A John Jay College study compared a South Bronx neighborhood served by Cure Violence with a demographically similar neighborhood that did not have violence interrupters. But perhaps more promising than the decrease in shootings were the shifts in attitudes toward violence the John Jay survey found among young men in the neighborhood.
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting series tracks violent crime trends using the four offenses of murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. According to the FBI, youth arrests for these offenses grew one percent between 2016 and 2017.
The John Jay College of Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation Center analyzed the New York City experience with the Cure Violence model in 2017, seven years after the strategy was adopted. It found reductions in gun injuries of 37–50 percent in the South Bronx and Brooklyn. The center also documented a 14 percent reduction in attitudes supporting violence, with no change in control populations. However, more research is needed.
Douglas Evans, a senior investigator with the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said victims are often unaware there is support for them. “It should be advertised, like in a hospital where you are treated after being hurt. Not in a police station,” he said.
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.
Seventeen prosecutors participated in a Practitioner Learning conference at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in November 2017. Of these, 16 participated in a follow-up interview. The 16 responding prosecutors came from 14 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
