Category: Violence

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.

Critical Care: The Important Role of Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Programs

Douglas Evans and Anthony Vega In Denormalizing Violence: A Series of Reports From the John Jay College Evaluation of Cure Violence Programs in New York City Introduction Crime has been decreasing since the mid-1990s, but violence is still a serious concern in many neighborhoods throughout the United States. Victims of violence often suffer psychological trauma as well as physical injuries, and research suggests the effects do not end there. Nearly half of all victims experience subsequent violent victimization. The criminal justice system may respond effectively to incidents of violence, but preventing violence and addressing the needs and ongoing risks of…

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Local Measures

Data infrastructures for tracking youth violence in the United States do not provide a clear view of neighborhood-level change, but the most effective strategies for dealing with youth violence inevitably focus on small areas like neighborhoods. This makes it essential to measure the effects of violence prevention efforts at the neighborhood level as well.

Street by Street: Cross-Site Evaluation of the OJJDP Community-Based Violence Prevention Demonstration Program

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

This study suggests that the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention provides meaningful assistance to cities. The organizational networks involved in the National Forum appear to be moving in positive directions and the individuals involved in those networks report high levels of confidence that they are making a difference.