On June 10, 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the $10M expansion of Cure Violence programs in police precincts in New York City with the highest amounts of gun violence.
In a podcast interview with the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, JohnJayREC director, Jeffrey Butts, discussed gun violence prevention and the need to maintain a balanced evidence base.
The cost of gun violence extends beyond the immediate medical consequences and the public pays.
“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.
An ongoing evaluation by John Jay College of Criminal Justice found one neighborhood experienced a 63% drop in monthly shooting victims from 2009 to 2016, based on New York Police Department data. New York spends approximately $40 million a year on Cure Violence programs. Slutkin estimates that big cities require about $15 million to $30 million to run an effective program, and small cities need $5 million to $10 million.
The Tessa Majors case is a test for New York’s recently-enacted Raise The Age law, which barred the state from automatically prosecuting 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. Jeffrey Butts, who leads John Jay College’s Research and Evaluation Center, told Floyd that this is the exact kind of case that the law’s critics could use as leverage to reverse it.
