Jeffrey Butts said that while he is encouraged by1 the Biden administration’s public commitment to gun violence research, long hobbled by years of underfunding at the federal level, more attention needs to be paid to community-based programs that don’t rely on police intervention.
New York City’s Cure Violence programs found shootings and gun injuries dropped in two neighborhoods where such programs were in place between 2013 and 2017, according to an evaluation led by Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Jeffrey Butts was interviewed by NBC News for a story about community-based violence prevention efforts in New York City.
Cure Violence programs in New York City have become a staple during the de Blasio administration over the years, receiving $34 million in allocations while expanding into 17 precincts in high-crime neighborhoods. A study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2020 found that the drop in shootings over the years coincided with increased use of Cure Violence programs across the city.
A Brooklyn community’s experiment to deal with a longstanding crime hotspot in a busy commercial corridor took a new approach last month: They pulled back on policing. … Jeffrey Butts, who has done extensive research on Cure-Violence initiatives, also questioned how far the experiment could go.
Center director, Jeffrey Butts, was interviewed for this story on Fox News, July 30, 2020.
