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.
“The Brooklyn recovery seems more striking than other boroughs,” Dr. Butts said. “The Brooklyn spike is horrendous when you look at it over time. But the most recent quarter, the data point is back to where it’s been bouncing around for the past 15 years.”
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.
“Shooting trends in New York City remain a serious concern, but these quarter-specific, one-year differences declined for three straight quarters,” researchers Jeffrey Butts and Richard Espinobarros write.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice was commissioned by the city to assess the effectiveness of its anti-violence initiatives. Jeffrey Butts said police intervention is only the first step and societal factors must also be addressed.
Progressive-minded criminologists like Roman or Butts are boosters of community antiviolence intervention programs such as the Cure Violence model, in which more mature people from the neighborhood work as “violence interrupters” and seek to mediate disputes or defuse tensions before they get out of hand.
