in producing and sustaining city level reductions in community violence? TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE: Using action research and existing evidence to help cities develop effective strategies and strengthen political governance, management, and key capacities. At present, technical assistance providers are filling capacity gaps at the local level—while technical assistance will likely always be needed to help cities get started or course-correct as they go, the field needs useful frameworks for improving city-level systems aimed at reducing community violence. POLICY: Engaging the field on how to sustain and enhance violence reduction efforts through policy development, governance, and management. Mayoral offices or statewide offices of violence prevention, strong community-based intermediaries, and other governing entities may be better able to provide structural support to violence reduction strategies when those offices and entities are supported by strong standards of practice  

Oakland, CA: California Partnership for Safe Communities, 2023. 13p.   

By H. Douglas Ott and Alysson Gatens

The nature of police work may at times involve stressful situations such as the threat of, and actual, physical harm and witnessing the human toll of violence. The stress of the job combined with organizational stressors may severely impact police officers and their work. Stress can lead to substance misuse and disorders, trauma, and suicide. Police departments can address officer stress through interventions, such as counseling, peer support groups, and stress management training. This article summarizes literature on the effects of police officer stress and trauma. Police officers that embrace active coping styles may be better able to handle stress  

Chicago: Illinois Criminal Justice Information. Authority 2022. 14p.

 By Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani

Since 2014, viral images of Black people being killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020, nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest social movement in the history of the United States. 2 Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives. 3 And others have called for abolishing the police altogether.4 It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious crimes, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially, Black people. This is the so-called paradox ofunder-protection and over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since emancipation.5 The American criminal legal system is unjust and inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.” Wedefendthis idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’sWrongwith Mass Incarceration. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the book. In the spirit of conversation and debate, in this essay, we err deliberately on the side of comprehensiveness rather than argumentative rigor. One of us is a social scientist, and the other is a philosopher and legal scholar. Our primary goal for this research project, and especially in this essay, is not to convince readers that we are correct—but rather to encourage a more explicit discussion of the empirical and normative bases of some pressing debates about the American criminal legal system. Even if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we might have to look like to be sound. In fact, because much of this essay (and the underlying book project) strikes a pessimistic tone, we would be quite happy to be wrong about much of what we argue here.

American Journal of Law and Equality vol. 2, 2022.

By Danilo Souza, Mateus Maciel

In the context of increasing violence, public security reforms are commonly advocated as a solution to the problem despite the lack of empirical evidence. We address this question by evaluating the effect of the Pacto pela Vida program, a comprehensive reform on the public security of the state of Pernambuco, Brazil. We document a reduction of 16 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants following the program implementation. We show that a reduction in crimes occurring on the streets and associated with young males and firearm availability are likely to have contributed to the program’s effect.

Unpublished paper. 2024, 11pg