Serious Youth Violence and Innovative Prevention: On the Emerging Link Between Public Health and Criminology

It was not so long ago that scholarly writings pointed to the vast chasm that existed between criminal justice and public health approaches to understanding and controlling interpersonal violence. Other scholarship of the day examined how criminal justice and criminology could benefit from adopting elements of the public health approach. For sure, there still exist many differences in how the two disciplines approach the violence problem, but over the years there have been some promising developments at the intersection of public health and criminology. This paper surveys the evolving link between public health and criminology, with a special focus on serious youth violence. It is concerned with both research and practice and how these efforts—across primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention strategies—are contributing to improved public health-criminology collaborations or public health-influenced programs that have a discernable impact on youth violence.     

Proactive Policing: a Summary of the Report of the National Academies of Sciences,Engineering, and Medicine

This paper provides a summary of our report for the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on proactive policing. We find that there is sufficient scientific evidence to support the adoption of many proactive policing practices if the primary goal is to reduce crime, though the evidence base generally does not provide long-term or jurisdictional estimates. In turn, we conclude that crime prevention outcomes can often be obtained without producing negative community reactions. However, the most effective proactive policing strategies do not appear to have strong positive impacts on citizen perceptions of the police. At the same time, some community-based strategies have begun to show evidence of improving the relations between the police and public. We conclude that there are likely to be large racial disparities in the volume and nature of police–citizen encounters when police target high-risk people or high-risk places, as is common in many proactive policing programs. We could not conclude whether such disparities are due to statistical prediction, racial animus, implicit bias, or other causes.

     

A comment on Baron and Ferejohn (1989): The Open Rule Equilibrium and Coalition Formation

I present a more general characterization of the symmetric stationary subgame perfect equilibrium to the Baron and Ferejohn (1989) open rule divide-the-dollar game. Specifically, I show that an amender can follow several different randomization strategies when deciding whom to make offers to, and each can be sustained as a distinct equilibrium with slightly different payoffs. The result demonstrates that, when building coalitions in bargaining settings where an offer is already on the table, those with the worst offers need not be the ones “bought up” first.     

The Influence of Community Areas,Neighborhood Clusters,and Street Segments on the Spatial Variability of Violent Crime in Chicago

Objectives

The influence of three hierarchical units of analysis on the total spatial variability of violent crime incidents in Chicago is assessed. This analysis seeks to replicate a recent study that found street segments, rather than neighborhood units of analysis, accounted for the largest share of the total spatial variability of crime in The Hague, Netherlands (see Steenbeek and Weisburd J Quant Criminol. doi: 10.1007/s10940-015-9276-3, 2015).

Methods

We analyze violent crime incidents reported to the police between 2001 and 2014. 359,786 incidents were geocoded to 41,926 street segments nested within 342 neighborhood clusters, in turn nested within 76 community areas in Chicago. Linear mixed models with random slopes of time were estimated to observe the variance uniquely attributed to each unit of analysis.

Results

Similar to Steenbeek and Weisburd, we find 56–65 % of the total variability in violent crime incidents can be attributed to street segments in Chicago. City-wide reductions in violence over the observation period coincide with increases in the spatial variability attributed to street segments and decreases in the variability attributed to both neighborhood units.

Conclusions

Our results suggest that scholars interested in understanding the spatial variation of crime across urban landscapes should be focused on the small places that comprise larger geographic areas. The next wave of “neighborhood-effects” research should explore the role of hierarchical processes in understanding crime variation within larger areas.

     

Budgetary Reform and Formal Modeling: A Comment on Gabel and Hager

In a recent article, Gabel and Hager argue that the line-itemveto and the balanced budget amendment promote (BBA) and mayincrease pork-barrel spending. In their discussion of thebalanced budget amendment, Gabel and Hager present one exampleto support their claim. I demonstrate that the effect of a BBAin their model is highly contingent on parameter values, andthat their results hold only for a specific set of parametervalues. Further, in a generalized model where the balancedbudget amendment is crafted endogenously, the BBA that isenacted has the effect of either decreasing spending orkeeping it constant.     

Streetwork at the crossroads: An evaluation of a street gang outreach intervention and holistic appraisal of the research evidence

Spurred by the success of public health violence interventions, and accelerated by policy pressure to reduce violence without exacerbating overpolicing and mass incarceration, streetwork programs—those that provide anti-violence services by neighborhood-based workers who perform their work beyond the walls of parochial institutions—have positioned themselves as the most important non–law-enforcement violence prevention option available to urban policy makers. Yet despite their importance, the state of the field seems difficult to interpret for academics and practitioners alike. In this article, we make several contributions that bring forth new findings and deliver new perspectives on streetwork as a violence reduction strategy. First, we offer an extended analytic review of the streetwork evaluation literature that connects the study of contemporary public health violence interventions to a preceding tradition of criminologically inspired streetwork studies. Second, we present the results of an impact evaluation of StreetSafe Boston (SSB)—a multiyear streetwork intervention that served 20 Boston gangs. We find that the SSB intervention had no detectable effect on violence among the gangs that it served. We conclude by offering a framework for understanding a field at multiple crossroads: past and present, proclaimed successes and failures, help and harm.