Do Anti-Violence Initiatives Actually Work?

In recent years, a number of innovative anti-violence and intervention programs have proliferated around the U.S. Lately, they've come to be seen as a new silver bullet for dealing with our epidemic of urban violence. But are the success stories anything beyond the anecdotal?

Emerging studies of the causes of violence — and the impact of various anti-violence programs — do offer some hope that we can effectively target and prevent violence. But it's not an easy road, and early results show that not every community-based program works.

A new study of an anti-violence program in Pittsburgh, for example, found that several years of alternative strategies aimed at preventing violent crime had little to no effect on three dangerous neighborhoods. In fact, the murder rate remained flat in all three areas, while violent assaults actually increased — bucking a national trend.

For what looked like a promising program, it's a grim finding. The study evaluated Pittsburgh's One Vision One Life program, which was created after the city experienced a record 125 murders in 2003. And while it's nearly impossible to control for all variables when evaluating violent crime, the study — conducted by the RAND Corporation and University of Michigan researchers — seems to have made every effort to carefully calibrate its data for different factors.

The Pittsburgh results don't suggest that anti-violence programs are a waste, but they do show that there are significant challenges in building programs like One Vision — much less evaluating their outcomes.

Another study, for example — one focused on Chicago's groundbreaking Ceasefire initiative — turned up far more positive results. Last year, the National Institute of Justice published a study of Ceasefire and found the program was connected to significant drops in violent crime. In fact, Pittsburgh's One Vision was modeled on Ceasefire. But every city is different, and implementation is never easy.

Controlled scientific studies of global anti-poverty initiatives are gaining prominence, thanks to champions like MIT's Poverty Action Lab. As development practitioners are increasingly asking, how can we know what's working if we don't study the impact of alternative approaches? It's a lesson that we can apply to crime, too.

Ceasefire founder Gary Slutkin often says he treats violence like a contagious disease. Like a disease, we should examine the spread of violence to find strategies to stop the scourge — and we need to continually evaluate those strategies to see if they're working.

Divergent early results like the studies from Pittsburgh and Chicago suggest that we need an anti-crime lab modeled after MIT's Poverty Action Lab. Because while community-based alternatives to prevent violent urban crime offer hope, we need to make sure our investments pay off — and that we're not throwing money away after anecdotes.

Via The Crime Report

Photo Credit: milesgehm