Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention: Case Studies and Lessons Learned [1st ed.] 9783030436346, 9783030436353

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Robert J. Stokes Charlotte Gill  Editors

Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention Case Studies and Lessons Learned

Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention

Robert J. Stokes  •  Charlotte Gill Editors

Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention Case Studies and Lessons Learned

Editors Robert J. Stokes School of Public Service DePaul University Chicago, IL, USA

Charlotte Gill Department of Criminology, Law and Society George Mason University Fairfax, VA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-43634-6    ISBN 978-3-030-43635-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43635-3 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 In Support of Innovative Partnerships for Crime Prevention: The Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program��������������������������������    1 Robert J. Stokes and Charlotte Gill 2 Community-Based Empowerment, Collective Efficacy, and Collaborative Data-Sharing: Key Elements for Crime Reduction Planning in Baltimore ����������������������������������������   23 Seema Iyer, Cheryl Knott, and Andrea Cantora 3 A Community-Based Response to the Opioid-Epidemic-Linked Crime in Dayton, Ohio����������������������������������������������������������������������������   45 Brian John, Amanda Arrington, Jan LePore-Jentelson, and Richard Stock 4 Improving Community Governance to Reduce Crime: The Case of the Philadelphia’s Mantua BCJI Program����������������������   65 Robert J. Stokes 5 Building a “Beautiful Safe Place for Youth”: The Story of an Effective Community-Research-Practice Partnership in Rainier Beach, Seattle����������������������������������������������������   91 Charlotte Gill and Claudia Gross Shader 6 Cleveland, Ohio: A Community Law Enforcement Partnership for Sustainable Neighborhood Change����������������������������  121 Daniel J. Flannery, Liuhong Yang, Mark I. Singer, and Michael Walker 7 Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Grant Program in Providence, Rhode Island ������������������������������������������������������������������  139 Sean Varano and Stephanie Manzi

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8 “Harmony in the Hills”: Peaks and Valleys in the Berea, KY, Rural BCJI Program������������������������������������������������������������������������  163 Jenna Meglen and Charlotte Gill 9 Unfamiliar Waters: Expectations Versus Reality for a Newly Minted Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Grant Research Partner in the City of St. Louis����������������������������������  195 Lee Ann Slocum, Cherrell Green, and Thomas Owen Baker 10 Applying the ACTION Framework to BCJI in Tucson, Arizona��������  219 Mary Ellen Brown and Katie Cotter Stalker 11 National Support for Collaborative Approaches to Neighborhood Safety: Developing a Technical Assistance Approach for the Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program����������������������������  231 Matt Perkins Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  251

Contributors

Amanda Arrington  Dayton Metro Library, Dayton, OH, USA Thomas Owen Baker  Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA Mary Ellen Brown  Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA Andrea Cantora  School of Criminal Justice, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA Daniel  J.  Flannery  Begun Center for Violence Prevention, Research and Education, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA Charlotte  Gill  Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA Cherrell Green  Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA Seema  Iyer  Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance at the Jacob France Institute, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA Brian John  Dayton Police Department, Dayton, OH, USA Cheryl  Knott  Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance at the Jacob France Institute, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA Jan  LePore-Jentelson  East End Community Services of Dayton, Dayton, OH, USA Stephanie Manzi  School of Justice Studies, Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI, USA Jenna Meglen  Partners for Education at Berea College, Berea, KY, USA Matt Perkins  Local Initiatives Support Corporation, New York, NY, USA vii

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Claudia Gross Shader  City of Seattle Office of City Auditor, Seattle, WA, USA Mark I. Singer  Begun Center for Violence Prevention, Research and Education, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA Lee Ann Slocum  Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA Katie Cotter Stalker  Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA Richard Stock  University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, USA Robert J. Stokes  School of Public Service, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA Sean  Varano  School of Justice Studies, Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI, USA Michael Walker  Partnership for a Safer Cleveland, Cleveland, OH, USA Liuhong  Yang  Begun Center for Violence Prevention, Research and Education, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA

Chapter 1

In Support of Innovative Partnerships for Crime Prevention: The Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program Robert J. Stokes and Charlotte Gill

Introduction This book presents a series of cases of communities across the United States partnering with public agencies and civil society organizations to positively impact the safety of their residents. This work has been pursued in some of the most troubled communities in the country: neighborhoods that have long suffered from extreme economic, social, and civic decline. These areas are characterized by high levels of unemployment, property abandonment, disorderly public environments, active illegal drug markets, underperforming schools, and violent crime. While the work chronicled here is focused on the activities of the federally funded and administered Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) program, in many sites, community work long predates the more recent efforts of this program. For some sites, organized crime prevention activities have been pursued for decades prior to this program. These recent efforts, pursued under the BCJI program, have occurred during a rather difficult era in the annals of American policing. Stocks of mutual trust between police and the communities where policing services tend to be most active, while historically fraught, have been further depleted over the past decade. A series of nationally publicized police shootings − often accompanied by ubiquitous digital images provided by cell phone, police dashcam, or police body camera footage – has exacerbated historical tensions between the police and communities of color. These incidents, in addition to the controversial and drawn-out legal cases that have followed them (serially followed by an endless 24/7 media cycle), have led each side, the police and community advocates, to close ranks and

R. J. Stokes (*) School of Public Service, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Gill Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. J. Stokes, C. Gill (eds.), Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43635-3_1

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become less inclined to seek common ground. Indeed, those who casually follow the national news in the United States over the last decade would be inclined to believe that the relationship between the police and residents of disadvantaged, minority neighborhoods is fundamentally broken (Sharkey 2018). The cases in this book, utilizing on-the-ground observations from a blend of urban planning, social work, economics, and criminology scholars, in addition to their practitioner partners, suggest an alternative view. Even during these difficult times, police and community advocates have continued to work together to address long-standing issues of crime and violence. While seldom perfectly pursued, as attested in the myriad case details presented in this book, these good faith collaborations provide a necessary glimmer of hope in support of community-empowered, legitimate, and effective public safety services. This past decade, while difficult, has not been all bad news. Crime in many cities, including the country’s largest two, New York and Los Angeles, have continued to creep down to levels not seen for more than a half-century. Advances in technology and data systems have led to improvements in policing deployment strategies and  electronic surveillance capabilities in both public and private spaces, while also having a democratizing effect of the availability of criminal justice information for citizens, civil society advocates, the media, and researchers. Good news aside, many larger cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore have witnessed tremendous spikes in murders and shootings over the last decade after a sustained period of decline. Crime has also become a growing problem in many smaller cities and, increasingly, suburbs and rural areas across the United States. The economic decline, depopulation, and municipal fiscal stress experienced by many large cities during the 1970–1990s have reached smaller cities and have led to increases in crime and violence in places where they had not been seen before. Smaller cities and rural areas have also endured the terrible ravages of increased levels of opioid addiction, facilitated by the easy access of powerful prescription pain medications and the synthetic opioid, fentanyl. This new set of problems have vexed smaller places, which lack the resources or established set of program providers, be they public or nonprofit, to address them. It is within this context that the Obama Administration pursued an effort to provide federal support for community-­ based crime reduction and prevention partnerships in distressed communities.

The BCJI Program The BCJI program emerged at the end of President Obama’s first term (2012) as part of a suite of three federal programs known as the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative (NRI). This three-pronged initiative sought to link federal support to improvements in affordable housing through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Choice Neighborhoods, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) BCJI program, along with the Promise Zone program, which sought to decrease poverty through investments in education, training, and targeted incentives

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for private development in designated areas. While the BCJI program represented a new type of federal anti-crime program, it shares much in common with other programs that have come before it, many with similar theories as to the causes of crime, such as community and problem oriented policing, as well as a clear set of prescriptions toward its reduction and prevention. Prior to the decline in urban industrial and manufacturing areas and central city population losses brought on by suburbanization in the 1960s, the US Federal government had a very limited role in local crime policy. This changed with the passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, a wide-reaching federal law that emerged within a context of growing urban, civil unrest; fast-growing rates of crime and violence; and the concomitant reduction in the local tax base due to industrial and population decline. Out of the Safe Streets Act came a set of new federal resources and organizational capacities to help local governments address crime more effectively. These included the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), to be located within the Department of Justice (DOJ). The OJP was designed to provide the organizational structure to support local criminal justice agencies through grants, data, and technical support. The Act also created a national resource for criminal justice data collection and analysis, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, as well as supporting scientific research to study the efficacy of justice policies and practices through the creation of the National Institute of Justice. Support for community-based crime prevention and community capacity building were also key focus areas, through the Community Capacity Development Office and Office of Weed and Seed Strategies, respectively. Lastly, the Act created two additional sections to support improvements in  local police training, operations, communications, and computer equipment: the Division of Applied Law Enforcement Technology and the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program. Around the same time, community-oriented policing approaches rose up out of a crisis of legitimacy in American policing, whereby the civil unrest and rising crime of the late 1960s and 1970s eroded communities’ trust in the police and fostered the view that they were out of touch with the needs of neighborhood residents. As crime grew and resources shrank, local policing organizations sought efficiencies in police services. These included designing centralized crime reporting and dispatch systems that linked patrol officers, often in cars, by radio to crime events in real time. Policing commanders became more focused on response times and clearing (or solving) crimes after they occurred, thus deprioritizing the preventative nature of police patrols. Reformers pushing for a return to a community policing model became ascendant in the 1990s. Rather than impacting crime, community policing and problem-­ solving focused on the broader role of the police in maintaining order, reducing fear, and service provision (Skogan and Frydl 2004; Weisburd and Braga 2006; Gill et al. 2014; Weisburd and Majmundar 2018). The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act created the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) within the DOJ. The COPS Office has provided over $14 billion in funding to a majority of police agencies around the United States to implement community policing and to federally subsidize the hiring of additional community

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policing officers (Scheider et al. 2009). The development of community policing offered opportunities for innovation and the re-establishment of relationships with the community (Morabito 2010; Scheider et al. 2009). Further leveraging relationships between police and communities, programs like Weed and Seed, the Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative (SACSI), and Project Safe Neighborhoods, paired researchers, police departments, and communities in datadriven problem-­solving efforts that capitalized on new research showing that the physical and social characteristics of places were relevant to crime prevention (Weisburd 2012, 2015; Rojek et al. 2015; Weisburd et al. 2016). These programs can be seen as precursors to the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Smart Suite (now called the “Innovations Suite”) of grant programs, including BCJI, which also supported action-focused research partnerships. In the following section, we will lay out what social researchers refer to as the theory of action of the BCJI program. The program request for proposals (RFP) document offered a clear theory of action framework for a set of preferred program interventions that had shown prior evidence of efficacy.

The BCJI Theory of Action Community Empowerment The opening paragraph of the first BCJI grant RFP expresses the ultimate goal of the BCJI program: creating healthy, vibrant communities. Healthy, vibrant communities are places that provide the opportunities, resources, and an environment that children, youth, and adults need to maximize their life outcomes, including high-quality schools and cradle-to-career educational programs; high-quality and affordable housing; thriving commercial establishments; access to quality health care and health services; art and cultural amenities; parks and other recreational spaces; and the safety to take advantage of these opportunities (US BJA 2012).

The BCJI program was based on a set of foundational programmatic principals that have emerged through urban-based scholarship over the past century. While the scale of BCJI places varied across the program, it seldom exceeded the size of one neighborhood (with a mean of about 5000 people, the size of one typical census tract). Second, the programming was to be informed by the comprehensive nature of crime. This meant that an effective crime plan would need to account for various policy areas that are typically managed by different agencies and organizations across both geographic and policy scales. Thus, effective place-based, comprehensive crime prevention efforts would require a governance organization, one that could act as a problem-solving and response-coordinating node for too-often siloed efforts across government and nongovernmental agencies. Third, BCJI sought crime prevention and policing decisions to be informed by data and competent analysis of both secondary data such as crime, code violations, and land use indicators and

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primary data that was to be collected by a designated research partner. These research and data collection methods often involved community satisfaction and fear of crime surveys, focus groups, interviews, and systematic observations of public spaces.

 Focus on Place: From Social Disorganization to Crime A Hot Spots The idea that place matters in the formation of criminal opportunity has a long history in the research on crime (Park 1915; Shaw and McKay 1942; Weisburd et al. 2016). The programmatic emphasis of the BCJI grant program was strongly influenced by the long-standing neighborhood-based research in criminology and urban studies (Shaw and McKay 1942; Jacobs 1961; Wilson and Kelling 1982; Bursik and Grasmick 1993; Newman 1995; Taylor 2001; Kubrin and Weitzer 2003; Sampson 2011), which suggests that communities with higher levels of community organization are more likely to succeed in tamping down the myriad threats to public order and safety that economically declining communities too often face. Indeed, the relative ability for a community to solve its collective problems varies greatly across places. The idea that a neighborhood can bring together existing resources as well as effectively marshal outside political support to garner additional resources has been a key area of research among social scientists. Researchers have noted that communities in the deepest need also tend to score low on their ability to manage their own social and civic affairs. Early place-based theories of criminality suggested that areas that were more socially “disorganized” tended to produce, over time, more juvenile delinquents than communities that were more organized (Shaw and McKay 1942). Social disorganization theory suggested that areas that were economically troubled, with high levels of housing turnover, low homeownership rates, and a surfeit of young people, would have a harder time collectively organizing to express and enforce community norms. The ideas expressed in social disorganization have been updated through the years to include important variants of social processes and scale. For example, a number of studies conducted over the past three decades in the United States and internationally show that crime rates vary substantially across communities (e.g., Weisburd et al. 2012; Weisburd 2015). Crime typically concentrates at a small proportion (around 3–6%) of “micro” places as small as a single street block or even addresses, which are known as “hot spots.” Numerous evaluations have demonstrated that deterrence-based and problem-oriented policing interventions at hot spots are effective at controlling crime (see Braga et al. 2014). However, Weisburd et al. (2012) found that indicators of social disorganization also vary across micro places, suggesting crime prevention responses should be rooted in informal social control and collective efficacy-building programming.

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Social Capital and Collective Efficacy The theory of social disorganization informed more refined articulations of community-­based theories such as social capital theory. Social capital is defined by the frequency and quality of positive social interactions exhibited among neighbors, which suggests that in communities with strong formal (civic associations, clubs, etc.) and informal sociability (speaking and sharing information with neighbors) communities can better marshal internal and external resources to deal with common problems. This theory was later adapted to form a theory of collective action, called collective efficacy, where researchers became  interested in how social ties among neighbors impacted informal actions taken to address public problems (Sampson et al. 1997). While social capital theory was divorced from action (although it was theorized as being connected), collective efficacy researchers would ask people whether they thought their neighbors would get involved in common collective behavioral problems. Like social disorganization, in many national and local studies, neighborhoods with the most problems like poverty and substandard and vacant housing also tend, not surprisingly, to score low on scales of social capital and collective efficacy. The connection to crime theory was forwarded by Sampson and Raudenbush (1999), who tested the notion that holding other variables equal, communities with higher collective efficacy would have lower crime rates. They showed that  even in equally poor neighborhoods, the quality of their civic capacity mattered. Thus, the strengthening of civic capacity was one of the core goals of the BCJI program.

Community Trust in the Police Trust is an important element in community-based efforts to reduce crime and disorder. Citizens need to trust that the police will treat them fairly. The police need to trust that the communities they patrol will cooperate in, at times, very dangerous and difficult circumstances. A lack of trust from either side of this equation leads to a breakdown in communication and invariably leads to less effective policing practices and higher crime. Unfortunately, due to the relationship between economic and social disadvantage, crime, and disorder, poor communities also tend to need and get greater levels of policing services. This extra need for police resources in disadvantaged communities does not always translate into positive experiences with the police as police are known to change their tactics in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Smith (1986) found black suspects were more likely to be handled coercively in black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods. In Kane’s (2002) study of police misconduct in New York City, he found that areas characterized by high rates of poverty and disadvantage also had the highest rates of police misconduct. There is a well-articulated link between trust in the police and effective policing services (e.g., Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler 2004). Communities that exhibit high

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degrees of police mistrust are less likely to report crime, to serve as witnesses, or to cooperate in legitimate investigations. Thus, known violent criminals are left on the street to continue engaging in criminal activity. This evolves into a culture of mistrust where young children are told not to trust or respect the police, and the police assume that everyone in a community distrusts and dislikes them. This has a corrosive effect above and beyond simple everyday citizen/police interactions and becomes part of a bigger problem where mistrust is not the result of bad interactions between citizens and police, but instead becomes the cause of bad interactions. On the other hand, community policing efforts aim to strengthen police-community relationships and enhance legitimacy (Weisburd and Majmundar 2018), and higher levels of perceived police legitimacy and trust have been found to protect against crime at both the individual and neighborhood level (Mazerolle et  al. 2013; Higginson and Mazerolle 2014; Tyler et  al. 2015; Tyler 2017; Nagin and Telep 2017). Thus, trust is seen as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of effective police-community partnerships directed at crime control. The BCJI program directly sought to build trust between the police and community groups. 

Disorder Abatement The well-known “broken windows” hypothesis, based on an elaboration of a social psychological field experiment by Zimbardo, proposes that social and physical disorder, including trash, broken windows, graffiti, vacant lots, groups loitering in public spaces, public drinking, and aggressive begging, can lead to more serious crimes (Kelling and Wilson 1982). Disorder is thought to diminish public order and increase fear among residents. This fear, in turn, is theorized to undermine collective action and generate more (and more serious) disorder and crime (Kelling and Wilson 1982; Skogan 1990; McGarrell et  al. 1997; Hinkle and Weisburd 2008; Yang 2010; Weisburd et al. 2015a, b). The causal link between disorder and serious crime, however, has been questioned by some researchers (see Sampson and Raudenbush 1999; Harcourt 2001) as either being nonexistent, spurious, or conditioned on cultural and reputational factors, rather than on objective measures of disorder (see Wilcox et al. 2018). That is, disorder occurs in lockstep with serious crime, or serious crime can be predictive of increasing levels of disorder, not the other way around. Recently, broken windows theory-informed policing has been assailed by criminal justice reformers as racist and unfair to the poor. Its tactics of stopping, questioning and frisking, or running warrant checks on low-level offenders have been seen as contributing to the mass imprisonment problem in the United States as well as declining levels of trust between minority communities and the police (Sharkey 2018; Southall 2019). While the role of the police in affecting broken windows enforcement is controversial, less so is the usual role that is played by civic groups, code enforcement officers, and environmental sustainability groups who have been active over the past decade in cleaning and greening vacant properties that were previously seen as free

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dumping sites. Recent research has pointed to the crime and violence reduction impacts of such cleanup efforts (Branas et al. 2011). An effort to focus on reducing place-based physical disorder – such as community cleanups, vacant lot remediation, and tree and flower planting campaigns – rather than people-based social disorder, is a key aspect of the BCJI program.

A Focus on Youth Engagement Programming The importance of the positive socialization of children is clear in the sociological literature, especially how socialization and engagement of youth can act as a preventive barrier to crime and violence. In communities with limited private family resources – that is, a concentration of economically disadvantaged families – public and civil society organizations and programs are needed to fill the gap toward this end. Historically, these have included academic (homework clubs, tutoring), sports, arts, and performance-based enrichment programs (basketball, dance, arts, and crafts); adult and peer mentoring programs (Scouts, Big Brother/Big Sister); and psychological interventions related to stress or trauma. The relative availability and quality of such programs in a community, whether delivered in school, in public recreation centers, or through volunteer or civil society groups, can go a long way toward offering young people much needed social and psychological resources to grow into productive adults. Much of the programming derived through BCJI sought to bolster local community capacity to engage youth in planning and program delivery, while also seeking active partnerships with schools, sports and recreation as well as youth arts-focused organizations. 

 overnance Toward Problem-Solving: The Comprehensive G Community Model Current urban problems require innovative solutions that are focused on organizational flexibility, cross-sectoral partnerships, and programmatic experimentation (Bogason and Musso 2006). While urban problems are hardly new, the strategies to solve them have continued to evolve away from purely state-centered solutions. Governance, rather than government, has become the focus of local policymakers, citizens, and nonprofit organizations. Governance networks have arisen to develop coordinated solutions to policy problems such as urban redevelopment; environmental management; low-income housing; and, in the case of the BCJI program, crime, violence, and disorder prevention. Research focused on public safety and security governance has noted an erosion in both the public monopoly in policing and broader social control policy formation (Johnston 2001; Wood 2006). In this perspective, public police are but one

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institutional actor among many who seek to assure a public safety outcome. Within police bureaucracies themselves, this phenomenon gets played out through policing innovations such as community and problem-solving partnerships, where police seek to develop a more diverse set of information networks and problem-solving mentalities (Goldstein 1990). And outside of formal policing organizations, “policing,” or the efforts to institutionalize formal social control mechanisms, has been pursued by other public regulatory agencies, such as code enforcement, as well as from private community-based nonprofit groups, who have made crime prevention and social control part of their operational efforts (Johnston and Shearing 2003). Poorly coordinated, fragmented public services – including policing services – can afford greater opportunity for criminal activity. Thus, effective community-based crime interventions need to account for a variety of factors while being integrated and comprehensive (Sampson 2011). The BCJI program asserted that a place-based orientation was an important aspect of crime programming, but so was the existence of locally legitimate, community civic institutions which are key to negotiating shared values. These organizations also work as an intermediary to local political leadership and public bureaucracies, as well as providing a network that connects to other resources that extend beyond the community itself (Sullivan 1998; Sharkey et al. 2017; Sharkey 2018). Skogan’s (1987) work on the role of community organizations and public safety points to the dual role that community organizations play in crime prevention. First, they work on the more basic community-level social, economic, and physical drivers of crime, whether it be infill housing development, zoning changes, code enforcement, or youth engagement programming, while also being focused on directly working with the criminal justice agencies on information sharing, trust building, patrol planning, prisoner reentry, and citizen surveillance programs such as block watches. Acosta and Chavis (2007) suggest four key connections between a community development ethos and crime reduction: Community development addresses the root causes of crime, improves the effectiveness of law enforcement, and enhances justice. The key components of community development that contribute to its ability to address crime are (1) relationship building; (2) development of institutional, structural, and economic assets; (3) engagement and collective action by citizens; and (4) sustainable and institutionalized change (p. 653).

The Use of Data in Making Informed Policy Choices Having a designated research partner was a key element of the BCJI grant program. Grantees were required to have an identified partner, one who could assist in developing a data-informed plan, as well as be content experts to the community and police with regard to the probable efficacy of planned activities. As “embedded experts,” the research partner role was much more involved in the day-to-day decision-­making process than would be normal for academic researchers, who are more likely to be there at the end of a program to perform a study on whether

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planned activities had an impact on program goals. While many of the case chapters below do offer an assessment of crime or other outcomes, such as disorder or job training placements, most also pursue a description of the process of building a community based crime prevention program. Many of these chapters, most notably the concluding Chap. 11, on the technical assistance needs of the BCJI program, also offer additional insights into the role of the research partner, its prospects, and its limitations.

Case Studies This book emerged from a set of discussions with a group of BCJI designated research partners and representatives from the federally contracted technical assistance provider for the BCJI program, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). The original set of grantees from 2012 included 15 sites, four of which are described in Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5 of this volume (Baltimore, MD; Dayton, OH; Philadelphia, PA; and Seattle, WA). This volume also includes two BCJI neighborhoods (Chaps. 6 and 7) from the 2013 grantee group (Cleveland, OH; Providence, RI), two (Chaps. 8 and 9) from 2015 (Berea, KY; St. Louis, MO), and one (Chap. 10) from 2017 (Tucson, AZ). The 11th and final chapter is written by the lead staff member for LISC’s BCJI technical assistance program, an organization that has long advocated for building safety planning into the broader community development process. These case chapters represent an array of place types, including one very large city with a population above 1 million (Philadelphia, PA); three large cities with populations between 500,000 and 1 million (Seattle, WA; Baltimore, MD; Tucson, AZ); two midsized cities with populations between 200,000 and 499,000 (Cleveland, OH; St. Louis, MO); two smaller cities with populations below 200,000 (Providence, RI; Dayton, OH); and three rural counties with a total population of less than 85,000 and no population centers over 10,000 residents (Berea, KY). These places also represent cities that are growing quickly (e.g., Seattle, WA; Tucson, AZ) and those in the throes of steep population declines (e.g., Baltimore, MD; Cleveland, OH; Dayton, OH; St. Louis, MO) that thus have stressed municipal resources in which to deal with growing problems of crime, violence, and drug addiction. What all these places have in common is a history of serious crime problems, often linked to larger social and economic forces that have negatively impacted the private, parochial, and public institutions which are the basic requirements of safe, healthy places. In addition, flagging private, public, and civic resources have directly impacted the physical landscape of these places, influencing the growth in vacant and abandoned properties; unhealthy land uses, including concentrations in alcohol-­ serving establishments, a lack of healthy food options, and disorderly and dangerous public spaces; as well as a lack of access to employment and quality educational options of children. Places in decline also suffer from declining political influence as well as a decreased governance capacity to solve collective problems, rendering

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solutions that much more difficult. Many of the cities included in this volume have also undergone, during or immediately prior to the BCJI process, a crisis in police-­ community relations, including rioting and civil unrest. This has been the case in Baltimore, MD; St. Louis, MO; and Cleveland, OH, all brought on by notable cases of police officers’ use of deadly force against minority citizens.1 The main motivation to compile this work was a desire to chronicle, with the necessary level of detail and nuance, the inner workings of a major federal community crime prevention program – one that has a relatively large enough set of cases to uncover both challenges and better (if not best) practices in the planning and implementation of a comprehensive crime reduction strategy. As the National Institute of Justice has contracted separately for a larger evaluation of the crime impacts of this broader program, our volume represents an effort to examine the difficult work undertaken on the ground to build these crime-focused partnerships and thus offers a venue for uncovering processes and outcomes beyond crime prevention  outcomes. While many chapter authors do report on various crime outcomes, they also report the results of citizen surveys, focus groups, systematic observations of disorder, and in-depth interviews. In developing their chapters, authors were asked to consider the following set of themes: • How can we best institutionalize sustainable police-community partnerships in times of distrust? • Are there economies of scale and consistency-of-focus in the safety governance of small places? • How can we empower community research capacities and find a role for research that matters to real people on the ground? • What are some of the factors and conditions that predict the relative effectiveness and sustainability of crime-centered community partnerships? • How does a comprehensive community planning process that is centered on crime reduction as a key policy outcome differ from other urban planning endeavors that more typically focus on redevelopment, transportation, and/or land use issues? • How did policy innovation related to crime prevention and reduction programs work in real time and in real places? • What was the specific role of the BCJI research partner (RP) in the effectiveness and sustainability of program efforts? How did the role of the RP ultimately vary from the initially prescribed role?

1  In St. Louis, civil unrest started in neighboring suburban Ferguson, MO, and was inflamed by the police shooting and subsequent legal processes surrounding the death of Michael Brown in 2014. In Baltimore, the death of Freddy Gray, which occurred in 2015 while Mr. Gray was in police custody, has led to a prolonged set of police-community problems for that city, while in Cleveland, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot in a city park while holding a BB gun in November of 2014 by a police officer responding to a radio call regarding a person with a gun.

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While not every theme was addressed by each case, many of them come through in the authors’ narratives, both directly and indirectly. The following and last section of this chapter offers a set of summaries of the case chapters in this volume.

Case Chapter Summaries Chapter 2 presents an overview of the program process and selected outcomes of the Baltimore BCJI case. In the first cohort of 15 sites to receive BCJI funding, the McElderry Park neighborhood in Baltimore provides an interesting case of an innovative crime prevention partnership. The chapter authors, Seema Iyer (the lead research partner), Andrea Cantora, and Cheryle Knott  – all at the University of Baltimore – chronicle a crime prevention partnership that emerged from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice,2 an office that serves as an institutional link between the Mayor’s Office and the Baltimore Police Department. McElderry Park, a community of 4,000 located in the eastern end of the city, possessed a set of economic, social, and physical challenges. The area has a higher poverty rate than the citywide average, is home to a significant cluster of vacant and abandoned buildings, and has a crime rate that is almost double Baltimore city averages. The Baltimore BCJI award led to the development of a new community-based, umbrella organization known as the McElderry Park Revitalization Coalition (MPRC). The MPRC, which was composed of various established community interests in the neighborhood, became the lead advisory organization for the planning and implementation of the BCJI program. The Baltimore authors detail a democratic planning and participatory budgeting process, facilitated by a university-based data collection and analysis unit  – the Neighborhood Indicators Alliance – where residents voted on how to direct budgeted funds each year. The authors note that the outcomes of such a democratic process can conflict with one of the primary programmatic goals of the BCJI program, that is, to pursue programs having an empirically tested basis for their investment. The authors noted that the main, democratically determined, programmatic intervention in year 2 was a job training and placement program. The authors correctly noted that there was no evidence in the crime prevention literature to support such a program in a small localized area. Nonetheless, residents clearly came to the process with a view, no doubt influenced by their lived experience, that crime was caused by economic stress and joblessness, and finding people employment would reduce crime. They ran into the reality of the limits of recruiting a sizable enough population to participate in the program, especially one that was transitioning from 2  Many cities around the country have added such an office over the past decade in an acknowledgement that policing services should not exist in a policy or operational silo from other crime and safety influencing public service areas, such as housing, zoning/code enforcement, sanitation, and recreation. While these offices have proliferated, their influence over policing practices, as evidenced in the Baltimore case, has remained a work in progress.

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incarceration back to the community (which was a targeted population for the training), as well as the fairly common low completion and placement rate of the program participants. And finally, the realization that such a program would not have a direct or measurable impact on local crime in any reasonable bounding period ultimately led residents to jettison this program focus in year two. Thus, the main takeaway from the Baltimore case involved the realization of limits of a locally focused social programming directed toward crime reduction. Moreover, like many of the sites in this volume, the authors note an increased and sustained level of community energy and organizational capacity, which while not sufficient, is certainly a necessary precondition to larger community improvements. Chapter 3 is focused on Dayton, OH, and was authored by Brian John of the Dayton Police Department (DPD); Amanda Arrington and Jan LePore-Jentelson of a local community-based organization, the East End Community Services (EECS); and the designated research partner, Richard Stock of the University of Dayton. Dayton is located in the Miami Valley region of southwest Ohio. It is a declining city of 140,000 that sits in the center of a formerly thriving industrial and agricultural region that has been hit hard by the last great recession. Declining population and unionized employment levels have had the effect of battering its job and tax base, leading to both personal and collective damage. Like many places throughout the United States over the past decade, Dayton has suffered from the ravages of an opioid addiction and overdose crisis. The authors, whose professional backgrounds speak clearly to the cross-sectoral nature of the BCJI program, examine a crime prevention partnership between the DPD, EECS, and the researcher that is focused primarily on opioid overdose and drug addiction prevention. Detailing an incredible spike in the level of narcotic abuse and overdose deaths in their target area, the authors point to an opioid access trajectory that began with the growth of under-regulated “pill mills,” or pain clinics where medical doctors prescribed and distributed copious amounts of pain medications, often without a required medical examination and often paid for in cash by addicted patients. After the Ohio legislature stepped in to regulate unscrupulous pain clinics, heroin – often laced with the powerful synthetic opioid, fentanyl – made its way into circulation, causing overdose deaths to skyrocket. The Dayton BCJI looked for innovative solutions to street level opioid addiction and adapted an intervention originally created to intervene with known criminals. By linking disparate data sets and utilizing innovative data analysis to support a “call-in” strategy of known addicts and their families, the Dayton BCJI team sought to reduce overdose deaths through counseling and training on the timely administration of Narcan, an overdose reversal drug. They also sought to connect and prevent more prosaic but demoralizing crime problems such as theft and prostitution that were found to be directly associated with the drug trade and drug users. Chapter 4, authored by Philadelphia’s designated research partner, Robert J. Stokes, presents the case of the Mantua community in Philadelphia. Mantua is a long-struggling area of 6,000 residents, located just north of more thriving areas surrounding the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University in West Philadelphia (aptly named University City). Mantua has, since the 1970s, been the

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focus of intense economic decline, racial segregation, property abandonment, and crime – much of it violent and centered on a very active illegal, street drug market. As much of the rest of University City has become safer and more prosperous, Mantua has stood out as one of the last communities not to have gone through a prolonged gentrification phase. Mantua is notable as it received all three of the Obama Era neighborhood-based federal grant programs: Choice, BCJI, and the Promise Zone. This stacking of federal programs comes from an understanding that the problems facing disadvantaged neighborhoods are mutually reinforcing across policy areas such as housing, economy, schools, and crime. Moreover, in order to get the most troubled places turned around, stacked investments are more likely to bring enough resources to bear to reach a tipping point, whereas communities are more likely to sustain a trajectory of improvement than merely receiving a one-off grant program. Mantua’s deep needs have led to the neighborhood becoming the focus of intensive programming, within and outside the BCJI programming umbrella. These have been pursued by city agencies, local nonprofits, as well as Drexel University, whose campus is directly adjacent to the neighborhood. This larger effort is referred to as the We Are Mantua! community initiative. The Mantua chapter describes the community governance capacity improvements realized  in the neighborhood. These include the restoration of a dormant civic association; the creation of a community development corporation focused on affordable housing, zoning, and commercial development; enhanced partnerships with local schools and city recreation department programming; a sustained partnership with police on problem-solving and a crime hot spot intervention; and the development of a block leadership program. This chapter also chronicles the difficulty in developing and fully implementing effective, discrete, crime prevention programming that requires multiple partners under short-term contracts, as well as working in a true partnership with policing organizations. This has been especially the case during these heightened times of conflict between police and disadvantaged communities. Evaluation elements include a pre- and post-block assessment that sought to isolate the impacts of a block leadership program on observed disorder; a comprehensive analysis of officially reported crimes, looking at both crime volume trends and crime distribution across identified hot spots; and interviews and focus group results from residents regarding perceived changes to the neighborhood related to BCJI programming. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the Seattle, WA, BCJI program. Named Rainier Beach: A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth (ABSPY) by participating community members, ABSPY is a community-led, non-arrest, place-based, data-driven initiative to improve public safety and collective efficacy in five hot spots of youth violence in the Rainier Beach neighborhood. The broader goal of ABSPY was to rebrand Rainier Beach, a diverse and vibrant area that has been stereotyped as high-­ crime and low-opportunity, as a “beautiful, safe place.” ABSPY is both a community partnership and a problem-solving framework. A community task force, composed of people who lived and worked in the areas of five data-determined hot spots, was at the forefront of identifying place-based risk factors for youth crime and developing innovative, evidence-informed strategies. The implementation of

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these strategies was stewarded by a core team composed of community organizations including the Rainier Beach Action Coalition, Rainier Vista Boys and Girls Club, and the Seattle Neighborhood Group; several city departments, including the Seattle Police Department; and research partners from the Center for Evidence-­ Based Crime Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. ABSPY’s signature interventions include the Corner Greeters, who build relationships and collective efficacy in the community, spread positive messaging, and provide guardianship through “pop-up” events, information sharing, and neighborhood beautification; Safe Passage, in which neighborhood residents provide guardianship and encouragement to young people on their way to and from school; business outreach; and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. In this chapter, authors Charlotte Gill  – ABSPY’s lead research partner  – and City of Seattle research liaison Claudia Gross Shader draw on the success of ABSPY, which is now funded for continued operation and evaluation through the City’s budget and has shown promising results for community perceptions of safety in Rainier Beach. The authors explore the factors that underpin a successful, sustainable “translational criminology” experience such as ABSPY, whereby compelling research and theory, motivated practitioners, and a supportive context came together to support the crime prevention effort. The authors describe specific examples of how successful research translation and implementation was achieved in Rainier Beach, which is particularly noteworthy given that ABSPY developed almost completely outside traditional bureaucratic criminal justice system and local government structures.  Chapter 6 details the BCJI program in the city of Cleveland, OH. The Mount Pleasent neighborhood was identified by the local planning group as particularly challenged, with high levels of poverty, racial segregation and property abandonment. The area was also known to have active criminal gangs that drove violent crime trends in the area.  Cleveland case authors Dan Flannery, Liuhong Yang, Mark Singer, and Michael Walker, note that Mt. Pleasant was chosen as a targeted BCJI intervention site through a data-informed process. Unlike many of the sites in this volume, there was not a need in Cleveland to create the organizational structure to build the partnership model required of BCJI. Cleveland already had an organization, created in 2006, called the Stand Together Against Neighborhood Crime Every Day (STANCE) program. The authors describe STANCE as an evidence-based partnership program that is managed by the larger Partnership for a Safer Cleveland. It is notable that many cities in the US, and a few in this volume, have created citywide, civil society organizations to assist in addressing crime problems. The STANCE program is focused specifically on working with police and community partners to assist in crime prevention, law enforcement interdiction, and the effective reentry of formerly incarcerated citizens back into their communities. Chapter 7 is written by policing researchers Sean Varano and Stephanie Manzi of Roger Williams University, who describe Providence, Rhode Island’s Olneyville neighborhood and its BCJI effort, known locally as the Community and Police Alliance (CaPA). A diverse community of just under 6,000 people, Olneyville has

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long suffered from economic disadvantage, in part due to the collapse of the textile industry in the mid-twentieth century. With a large population of recent immigrants, Olneyville residents have a median income of about 60% of the citywide average. The neighborhood, like many chronicled in this volume, has become defined by a chronic vacant property  problem, with a large number of vacant dwellings and empty lots due to weak demand for real estate. These extreme social and built environment disadvantages have contributed to making Olneyville one of the most crime-ridden areas in Providence, causing a further drag on the area’s economic prospects. Despite these challenges, Olneyville has been able to sustain an active community development corporation, ONE Neighborhood Builders (ONB) which served as a key partner in the BCJI program. A list of the programmatic interventions plied by CaPa include a set of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) efforts; focused deterrence of identified hot spots utilizing BCJI program budgets for police overtime; and an enhanced set of community engagement efforts with the police – including a more strategic problem-oriented policing partnership approach in the community – specifically to address the consistent issue of street prostitution. Considering the expertise of CaPA and the broader goals of the BCJI program to blend physical redevelopment and safety planning, the team centered some of their programming around mitigating the negative externalities of vacant structures and lots by redoubling their efforts to rebuild and revitalize abandoned structures and spaces. The authors also report on their research findings, which include the results of a geographic crime analysis; a pre- and post-community survey that sought to gauge changes in citizen attitudes toward the police, perceptions of community problems, collective efficacy, and other constructs; and key informant interviews. The authors offer a detailed set of pre- and post-metrics to assess the results of the BCJI intervention, which, due to the structural nature of the economic and physical environment problems in Olneyville, will require a sustained future effort to ameliorate. Chapter 8 examines a unique case in this volume. Based out of Berea, KY, this case represents one of only a handful of BCJI sites focused on a completely rural area. Funded in 2015, Berea’s BCJI effort intended to empower and mobilize local communities in three Southeastern Kentucky Promise Zone counties to develop evidence-informed approaches to reducing youth crime. The fiscal agent for the grant, Partners for Education at Berea College, provides programs, services, and funding for place-based, student-focused approaches to improving education in Appalachian Kentucky. In collaboration with researchers from the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University, they aimed to combine best practices in youth development and crime prevention to improve youth safety and security, recognizing the important relationship between safety, health, and academic success. The four-phase BCJI program began with community capacity building around problem-solving and youth engagement, followed by increasing supervision and structure for young people in the community through mentoring and recreational activities; positive youth development approaches including leadership and service learning; and environmental revitalization and economic development.

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Unfortunately, due to a “course correction” in the goals of BCJI toward the end of Berea’s planning phase, most of the planned interventions developed by the community could not be implemented. However, in this chapter, author Jenna Meglen, the program coordinator, and research partner Charlotte Gill describe the valuable lessons they learned during the planning phase about how to apply community-led, data-driven, place-based crime prevention strategies in a rural area. In the absence of much guidance in the research literature about rural crime hot spots and relevant evidence-based approaches and significant challenges in obtaining crime data from more than 30 law enforcement agencies that serve the target communities, they developed innovative ways to combine quantitative and qualitative methods to identify hot spots. The authors also discuss the painstaking iterative approach to leveraging community buy-in and support that respected local cultural traditions of relationship building and storytelling. Finally, they highlight some of the challenges and pitfalls in trying to apply research and evidence-based strategies developed in urban settings to the rural environment. Chapter 9 is an examination of the BCJI program in St. Louis, MO, and is written by research partners Lee Ann Slocum, Cherrell Green, and Thomas Baker from the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Programmatically led by the City of St. Louis’s Department of Health, this site engaged a local nonprofit, Urban Strategies, Inc., to facilitate community engagement. The St. Louis BCJI program, which included both a planning and implementation funding stream, focused on two adjacent neighborhoods just north of St. Louis’s central business district, Carr Square and Columbus Square. Together, these neighborhoods hold approximately 4,600 residents with a demographic profile that indicated a high level of poverty, joblessness, youthful population, and minority racial isolation. These neighborhoods also had a violent crime rate that was twice the citywide average. Like the case of Philadelphia, the Carr and Columbus Square neighborhoods are also the recipients of all three federal NRI grants: BCJI, the Choice Neighborhood, and the Promise Zone program. St. Louis, like many of the cities described in this volume, has suffered from extensive economic decline and population loss during the era of suburbanization and deindustrialization in the United States. The city of St. Louis has lost almost 65% of its population from its height (856,798 in 1950) to a recent estimate of just over 300,000. The authors also note that Carr Square represents one of the more infamous examples of urban policy failure in US history, as it was home to the Pruitt-Igoe public housing development. Built in the mid-1950s, its 33 towers held close to 3,000 units. Its decline was fast, as the towers were emptied and demolished in the early 1970s due to crime and eroding housing conditions. Five decades later, the mega site, located within a couple of miles of downtown St Louis, remains an undeveloped, overgrown, open field. As the St. Louis BCJI was established a few years after the other cases in this volume, the authors do not report on any measured program outcomes. Instead, they distinguish place-based interventions – including a CPTED intervention in identified hot spots and a public art program – with people-based programming, including employment training; psychological counseling to address post-traumatic stress syndrome from exposure to community violence; a restorative justice and conflict

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resolution program; and an effort to improve trust between the police and citizens. The authors do a service to future planners of this program by exploring three main themes that are evident across many of the BCJI sites, which include (1) the unclear, evolving and conflicting role of the research partner; (2) the challenges to implementing programming with a high degree of fidelity given the low capacity limits of local contractors; and (3) the inability to jettison and replace planned, budgeted, but failing programming due to the delays in approvals required by federal and local governments. Chapter 10 provides a review of the BCJI site in Tucson, AZ – a site that was, at the time of this writing, in the initial stages of its program plan. Authored by Mary Ellen Brown and Katie Cotter Stalker of Arizona State University, the chapter describes the target area, the Oracle/Miracle Mile section of Tucson. The target area is characterized by automobile dominated land use, with low density and copious amounts of abandoned property (14.6%). Once a thriving economic area, the 1.6 square mile community of 9,073 residents fell on hard times after the construction of Interstate 10, which valorized other areas of the Tucson region at the expense of places like Oracle/Miracle Mile. As property was abandoned, formerly attractive private-­market dwellings, like the luxury high-rise Tucson House, were taken over by the city of Tucson to provide low-income housing. The authors describe a community-based comprehensive planning and programming effort, subsidized by both a HUD Choice Neighborhoods grant and the BCJI3 program that has come to be known as THRIVE in the 05.4 Much of the chapter is dedicated to laying out the larger organizing framework of the BCJI effort in Tucson, which is defined by the principles of community-based participatory research. The authors organize the key aspects of the Tucson effort with the acronym ACTION, which stands for Assess, Connect, Transform In Our Neighborhood. Program goals are expressed through a sustained engagement process, in partnership with Tucson’s city planning department, the Tucson Police Department, and local community-­ based groups. Collectively, THRIVE in the 05 is aiming to improve community civic capacity, public safety, local culture, economic opportunity, and physical aspects of targeted neighborhoods. As this project is still in its early phases, the main lesson learned in this case is the need to be patient, flexible, and resident focused. The eleventh and final chapter of this volume is authored by Matthew Perkins, who worked closely with all BCJI sites as the technical assistance point-of-contact for the program. Mr. Perkins, a senior program officer with Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Safety and Justice unit, reviews the relevant history of US federal intervention in crime and community-based programs while also couching the BCJI program origin into this history. The author also discusses LISC, which is a national nonprofit community development financial institution (CDFI) created during the late 1970s by the Ford Foundation, in partnership with several capital 3  Tucson received the DOJ funding under the new program articulation and name, the Innovations in Community Based Crime Reduction program, or CBCR.  For the sake of consistency, it is referred to as BCJI here as this program emerged directly from the BCJI program. 4  05 is a reference to the last two digits of the area’s zip code (85705).

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investment partners. CDFIs seek to provide capital and development expertise in neighborhoods that have witnessed substantial market failure in  localizing real estate markets  –  places, that due to factors such as deindustrialization, suburban population flight, and/or mortgage redlining, have a stunted market for housing and commercial development. This market failure leads to widescale property abandonment, the demise of civic and community institutions, and attendant increased criminal opportunity. Since its creation, LISC has grown beyond its national offices in New  York City to include over 30 regional offices located in cities across the United States. The author offers an assessment of the challenges faced in providing technical assistance, especially early in a program’s funding trajectory where grantees are likely to experiment with what works, while trying to make positive course corrections in an at-times balky collaboration process. He provides an overview of the four main pillars of the BCJI program through an examination of the experiences of key case sites. These include a focus on (1) data and analysis, (2) cross-sectoral partnerships, (3) community engagement, and (4) sustainability of programming. The end of this chapter also provides challenging but hopeful ideas for places seeking to learn how to best build lasting community partnerships for innovative, data-informed, crime prevention programming. These include how police and community partners can best share responsibilities for problem identification, decision-­ making, and program implementation; how to disrupt crimes in the short term – while also working toward improving root cause conditions and processes that often predict future criminal activity; and how to make collaborative problem-solving part of a larger program to repair frayed police and community relationships. This final chapter also offers a framework for partnership: that is, how to best build a goal-­ oriented structure that can work effectively across the various actors, agencies, organizations, and cultures that have, thus far, been less than optimal in their independent responses to the problems at hand – to work together to be able to effectively and consistently innovate around the immediate and longer-term issues of crime, safety, and community development.

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Sharkey, P., Torrats-Espinosa, G., & Taykar, D. (2017). Community and the crime decline: The causal effect of local nonprofits on violent crime. American Sociological Review, 82(6), 1214–1240. Sharkey, P. (2018). Uneasy peace: The great crime decline, the renewal of city life. And the next was on violence. New York: Norton. Skogan, W. G. (1987). Community organizations and crime. Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research (Vol. 10, pp. 39–78). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Skogan, W. G. (1990). Disorder and decline: Crime and the spiral of decay in American neighborhoods. New York: Free Press. Skogan, W. G., & Frydl, K. (Eds.). (2004). Fairness and effectiveness in policing: The evidence. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Smith, D.  A. (1986). The Neighborhood Context of Police Behavior. Crime and Justice, 8, 313–341. Southall, A. (2019, November 17). Why stop-and-frisk inflamed Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. New York Times. Accessed December 12, 2019 at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/17/ nyregion/bloomberg-stop-and-frisk-new-york.html Sullivan, M. (1998). Evaluating the effects of community development corporations on conditions and perceptions of safety. Security Journal, 11, 51–60. Sunshine, J., & Tyler, T.  R. (2003). The role of procedural justice and legitimacy in shaping public support for policing. Law & Society Review, 37(3), 513–548. https://doi. org/10.1111/1540-5893.3703002. Taylor, R. (2001). Breaking away from broken windows: Baltimore neighborhoods and the nationwide fight against crime, grime, fear, and decline. Boulder: Westview. Tyler, T. (2017). Procedural justice and policing: A rush to judgment? Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 13, 29–53. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-110316-113318. Tyler, T. R. (2004). Enhancing police legitimacy. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 593(1), 84–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716203262627. Tyler, T. R., Goff, P. A., & MacCoun, R. J. (2015). The impact of psychological science on policing in the United States: Procedural justice, legitimacy, and effective law enforcement. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 16(3), 75–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100615617791. United States Bureau of Justice Administration. (2012). Byrne criminal justice innovation program, request for proposals. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Weisburd, D. (2012). Bringing social context back into the equation: The importance of social characteristics of places in the prevention of crime. Criminology & Public Policy, 11(2), 317–326. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2012.00810.x. Weisburd, D. (2015). The law of crime concentration and the criminology of place. Criminology, 53(2), 133–157. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12070. Weisburd, D., & Braga, A.  A. (2006). Understanding police innovation. In D.  Weisburd & A.  A. Braga (Eds.), Police innovation: Contrasting perspectives. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Weisburd, D., Davis, M., & Gill, C. (2015a). Increasing collective efficacy and social capital at crime hot spots: New crime control tools for police. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 9(3), 265–274. https://doi.org/10.1093/police/pav019. Weisburd, D., Eck, J. E., Braga, A. A., Telep, C. W., Cave, B., Bowers, K., Bruinsma, G., Gill, C., Groff, E. R., Hibdon, J., Hinkle, J. C., Johnson, S. D., Lawton, B., Lum, C., Ratcliffe, J. H., Rengert, G., Taniguchi, T., & Yang, S.-M. (2016). Place matters: Criminology for the twenty-first century. New York: Cambridge University Press. Weisburd, D., Groff, E. R., & Yang, S.-M. (2012). The criminology of place: Street segments and our understanding of the crime problem. New York: Oxford University Press. Weisburd, D., Hinkle, J. C., Braga, A. A., & Wooditch, A. (2015b). Understanding the mechanisms underlying broken windows policing: The need for evaluation evidence. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 52(4), 589–608. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427815577837.

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Weisburd, D., & Majmundar, M. K. (Eds.). (2018). Proactive policing: Effects on crime and communities. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. Wilcox, P., Cullen, F. T., & Feldmeyer, B. (2018). Communities and crime: An enduring American challenge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. (1982, March). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. Atlantic Monthly, pp. 29–38. Wood, J. (2006). Research and innovation in the field of security: A nodal governance view. In J. Wood & B. Dupont (Eds.), Democracy, society and the governance of security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yang, S.-M. (2010). Assessing the spatial–temporal relationship between disorder and violence. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 26(1), 139–163. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10940-009-9085-7.

Chapter 2

Community-Based Empowerment, Collective Efficacy, and Collaborative Data-Sharing: Key Elements for Crime Reduction Planning in Baltimore Seema Iyer, Cheryl Knott, and Andrea Cantora

Introduction In 2012, an interagency collaborative of federal agencies, led by the US Department of Justice, initiated the Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) grant to provide funding for a comprehensive approach to addressing persistent issues of crime in urban neighborhoods. Baltimore City1 was selected in 2013 as one of the recipient cities of the grant with the purpose of developing a plan for crime reduction in the McElderry Park neighborhood located in east Baltimore. The approach for the BCJI grant involved community participation through a newly established advisory council, the McElderry Park Revitalization Coalition (MPRC), to better understand deep-rooted concerns that cause crime to persist in the neighborhood and to collaboratively formulate a multipronged approach to addressing these issues. The BCJI grant to the City of Baltimore also involved a university-based research partner embedded throughout the process in the community to provide data and training on how to use the information for decision-making, technical assistance regarding evidence-based programs and practices, and annual evaluations of performance and outcomes  – which in turn could be used to inform subsequent years’ implementation. As the embedded research partner, the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) at the University of Baltimore (UB) was a unique choice

 All plans and reports for this grant are available online at www.bniajfi.org/currentprojects/bcji

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S. Iyer (*) · C. Knott Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance at the Jacob France Institute, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Cantora School of Criminal Justice, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. J. Stokes, C. Gill (eds.), Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43635-3_2

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among BCJI cities. Established in 2000, BNIA2 serves Baltimore as the local data intermediary to provide better access to neighborhood administrative databases housed within public agencies such as crime incidents, code violations, demographics, and other measures of quality of life. BNIA annually prepares the Baltimore Vital Signs report and open data portal consisting of over 100 indicators for every neighborhood in the city and, therefore, already routinely collected parcel-based data for McElderry Park. BNIA partnered with the School of Criminal Justice (SCJ) at UB to provide subject matter expertise on evidence-based practices and collective efficacy. The results of the work in McElderry Park over the three-year engagement varied widely, with some strategies leading to desired outcomes and others not. However, the comprehensive nature of the set of activities did impressively result in a 500-day period without any homicides in the neighborhood that sustained itself after the grant had officially ended.3 Reflecting on the process and innovations in McElderry Park, this chapter will highlight the three-pronged strategy, implemented by many different stakeholders in the neighborhood, that together led to effective outcomes: (1) the community planning process not only documented an inclusive range of potential solutions but also empowered the community to ask for resources beyond what the BCJI funding would support; (2) many of the community-based strategies served as the basis for increasing social capital in the neighborhood so the project focused on supporting and measuring increases in collective efficacy; and (3) having embedded research partners throughout the process enabled tactical technical assistance and allowed stakeholders to map positive assets in the neighborhood and routinely track hot spot analysis, crime data, and other quantitative measures with the possibility to adjust those measures midstream if no change was evident.

Background on the Baltimore BCJI Neighborhood The McElderry Park neighborhood is located east of downtown Baltimore and has been experiencing significant signs of distress for many years. In the decade prior to the BCJI grant program, from 2000 to 2010, the number of persons living in the McElderry Park neighborhood declined by nearly 10%. Over the same time, there had been a demographic shift in the racial composition of residents. While the neighborhood remains predominantly African American, the number of African American and white residents has decreased by 5 percentage points and 1.6 percentage points, respectively, and the number of Hispanic residents has more than doubled increasing by 8.5 percentage points. As of 2010, for 4033 people living in the neighborhood, the median household income in the East Baltimore neighborhood

2  BNIA is the local partner in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP), which is a learning network of over 30 cities across the United States convened by the Urban Institute. For more information, visit www.neighborhoodindicators.org 3  ABC2News casts on October 21, 2017 – https://www.wmar2news.com/news/region/baltimorecity/baltimore-neighborhood-celebrates-one-year-of-being-homicide-free

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was $35,283 which was lower than the Baltimore City median at $40,100. More than one out of every four (26%) of families with children live in poverty. Neighborhood measures collected over the course of the BCJI planning and implementation process exhibited some reductions in indicators of neighborhood distress. From 2011 to 2014, the percentage of families in the neighborhood receiving temporary cash (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF) benefits declined from 17.5% to 15.1%. The percentage of vacant and abandoned properties declined from 15.5% in 2011 to 12.8% in 2014; the citywide average in 2014 was 8%.4 From 2011 to 2014, the percentage of properties that are owner-occupied remained well-below the citywide average of nearly 50% and decreased from 23.3% to 21.6%. The median sales price of homes increased from $17,500  in 2011 to $31,000 in 2014, which was substantially lower than the median home sales price for all properties sold in Baltimore City ($126,325 in 2014). The primary indicator used to track crime incidents in the neighborhood was the rate of Part 1 offenses committed. Part 1 crimes include both violent crimes (murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery) and property crimes (burglary, larceny, and auto theft). Two additional measures of violent crimes not included in the technical definition of Part 1 offenses were calculated in the analysis – numbers of shootings and common assaults (see Table 2.1). From 2012 through 2015, the Part 1 crime rate remained relatively constant despite a peak in 2013 at 105.9 offenses per 1000 population. The number of homicides during this period decreased slightly, from four during the 2013 peak year to two homicides each year in 2014 and 2015. The number of shootings increased, tripling from 2012 to 2015. The number of burglaries and larcenies also peaked in 2013, but the numbers had decreased slightly by 2015. Comparatively, the Baltimore City Part 1 crime rates were much lower than that of McElderry Park during this period, with a rate of 61.8 incidents per 1000 in 2012 and 64.9 incidents per 1000 in 2015.5 Table 2.1  Part 1 offenses in McElderry Park, 2012–2015 Part 1 crime rate per 1000 population  Number of homicides  Number of rapes  Number of aggravated assaults  Number of robberies  Number of burglaries  Number of larcenies  Number of auto thefts Number of shootings Number of common assaults

2012 90.0 3 5 64 37 132 87 35 3 97

2013 105.9 4 2 58 39 143 155 26 7 106

2014 96.2 2 4 56 46 125 133 22 5 95

2015 92.5 2 1 57 38 122 107 46 9 86

Source: Baltimore City Police Department

4  Data gathered and analyzed by the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance for the BCJI planning and implementation phase. 5  Source: Baltimore City Police Department.

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Comprehensive Community Planning Process Despite these quantitative measures of neighborhood distress, the community has been well-organized for many years. In 2006, the neighborhood community association completed a neighborhood master plan to guide impending development around the adjacent university anchor institution. The plan addressed issues of crime and safety, particularly along commercial corridors, with broad discussion on improved quality of life and better sanitation, but the community strongly desired a multipronged, multiyear anti-crime initiative. This served as one of the reasons that the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ) decided the BCJI grant would be targeted to this neighborhood in 2012. In Baltimore, MOCJ serves as the institutional link or liaison between the Mayor’s office and the Baltimore City Police Department (BPD). However, MOCJ has little to no authority over BPD. So, while the BCJI grant in Baltimore was closely connected to MOCJ, the grant process did not extend to any additional coordination with the police department beyond what normally occurred in the neighborhood. When the grant was awarded, a new umbrella organization, the McElderry Park Revitalization Coalition (MPRC), consisting of faith-based organizations, various community groups, and nonprofits operating in the neighborhood, was created to serve as an advisory group during the planning and implementation phases of the grant. The MPRC was staffed by on-site dedicated personnel from MOCJ, and community members were involved of the screening and hiring process. As was required by the BCJI grant, a community-driven planning process was conducted during the first year of the grant. The research team, which consisted of the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) and the School of Criminal Justice (SCJ) at the University of Baltimore, worked with the MPRC to develop a plan with strong community input. Focus groups were conducted to gather residential perceptions about the drivers of crime in the neighborhood. The top five themes that emerged were (1) physical disorder, (2) crime and safety, (3) law enforcement relations and response, (4) lack of employment, and (5) lack of youth programs/ activities (Cantora et al. 2015). Aside from focus groups, potential solutions to help reduce crime in McElderry Park were collected from residents and other neighborhood stakeholders at monthly community meetings and other gatherings.6 From the data analysis (described in more detail below) and focus group findings, BNIA worked with the community to develop a comprehensive list of recommended ­strategies, which were cross-referenced with evidence-based programs and practices for effective crime reduction. The recommended solutions were organized into short- and long-term social, physical, economic, and policing strategies and what organizations or agencies inside or outside the community would be best suited to implement each strategy (See Table 2.2). In total, 62 strategies were listed, and the

 See McElderry Park BCJI Plan for Crime Reduction for more details of the Year 1 planning process and outcomes: http://www.bniajfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/McElderry-Park-BCJIPlan-Year-1-Final.pdf. 6

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Table 2.2  Information provided for each community-based solution Category Timeframe Goal Strategy Local partners Governmental agencies Evidence-based research Hot spot type Recommended funding strategy

Social, physical, economic, policing Short- or long-term E.g., Mixed-income housing E.g., Create a community land trust Schools, nonprofits, etc. Housing, public works, etc. Effective, promising, mixed, supports overall collective efficacy Commercial, residential, places of opportunity BCJI, other

research team noted which of those strategies were evidence-based to achieve crime reduction and/or crime hot spot alleviation.7 Of course, gathering input from residents is often part of other routine planning processes. The particular innovation employed for McElderry Park was that no potential solution was eliminated from the plan, even if, for example, there was no clear evidence that the activity had any direct relationship to ensure crime reduction. In this way, community members could see that their voice had been heard and documented. This allowed the community to seek resources that are often available to neighborhoods, such as community foundation or other grants, beyond what the BCJI funding could cover. With this list of strategies, MPRC community leaders presented the categorized list on large poster-sized tables for public vote in early 2014. Strategies with the most community votes would be the ones to receive implementation funded using the second-year funds from the BCJI grant. No particular guidance or emphasis was placed on those strategies that research showed would be effective for crime reduction. Each community voter was given the opportunity to vote for three crime strategies, and a total of 149 votes were cast via an online survey and at meetings throughout the community. The strategies with the most votes helped determine how the executive committee of the MPRC would work with MOCJ to allocate BCJI funding to implement the recommended strategies of the plan. Based on the results of the voting process, during Year 2 (2014–2015), 50% of the funds were directed to workforce development programs for McElderry Park residents. Twenty-five percent (25%) of funding was allocated toward addressing youth programming including recreation, education, and mentoring programs. The final 25% of program funding was designated for cleanliness and environmental improvement of the neighborhood, including greening initiatives, service programs,

7  For more information on the crime reduction search methodology and results, see L. Restivo and A. Cantora “McElderry Park Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Evidence-Based Crime Reduction Strategies” http://bniajfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Evidence-Based-Programs-andPractices_Final.pdf

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Goal Strategy

Crime Reduction Workforce Development

Youth Mentoring & Programming

Public Safety

Cleening & Greening

Community Building

Research Partner Technical Assistance Evidence Based Practice

EvidenceBased Practices

Focus on Parolees/Recidivism rates Ensure Services for substance abuse, reentry Supply supplemental cash

Focus on violence prevention and conflict resolution Ensure school attendance, low drug/alcohol abuse

Focus on non-violent shootings and homicides

Collective Efficacy

Collective Efficacy

Performance Measurement Neighborhood Profiles, Hotspots & Asset Map Assess Collective Efficacy & Legitimacy of Law

Funded Program

Digit All Systems

Jericho Reentry

Y of Central MD

Viewfinders

Banner

Safe Streets

Project SERVE Living Classrooms

Center for Graceful Living

Fig. 2.1  Implementation strategies for Year 2 of the BCJI Grant

organizing residents around city services, and other improvements to the built environment (see Fig. 2.1).8 Instead of using BCJI funding for a small number of targeted programs with more substantial funding, the community-led selection process resulted in several programs funded at smaller levels (ranging from $10,000 to $50,000). The benefit of this approach, which cannot be overstated, lies mainly in the sense of community empowerment and buy-in from MPRC leaders.

 earning by Trial and Error: Jericho Reentry and Digit L All Systems While eight separate programs were granted funding through the community vetting process, 50% went toward workforce development training, even though these strategies were noted as having limited to no evidence-based relationship to short-­ term reductions in violence. Jericho Reentry was selected to provide the target population with workforce skills and wraparound services as needed. Participants went through an intake process and were funneled into technology skills certification programming provided by Digit All Systems. Initially, the target population for the programming was young adults, specifically those under the age of 30 who were ex-offenders, were unemployed or underemployed, and were living in McElderry Park. However, there was no dedicated relationship with the criminal justice agencies to “push” ideal candidates in the  A full report on the results of Year 2 implementation can be found online “McElderry Park Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Grant Final Report for Year 2 Funding (2014–2015)” http://www. bniajfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/BCJI%20Year%202%20Report%20FINAL.pdf. 8

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neighborhood toward this new opportunity. Neither program turned away any resident that sought skills training. Consequently, the final number of persons who completed the intake process was higher than the initial goal (32 persons versus the target number of 27). The percentage of persons on parole or probation was much lower than initially projected. In the first cohort of program participants, none fit the ex-offender criteria; in the second cohort, only 13% of participants were on parole or probation. Furthermore, none of the program participants had arrests in the previous calendar year prior to involvement with Jericho Reentry or Digit All Systems. The target goal of program participants entering the workforce after training with Jericho and Digit All Systems was 60%; however, only 28% had actually found employment by the end of BCJI Year 2. Regardless, all program participants completed Jericho Reentry’s job readiness programming which prepared job seekers with skills for resume construction and development and provided social service referrals to all participants. For Digit All System’s A+ technical certification program, a goal was set of 80% coursework completion rate; by the end of the Year 2 programming, only 71% of program participants in both cohorts had attended and completed the course. The noticeable lack of positive outcomes became a source of community frustration during neighborhood meetings, and as a result, no workforce training programs were funded in the subsequent year (see Fig. 2.2). From a research perspective, the lack of results from the workforce training was evident from the start, but the fact

Fig. 2.2  Overview of implementation strategies for Year 3 of the BCJI Grant in Baltimore

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that the community tried and learned themselves is far more valuable for longer-­ term resilience to future opportunities.

Key Takeaways The two main challenges of the distributed model approach were overall program coordination and data collection. Coordination and clear communication about the programs with participants as well as the broader community was challenging but was spearheaded by the dedicated MOCJ staff member in the neighborhood. Staff from each of the programs came to community meetings and coordination meetings to build a relationship with the community and between organizations. Tracking data for so many programs, each at various levels of data collection capacity, was also difficult for the individual programs as well as the research team. Some were not equipped to track key performance indicators (e.g., attendance); some did not have access to a computer during the program operation to record participant data (e.g., Jericho). It should also be noted that BCJI funding represents a small fraction of the total resources available to the neighborhood. Not only did the 8 programs themselves leverage BCJI funding from other sources, but many of the other 62 strategies listed during the planning phase had been implemented through other means altogether. Both the local and national context for police community relations during the time of this work certainly influenced the overall neighborhood outcomes. Even though McElderry Park was not the epicenter of incidents of civil unrest that manifested in Baltimore in April 2015, due to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, the neighborhood did experience vandalism,9 particularly for the businesses along the northern boundary (Monument Street), and an overall increase in shootings and burglaries. Funded programs were disrupted in April and May 2015 during the waning months of the program’s second year. The capacity of the neighborhood to nonetheless remain on course to plan for Year 3 BCJI programming is testament to their resilience. For the third and final year of the BCJI funded portion of the program, the residents of McElderry Park eliminated workforce training as a focus and instead selected activities that increased community building, community outreach, and youth engagement. Based on the need for greater coordination identified in the previous year, the funded programs were nested within working “collaboratives” which met monthly to share successes, receive neighborhood data updates, and identify opportunities for collaboration. By structuring the meetings around shared intended outcomes, the funded programs were able to work together for a more impactful, targeted effect in the neighborhood. The proposed logic model below (see Fig. 2.2) places the funded programs in context for how they could contribute to crime 9  Data Visualization of businesses hit by vandalism during the Baltimore uprising, Baltimore Sun http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/vandalism-map/

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reduction and the role that the BNIA/SCJ team played to track neighborhood data metrics, provide technical assistance to the programs, and survey residents to measure collective efficacy. The BCJI model in McElderry Park operated according to a very unique, dispersed approach that was largely spearheaded by the community and the dedicated Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice staff person located in the community. A community-­led process determined the allocation of implementation funds, and while other city agencies were supportive, their role in the decision-making was very much passive.

Assessing Collective Efficacy The community-led planning process revealed the desire by residents to engage in relatively low-cost but highly inclusive “neighborly” activities, such as community potlucks or the creation of a community newsletter. The relationship between these kinds of activities and reduction in crime lies in the ability to build social capital and trust within the neighborhood The importance of social ties and bonding to control social disorderliness and reduce crime is explained by the term collective efficacy (Bandura 1975), which is defined as the relationships of a group that lead to trust and the shared expectation to intervene and control behaviors within an environment (Sampson et al. 1997; Sampson and Raudenbush 1999). Therefore, while not a part of the original evaluation plan, it became clear that the evaluation approach should focus on calculating and tracking measures of collective efficacy as overarching evidence of BCJI funding impact. In an effort to capture changes in engagement and involvement, a randomized community survey was conducted across two time periods (one in 2015 and the second in 2016). The survey not only was aimed at understanding how people interact with one another and participate in community activities but also included questions that relate to perceived safety and satisfaction with police services (Iyer et  al. 2016 describes technical details about the survey).

Survey Results Demographics The majority of participants in both years were female (61% in 2015, 55% in 2016), African American (77% in 2015, 75% in 2016), and over the age of 35 (56% in 2015, 63% in 2016). Fifty-six percent were employed full-time or part-time in 2015, compared to 44% in 2016. In 2015, 75% of participants rented their home compared to 60% in 2016. In 2015, 51% of participants reported planning to stay in the

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neighborhood for a long time (compared to 58% in 2016). The average time living in the neighborhood in 2015 was 9.6 years compared to 12.2 in 2016. Neighborhood Participation Based on survey responses, neighborhood participation in local activities and programs was very low in 2015 and 2016. Overall participation in the neighborhood was low but seemed to slightly improve in certain areas in 2016 (see Fig.  2.3). Residents were asked about their activity in the neighborhood over the past year. In 2015, 67% of participants reported they did not stop by the McElderry Park Resource Center, compared to 51% in 2016. In 2015, the majority (85%) reported not attending any Community Association Meetings, compared to 65% in 2016. When asked about participation in religious services, 76% reported they did not attend a religious service in 2015, compared to 54% in 2016. In 2015, 63% of participants did not read the neighborhood newsletter – the McElderry Park Star. In the following year, 39% reported that they did not read it, and 44% read it more than once. Seventy-three percent reported they did not attend a job training session in 2015, and in 2016, 74% reported not participating. Volunteering in the neighborhood was also very low during both years (78% reporting no volunteer participation in 2015, and 73% did not volunteer in 2016). Neighborhood Trust (Social Cohesion) Respondents were asked questions about how well people get along in the neighborhood. The questions were designed to measure trust and cohesiveness (see Fig. 2.4). The majority of the participants agreed that they were willing to help their neighbors (67% in 2015 and 61% in 2016). There were lower levels of agreement to the

2015 84.8

90.0 80.0 70.0 60.0 50.0

2016 79.7

75.9 67.1

65.2 53.6

50.9

73.2

63.3 50.6

45.5

40.0

39.3

30.0 20.0 10.0 0.0

Stopped by resource center

Attended a CA meeting

Attended a Attended a social Read community religious service event newsletter

Fig. 2.3  Likelihood to participate in neighborhood activities

Volunteer in neighborhood

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items “people in the neighborhood can be trusted” (29% in 2015 and 36% in 2016). There were two negative items in this section that also resulted in low levels of agreement. The first negative item was “people in the neighborhood generally don’t get along” (27% in 2015, and 26% in 2016), and the second negative item was “people in the neighborhood do not share the same values” (37% in 2015, and 31% in 2016). In 2015, 38% of the participants agreed to the statement that “this is a close-knit neighborhood,” with 46% in agreement in 2016. A similar item “people in the neighborhood are generally friendly” had higher levels of agreement with 66% agreeing in 2015 and 67% in 2016. In 2015, most participants (81%) agreed that they could recognize most people living in the neighborhood, compared to 70% in 2016. In both years, residents consistently agreed to “regularly stopping to talk to neighbors” (65% in 2015 and 63% in 2016) and feeling “happy to live here” (61% in both years). Community Involvement (Social Capital) The results of the community involvement section of the survey varied slightly from 2015 to 2016; however, the agreement level of all survey items was relatively under 50% (see Fig. 2.5). For example, in 2015, 33% of participants agreed that they could count on someone in the neighborhood for extra help, and in 2016, 45% agreed to this statement. When asked about willingness to exchange favors with neighbors, 48% agreed in 2015 with only 36% agreeing the following year. When asked “I would ask a neighbor for help if someone in a family was seriously ill,” 38% agreed in 2015, and 40% in 2016. In 2015, 47% agreed they would get together to help if something unfortunate happened, and 53% agreed in 2016. The level of agreement was low when asking whether the neighborhood was a great place to live for young people (33% in 2015 and 36% in 2016) and senior citizens (39% in 2015 and 43% in 2016).

2015

2016

90.0 80.0 70.0 60.0 50.0 40.0

81.0 67.1

65.8 67.0

61.6

38.0

69.6

65.0 63.4

60.8 60.7

45.5 29.1

30.0

35.7

30.4

37.5

20.0 10.0 0.0

Willing to help Close-knit neighbors neighborhood

Can be trusted

Solve problems Generally together friendly

Fig. 2.4  Agreement with neighborhood trust items

Recognize Regularly stop Happy to live most people to talk here

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2016

60.0 50.0 40.0

44.6

48.1

46.8 38.0

35.7

32.9

52.7

40.2

30.0 20.0 10.0 0.0

can count on neighbors to help with daily tasks

exchange favors with neighbors

If seriously ill, we would ask If something unfortunate for help happened, everyone would help

Fig. 2.5  Agreement to helping neighbors

Willingness to Intervene (Social Control) Residents were also asked “how likely” it is that neighbors would do something about the following situations. The results indicate that residents are likely to intervene during some instances of crime and disorder, but not others. For example, in 2016, the majority (51%) responded that they would intervene if “youth were skipping school and hanging out on the street corner.” However, in 2015, only 46% agreed. There was consistent agreement across the 2 years on intervening if “youth were showing disrespect to an adult” (62% in 2015 and 61% in 2016) and on the item “someone was using a vacant house for drug dealing” (49% in both years). Also consistent was intervening if “a fight broke out in the neighborhood” (53% in 2015 and 51% in 2016). There was a shift in agreement to several items including intervening if “someone in the neighborhood was firing a gun” (42% in 2015 and 58% in 2016), intervening if “someone in the neighborhood was selling drugs” (46% in 2015 and 57% in 2016), intervening if “someone was illegally dumping trash on the block” (57% in 2015 and 75% in 2016), and intervening if “someone was trying to break into a house on the block” (54% in 2015 and 61% in 2016) (Fig. 2.6). Changing Attitudes Over Time In order to examine variation in neighbors’ view toward four attitudinal dimensions (i.e., neighborhood trust, community involvement, community intervention, and police satisfaction), both survey waves were combined for a total of 191 participants. Two types of multivariate regression analyses, ordinary least squares (OLS) and ordinal logistic regression, were performed to estimate the relationship between collective efficacy measures and receptiveness to community policing and police response. The analysis yielded several interesting findings related

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2016 74.5

80.0 70.0

61.8

60.0 50.0

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45.5

61.0

50.9

52.6

57.5

51.0 41.9

57.0 46.1

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40.0 30.0 20.0 10.0 0.0 Youth were Youth were skipping disrespecting school/hanging an adult on corner

A fight broke Someone firing Someone out a gun selling drugs

Someone Someone using Someone breaking into a vacant house illegally for drug dealing a house dumping trash

Fig. 2.6  Willingness to intervene

to residents’ degree of social cohesion, homeownership status, and age. Residents with greater social cohesion (i.e., higher levels of trust) had more favorable attitudes toward police response and greater support for community policing and were more likely to report satisfaction with police services in their neighborhood. Residents who rent their homes were less likely to have a positive perception of police response. While younger respondents view police response time more positively, they are also more likely to report negative encounters with police and are also less likely to be satisfied with the quality of police services in the neighborhood (see Cantora et al. 2019).

Key Takeaways Overall, across each of the domains of collective efficacy, there were clear measures of positive results. The combination of greater attendance at community meetings, more positive news about the neighborhood, and willingness to help neighbors and to intervene in the case of illegal dumping all contribute to the sense of “neighborliness” that the community strove to achieve during the planning phase. The two waves of administering the survey provided quantifiable measures of how the community of McElderry Park increased the sense of collective efficacy, precisely through engagement with the kinds of programs that were funded through the BCJI grant. Neighborhood trust is most evident in residents’ attitudes toward community policing, police response, and the satisfaction with the police services in the neighborhood. Neighborhoods where residents know, help, and trust each other are more likely to agree with community policing approach, have more positive experience with police response, and are overall more satisfied with the police services.

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Data Sharing and Community-Based Technical Assistance The third prong of the BCJI strategy in Baltimore involved the nature of data sharing and technical assistance that the embedded research partners were able to provide on an ongoing basis over the 3-year grant period. Given the role played by the research team as an embedded evaluator providing both formative results (data that could be used to inform the project during implementation itself) and cumulative results, the research team took a broad, multi-method evaluation approach for this project, to help identify impacts at various scales.

Neighborhood Data As part of BNIA’s role in the project, quantitative measures of neighborhood context and change regarding demographics, socioeconomic status, housing, education, cleanliness, and crime were routinely provided to the neighborhood groups and funded programs. Several measurable neighborhood indicators that most directly measure the impact of evidence-based practices for crime reduction were calculated at the neighborhood scale to reflect overall collective impact on key outcomes (see Table 2.2). The results of those findings were grouped together to align with the main collaborative areas (see Fig. 2.2): community building and outreach and youth engagement. For the purposes of analysis, the metrics identified for the collaboratives were based on more general neighborhood measures rather than specific program performance. The organizations were working toward overarching goals of increasing community cohesion and collective efficacy, broadening Latino community outreach, working toward a cleaner community and engaging youth in the neighborhood. The community was provided a final summary that could be used for future programming (Table 2.3).

Analysis of Crime Hot Spots The other major component of data analysis for the community was specified by the BCJI grant for identification of crime hot spots. Cohen and Felson (1979) identify three factors that lead to predatory crime incidents: the presence of offenders, vulnerable targets, and the absence of a capable guardian or influence to dissuade violations. Determining the spatial distribution of crime events in McElderry Park was crucial to understanding the places of opportunity in the neighborhood where crime reduction strategies would have the most impact. While the neighborhood itself exhibited Part 1 incident rates higher than that of Baltimore City, identifying hot spots within the neighborhood with similar types

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Table 2.3  Summary of trends in outcome indicators for the McElderry Park neighborhood (2016) Strategy Community building and outreach

Key metric Increase the number of calls to CitiStat (311) to report illegal dumping, unsanitary residential properties, dirty streets, dirty alleys, and clogged storm drains Increase the number of residents visiting the McElderry Park Resource Center Increase the number of residents reading the McElderry Park Star newspaper Increase the number of residents likely to intervene if someone was illegally dumping trash, someone was firing a weapon, or if someone was selling drugs Increase the number of block captains

Trends

Increase attendance at monthly McElderry Park Community Association meetings Reduce the number of crimes occurring in hot spot areas Youth engagement

Reduce the number of juvenile arrests Reduce levels of chronic absenteeism for high school students Increase job opportunities for young adults Reduce the number of shootings and homicides

Arrows indicate values for metrics increasing or decreasing.

Positive trend,

negative trend

of crime would be the most useful for targeted prevention and reduction strategies. Theories of repeat victimization indicate that not only individual persons but also places, such as commercial properties, dwellings, or gathering spots, may be vulnerable for transgressions and suitable for direct problem-oriented policing (Farrell and Sousa 2001) and crime reduction strategies. For the purposes of BCJI, a highly localized hot spot analysis could provide guidance for implementing funded strategies, and examining crime data over time could provide indications of program success. The locations of Part 1 crime incidents, obtained from the Baltimore City Police Department, were mapped using geographic information systems (GIS). This data was analyzed longitudinally, initially from 2000 to 2012 at the start of the BCJI program and later from 2013 through 2016 during the duration of funding. The purpose of the longitudinal analysis was to identify overall trends within McElderry Park and to understand the neighborhood’s trajectory at the start of program funding. A total of 18 long-term chronic hot spots of crime, areas with at least 4 years of consistent hot spots, were identified during the initial analysis (see Iyer et al. 2015 for details on hot spot methodology). Other hot spots appeared temporarily and did not last longer than a few months to a year.

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Fig. 2.7  BCJI Year 3 hot spots

Knowing the locations of both long-term chronic and temporary hot spots allowed the community and funded programs to offer varying opportunities to address safety concerns. In the map below, which indicates hot spots during the last phase of BCJI, violent offenses are highlighted in red and overlaid with property offenses (blue). Areas of purple are overlapping areas that are hot spots for both types of offenses (Fig. 2.7).

Chronic Hot Spot Profiles The 18 chronic hot spots in the neighborhood exhibited similarities between the crimes committed in the hot spots and the physical neighborhood conditions. Three distinct types of hot spots emerged: specific businesses along commercial corridors, residential areas with blighted properties, and well-known public spaces (Table 2.4). Commercial Business-Adjacent Hot Spots Four hot spots were contained along the busy commercial corridor of the East Monument Main Street along the northern boundary of the neighborhood. Because of the high concentration of commercial businesses, this street contains

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Table 2.4  Types of Chronic hot spot locations in McElderry Park Commercial business-adjacent Residential property-adjacent Public places of opportunity Other hot spots

Main types of crimes Robbery, larceny Burglary, aggravated assault Mix of violent and property crimes Mix of violent and property crimes

heavy foot and vehicular traffic and serves as the eastbound route for the local bus line. The corridor is populated with a variety of businesses such as food stores and delis, small retail shops, liquor stores, beauty salons and barbershops, and pawnshops. Opportunities for property-based crimes such as robbery and larceny-shoplifting were problematic in some of the stores. Aggravated assaults are also commonplace, and the distribution of assault cases may just correlate to areas of high population density. An analysis of data reveals that this category of hot spots was the site of many 911 calls for service for narcotics and juvenile arrests. Vacant Property-Adjacent Hot Spots Five hot spots were located in residential areas in the northeastern portion of the McElderry Park neighborhood. Based on data from housing code violations and 311 calls for service, the nearby blight takes the form of vacant and uninhabitable housing and considerable amounts of trash in the street, sidewalks, and nearby alleyways. Additionally, these blighted blocks have few streetlights. The darkness, coupled with the low occupancy rates, suggest that the vacant houses may provide cover for illicit activities. Furthermore, the narrow design of the alleyways to and from these blocks may provide discreet paths of travel. The crimes that occurred at these hot spot locations were varied in that there was a mix of both violent and property crimes, particularly aggravated assaults, burglaries, and larcenies. Unlike the commercial-adjacent hot spots, these areas had fewer 911 calls for narcotics. Public Places of Opportunity and Other Hot Spots As seen with the number of crime hot spots in and around commercial properties, locations of high population density where people can congregate can be predictive of criminal activity. Other public places such as around the library or public schools in McElderry Park experienced a mixture of violent and property crimes since 2000. Opportunities for crime exist in these hot spots from the high daytime population density and the reduced nighttime surveillance of the nearby parking areas, playgrounds, and green space. High concentrations of thefts and personal

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(noncommercial) robberies are the primary forms of crime occurring in these locations at and adjacent to the schools and library. These hot spots were associated with a substantial amount of 911 calls for service for narcotics and an increasing number of drug-­related juvenile arrests.

Asset Mapping The final data product provided to the community over the course of the BCJI grant was an interactive asset mapping tool. The original process for collecting data for the map relied on business databases (InfoUSA) in the BNIA repository as well as resident input at community meetings. Using ESRI ArcGIS Online as the map platform, the new asset map contains data that was collected in the field by BNIA-JFI staff. Data for the asset map was assigned to one of the following categories: places of worship, retails and services, grocery and deli, community organizations and nonprofits, health care services, education, community-managed open spaces, banks, and CitiWatch cameras. Residents were shown how to use the online McElderry Park Data Viewer both at the monthly community association meetings and at the program collaborative meetings. Training sessions were held in the neighborhood intended to not only inform residents, stakeholders, and BCJI funded programs about the data and how to access the online resources but also gather feedback about how to improve the data presented online and to improve the interactive map’s usability. Given that all interested parties may not have been able to attend the training sessions, a 10-­minute walkthrough video10 was created and posted on YouTube which detailed how to use the online map. Community leaders were additionally trained on the functionality of the mapping tool including how to download and display updated or additional data.

Key Takeaways Although the Baltimore project emphasized data-informed and evidence-based practice, the ability to use data was based on both the desire on the part of the stakeholders and the ability to deploy adequate resources to address the issues the data illuminated. In short, this is difficult work, and there were very few examples of the use of data by a broad set of stakeholders throughout the project. Significant time was spent ground-truthing data both for the survey implementation and during code enforcement walks with inspectors from Housing to confirm that CitiStat calls from the neighborhood lined up spatially with problems

  McElderry Park Data Viewer Walkthrough (video resource) https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1ZqaRfJSQoc

10

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on the ground. BNIA provided quarterly crime statistics and shared data findings at many program collaborative meetings. Members of the BCJI executive team were trained on all indicator sources, definitions, and calculation methods so they could update the neighborhood profile and interactive map portal beyond the duration of the grant. One example of use by a funded partner was Banner Neighborhoods, a community-­based organization that extensively used data and technical assistance from the research partners to inform their programming. The types of projects their neighborhood block captains could use for funding were directly related to the evidence-­based analysis of practices provided to the community during the planning phase. The group also requested a custom analysis of the CitiStat data from Open Baltimore to analyze locations with high rates of complaints of broken street lights, so they could consider using remaining funds on installing porch lights which have been shown to be effective in decreasing crime. Additionally, they have requested locations of illegal dumping near hot spots and are working with the City to place a new CitiWatch camera in the neighborhood.

Conclusions As one of the first neighborhoods chosen for the BCJI grant, McElderry Park provides an important case for localizing the comprehensive intent of the innovative approach. The main lesson from the Baltimore BCJI case is that the community-led process focused efforts on improving quality of life in the neighborhood overall; reduction in crime was only one aspect of that overall desire. The approach to setting priorities in the neighborhood between the first year of planning and the subsequent years of implementation was primarily community-led and community-driven. The three-pronged approach to the project, implemented by many different stakeholders in the neighborhood, led to effective outcomes. The first prong revolved around the community planning process. Given the democratic process for deciding the programs and strategies initially funded through BCJI, it may not be surprising that they were not necessarily chosen based on strength of evidence for crime reduction. Only after experiencing the vagaries of implementation did the community focus on more evidence-based practices; perhaps, seeing really is believing and should be considered for future funding opportunities. In this respect, the learning that occurred in the community was invaluable. The fact that the community was empowered to jointly establish a framework with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice for distribution of BCJI funds contributed to the sense of collective efficacy in the neighborhood. The second key element was the measurement of collective efficacy in the neighborhood over time. From the results in Baltimore, neighborhood trust is most evident in residents’ attitudes toward community policing, police

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response, and satisfaction with the police services in the neighborhood. Neighborhoods where residents know, help, and trust each other are more likely to agree with community policing approach, have more positive experience with police response, and are overall more satisfied with the police services. The final innovative element of the BCJI grant was the requirement of having embedded research partners throughout the process. Having continuous access to technical assistance, hot spot analysis, crime data, and other quantitative measures allowed the multi-stakeholder groups to adjust their tactics and the measures midstream if no change was evident. Many of the desired outcomes, including reduction in homicides, occurred in McElderry Park precisely during a time in urban America of civil unrest and rise in violence. In the final analysis, the Baltimore case strengthens the argument for comprehensive, community-based, and data-driven approaches to sustained urban crime reduction. Acknowledgments  This project was supported by Grant No. 2012-AJ-BX-0014 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Office for Victims of Crime, and the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

References Bandura, A. (1975). The ethics and social purposes of behavior modification. In C. M. Franks & G. T. Wilson (Eds.), Annual review of behavior therapy theory and practice (Vol. 3). New York: Brunner/Mazel. Cantora, A., Iyer, S., & Restivo, L. (2015). Understanding drivers of crime in urban neighborhoods: Resident perceptions of why crime persists. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-015-9314-6. Cantora, A., Wasileski, G., Iyer, S., & Restivo, L. (2019). Examining collective efficacy and perceptions of policing in East Baltimore. Crime Prevention and Community Safety. https://doi. org/10.1057/s41300-019-00065-7. Cohen, L., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44(4), 588–608. Farrell, G., & Sousa, W. (2001). Repeat victimization and hot spots: The overlap and its implications for crime control and problem-oriented policing. Crime Prevention Studies, 12, 221–240. Iyer, S., Knott, C., & Cantora, A. (2013). McElderry Park: Community plan for crime reduction. Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, Jacob France Institute, University of Baltimore. http://www.bniajfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/McElderry-Park-BCJI-Plan-Year-1Final.pdf. Iyer, S., Knott, C., & Cantora, A. (2015). McElderry Park: Byrne criminal justice innovation Grant. Final report for year 2 funding (2014–2015). Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, Jacob France Institute, University of Baltimore. http://www.bniajfi.org/wp-content/ uploads/2016/05/BCJI%20Year%202%20Report%20FINAL.pdf.

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Iyer, S., Knott, C., & Cantora, A. (2016). McElderry Park: Byrne criminal justice innovation grant. Final report for year 3 funding (2015–2016). Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, Jacob France Institute, University of Baltimore. http://bniajfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ BCJI-Year-3-Report.pdf. Sampson, R., & Raudenbush, S. (1999). Systematic social observation of public spaces: A new look at disorder in urban neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 603–651. Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277, 918–924.

Chapter 3

A Community-Based Response to the Opioid-Epidemic-Linked Crime in Dayton, Ohio Brian John, Amanda Arrington, Jan LePore-Jentelson, and Richard Stock

Introduction The city of Dayton, located in the southwestern region of the state of Ohio, has a population of approximately 140,000. This small city, once the home to a bustling set of industries centered on a robust US Air Force installation, topped out in population in 1960 at just over 262,000. Like many cities in the United States that have gone through industrial decline and mass suburbanization, it has witnessed a steady increase in low-income population and a decrease in resources to address growing social and economic problems. At the same time, the city has made efforts to revitalize its downtown, rebuild its economic base, and invest its finite resources more strategically into solving problems such as crime and urban blight. It is under these conditions that Dayton received a BCJI grant in 2013. Working through a broad coalition of city agencies, community-based organizations, and university research partners, the partnership focused its efforts on a high-need geography in East Dayton. The community and problem-oriented policing partnership that emerged from the BCJI planning process was ultimately organized around four core crime reduction strategies: (1) a bike patrol that would engage in traditional community policing, (2) an anti-graffiti effort that would involve local youth in producing art murals, (3) a nonenforcement engagement with opioid addicts who were viewed as B. John Dayton Police Department, Dayton, OH, USA A. Arrington Dayton Metro Library, Dayton, OH, USA J. LePore-Jentelson East End Community Services of Dayton, Dayton, OH, USA R. Stock (*) University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. J. Stokes, C. Gill (eds.), Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43635-3_3

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local drivers of property crimes in the area, and (4) an engagement and outreach effort directed toward illegal sex workers in the community. While the BCJI program pursued in East Dayton was comprehensive, this chapter is focused on one particular intervention: a nonenforcement engagement effort with opioid addicts. Early in the planning process, the planning group recognized the role of opioid addiction as a key driver of property crime in the target area. A wide coalition of community institutions led by the Dayton Police Department (DPD) and East End Community Services (EECS), an established neighborhood-based social service organization, decided on a strategy of engaging opioid addicts through a nonenforcement program centered on opiate education and recovery options. The intervention involved inviting known opiate addicts and their families to a short session that utilized peers in recovery, opiate recovery specialists, and mediators trained in motivational interviewing techniques (abbreviated below as M.I.). Acknowledging the difficulty in getting active opioid abusers to attend and meaningfully engage in the program, participation inducements were designed. These included free prescription access and training in the use of naloxone (Narcan), a drug that can prevent overdose in opioid abusers. The key metrics used to gauge program success were output based (e.g., the number of participants seeking substance abuse treatment) as well as outcome based (e.g., property crime and drug-­ related violations).

 rogram Setting: East Dayton’s Neighborhood P Revitalization Zone The Neighborhood Revitalization Zone (NRZ) is a low-income area to the immediate east of Dayton’s downtown area. It is home to approximately 15,000 residents. Demographically, the area is mostly white (81%) and has a relatively high family poverty rate of 39% and a low median household income of $25,860. Almost a quarter of the area’s adult population (23%) failed to earn at least a high school diploma, and 16% had a bachelor’s degree or higher. Slightly more than one-third of households (35%) were single-parent female-headed households.1 Almost all housing in the area is composed of single family or duplexes – however, only 35% of the area’s housing units were owner occupied, with a vacancy rate of 22% due in part to the subprime foreclosure crisis in the early 2000s.2 The neighborhood is split in two by a four-lane divided highway (US Hwy 35), with limited through access, effectively cutting off the north and south sides of this traditionally intact community (see Fig. 3.1). In the northern portion of the area, the major east-west arterial street (3rd Street) leading out of downtown has an aging commercial strip with high levels of commercial vacancies that stretch over a  American Community Survey (2016) 5-year estimates.  American Community Survey (2016) 5-year estimates.

1 2

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Fig. 3.1  Map of neighborhood revitalization zone

20-block area. The southern portion of the area also contains a denuded and vacant commercial strip along another major east-west street (Xenia Avenue). This is the area where EECS’s offices are located.

The BCJI Partnership in Dayton The EECS The lead community organization and the fiscal agent in this work, the EECS, has actively worked for many years across a variety of revitalization and public service areas in the southern portion of the NRZ with a variety of community partners. It had previously led a successful housing redevelopment effort, negotiated site control of a new local public school (folding their own charter school into the new facility), and provided a variety of services to local residents including a successful after-school program. It had substantial experience working with the neighborhood associations in the southern portion but had less experience working with residents in the northern portion of the NRZ. The executive director of the EECS, a former head of housing inspections for the City of Dayton, had worked closely with a wide variety of neighborhood associations to assist in community improvement efforts.

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She possessed a deep understanding of the community’s decline, exacerbated by the deep job losses of the early 2000s. The primary lead at the EECS had spent the bulk of her career in a citizen engagement role with the City of Dayton and was thus expert at working with citizens and public service providers. In addition, she is a trained mediator with an intimate understanding of how community mediation processes worked.

DPD Another key partner in this work has been the DPD. The lead for the DPD in the BCJI was a DPD Major in charge of East Patrol Operations (EPOD). His prior experience with the vice division provided some key insights in the problems related to the illegal sex trade, which was a significant local disorder issue. In addition, he had a practical understanding of the relationship between heroin addiction and the property crime problem. At the start of the BCJI planning process, the DPD already had a sophisticated process in place to identify and address hot spot crimes, repeat call locations, and other community problems. What the DPD did not initially have – but quickly addressed – was the observational evidence that the opioid epidemic was largely driving the property crime problem in the area.

The Research Partner The local researcher, an expert on addiction, had recently conducted the latest countywide substance abuse needs assessment report and had an intimate understanding of the rapid increase in opioid addictions in the NRZ. In addition, in his role as an outside evaluator for the local substance abuse and mental health agency, he understood the increased emphasis placed in recent years on M.I. as an important step in a process known as Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) process. The research partner had access to crime and social data, as well as medical claims data that permitted documenting the prior behavioral health access of those who had died of drug overdoses. In addition to the content expertise each Dayton BCJI partner brought to the effort, each member brought a deep and well-established set of professional connections from across the city government and other institutional players. These prior connections were of key importance as the planning process unfolded. The DPD partner had established close connections with some of the advocate organizations for sex workers and had served on a problem-solving group that was known locally as the Prostitution Initiative Collaborative. The EECS lead served on the Dayton Board of Public Health and had numerous contacts throughout the community tied to her leadership role in the nonprofit sector. EECS’s community service director had substantial contacts in city government and had a close relationship with the

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head of the Dayton Mediation Center, which would become an important implementation partner later in the process. The local researcher had been involved in evaluation efforts with a wide variety of local governments and institutional partners including the local hospitals. Most importantly, he had established relationships with key people within the local substance abuse and mental health agency charged with developing strategies to counter the opioid epidemic.

The Preliminary Analysis of Data Initial planning sessions were held with local neighborhood associations, interested citizens, former addicts, the EECS, the DPD, and the local researcher. As an initial contribution to the planning process, the local researcher analyzed, tabulated, and where appropriate mapped several data series, including the following: 1. Annual NIBRS crime rate data by category (2008–2013) for the city, the revitalization zone, and individual neighborhoods within the revitalization zone 2. Juvenile felony arrests/crimes (2008–2013) geocoded and mapped to the block level 3. Dispatch call data (2012–2013) for major categories (disorder, drug activity, overdose calls, prostitution complaints, theft), geocoded and aggregated/mapped to the block level 4. County- and zip code–level data for poison deaths (2010–2012) 5. Opioid-linked poison deaths (2013–2014) geocoded and mapped to the address level 6. Dayton Fire Department overdose calls for service by neighborhood (2012–2013) In addition, the DPD provided hot spot maps for the revitalization zone and maps of drug overdose call for service and police response (2012–2013).

Crime Data Property crime declined for the City of Dayton (−23%) and the NRZ (−31%) over the five-year period prior to the BCJI process (2008–2013). Relatively, the share of NRZ property crimes to citywide totals decreased slightly over the same period going from 9.7% to 8.7% of citywide totals.3 The decline in the property crime rate held true as well for the city and the NRZ for drug-related violations (drug/narcotic violations and drug equipment violations) for the period from 2008 to 2012. However, for both the city overall and the NRZ, there was an abrupt rise in drug-related violations from 2012 to 2013 (+21% and

 The NRZ target area contains 10.6% of the citywide population.

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+ 51%, respectively). The NRZ share of drug-related violations increased from 5% to 7% from 2008 to 2013 (Table 3.1).

Juvenile Crime Data Juvenile felony arrests evidenced a similar pattern of decline from 2008 to 2012 in the NRZ. Property crimes committed by juveniles were down by almost half (49%), while drug violations were down by 58%. Although the block-level maps suggested some concentration of juveniles with felony arrests in the NRZ area south of US Hwy 35, there were also juveniles with felonies scattered through the NRZ area north of highway dividing line (Table 3.2).

Dispatch Call Data and Mapping The police provided dispatch call data for the period from June 2012 to July 2013 for the NRZ area which revealed the location, type, and amplitude of citizen calls to the police. Initial analysis of the citizen-initiated call data indicated theft (1273 calls) and disorderly person and no physical violence (1008) were the most frequent call categories – followed by welfare check (899), suspicious circumstance (825), and suspicious person (780). The research partner mapped dispatch call data to look for geographic variation across the NRZ. The dispatch calls associated with theft were widely distributed across both residential blocks and commercial strips and the far northern small manufacturing street. The dispatch calls associated with disorder4 were widely distributed across both residential blocks and commercial strips, exhibiting only slightly greater density along the two major commercial strips. Perhaps most revealing was that the dispatch calls associated with drug activity came from every block in the NRZ, rendering hot spot enforcement approaches less viable. There was a concentration along one section of the northern commercial strip well known as an area for open drug sales. Finally, as with the drug activity dispatch calls, overdose dispatch calls were distributed across the NRZ. There were slight clusters along sections of the north and south commercial strips, as well as around an apartment complex on the northeast end of the NRZ. Dispatch call data linked to overdoses and drug activity suggested a far wider distribution of activity than Hibdon and Groff (2014) had found in their analysis of drug-related EMS calls and drug crimes (Fig. 3.2).

 This offense group includes disorderly person, noise, fight in progress, drunkenness, and disorderly group.

4

Crimes against property City of Dayton Annual percent change Neighborhood revitalization zone Annual percent change NRZ share of citywide crime Drug--related violations City of Dayton Annual percent change Neighborhood revitalization zone Annual percent change NRZ share of citywide crime 1905 −2% 99 1% 5.2%

1945

5.0%

98

9.7%

1807

17,741 −5% 1654 −8% 9.3%

2009

18,632

Year 2008

1670 −12% 104 5% 6.2%

17,712 0% 1551 −6% 8.8%

2010

1618 −3% 119 14% 7.4%

15,673 −12% 1554 0% 9.9%

2011

Table 3.1  Property and drug violation crimes, City of Dayton and NRZ (2008–2013)

1493 −8% 84 −29% 5.6%

15,681 0% 1410 −9% 9.0%

2012

1808 21% 127 51% 7.0%

14,334 −9% 1251 −11% 8.7%

2013

29.6%

−7.0%

−30.8%

−23.1%

Percent change, 2008–2013

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Table 3.2  Count of crimes associated with all juvenile felony arrests, NRZ (2008–2012) NIBRS category Part 1 property crime Drug/narcotic violations

Year 2008 92 55

2009 84 33

2010 61 26

2011 58 18

2012 Percent decline 2008–2012 47 −48.9% 23 −58.2%

Fig. 3.2  Overdose calls for service (2012–2013)

Overdose Deaths Data In mid-2013, the community was already alarmed by the rapid increases in poison overdose deaths tied to heroin from 130 in 2011 to 162 in 2012 (see Table 3.3). In addition, there was a transition occurring from prescription opioids to heroin as the so-called pill mills were closed down by the state.5 While the percent of poison deaths linked to any opioid had stayed relatively constant over the 3-year period, the percent linked to heroin had risen. Data from the early part of 2013 suggested the

5  Ohio Rev. Code Ann. §4731.054 (2011) sought to regulate pain management clinics that, prior to the law, had little oversight, with many selling opioid pills, for cash, without requiring an examination. Also, see Brighthaupt et al. (2019) for an assessment of the law’s impact on overdose rates in Ohio.

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3  A Community-Based Response to the Opioid-Epidemic-Linked Crime in Dayton… Table 3.3  Poison death data at time of initial grant planning process Geographic area County NRZ Year

Population 535,123 14,342 Number of poison deaths

2010 2011 2012

127 130 162

2010–2012 poison deaths 373 ~36 Percent of poison deaths Linked to heroin 31% 35% 59%

Rate per 100,000 70 251 Linked to any opioid 92% 88% 90%

Table 3.4  Poison overdose deaths: Montgomery County (2010–2018) Year Number of deaths

2010 127

2011 130

2012 162

2013 226

2014 264

2015 259

2016 351

2017 566

2018 294

overdose crisis was accelerating. The researcher provided initial calculations that demonstrated how much worse the situation was in the NRZ than for the county overall. While the poison death rate was 70 per 100,000 for the county, the estimated rate for the NRZ was 251 per 100,000, just under three and half times higher. To set the context of the growing issue of narcotic addition and overdose deaths, which coincided with the BCJI planning and implementation phases in 2012–2013, Table 3.4 documents the acceleration in poison deaths that started in 2012. Poison deaths in 2013 increased to 226 in 2013 and then to 264 in 2014. The increased availability and use of Narcan by police and friends/family of addicts appeared to stem the rise in 2015 to 259 only to be overwhelmed by the introduction of fentanyl to the area among drug users, which sent the number of deaths skyrocketing to 566 by 2017. As the community discussion deepened on the link between opioid addiction and criminal activity in early 2014, the researcher obtained address data for all poison deaths in the county from January 2013 to February 2014 to document the relatively high concentration in the NRZ and help build the case for additional funding from the local substance abuse and mental health agency (ADAMHS) to fund the intervention known as Conversations for Change. The maps provided both a visual reminder that while the problem was countywide, there were disproportionate concentrations in the NRZ. Data from the 911 call system, as well as emergency service calls routed by the Dayton Fire Department, triangulated these findings regarding the incidence of non-death-related drug overdoses in the NRZ.

Connecting the Opioid Addiction Crisis to Criminal Activity Early in the planning process, the DPD officer responsible for the NPZ reporting area asserted that much of the property crime in the area (e.g., shop lifting, theft, burglary) was linked to opioid addicts trying to generate money to support their

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drug habits. When the EECS lead asked him what data he had to back up his claim, he realized that there was no documentary trail other than case notes that linked particular criminal arrests to the addiction crisis. He then sent his detectives to backtrack and keep up-to-date information on whether people arrested for property crimes had some known involvement with drugs. The analysis concluded that in regard to solved Part 1 Property Crimes, 92% were committed by a suspect with a history of drug addiction over a 6-month period in 2013. This analysis was updated in early 2016. Over the period from 2013 to 2015, 72.7% of the prisoners processed for property-related crimes had drug histories.6 While this is telling, the fact is that most property crime goes unreported, and arrests for property crimes are rare, so the true base rate for the percentage of property crimes committed by opioid addicts is not known. As a part of this effort, the DPD created a database to track individuals in East Dayton involved in heroin or other opiates. This data was collected by both patrol officers and detectives investigating crime. There were three criteria for inclusion in the database: (1) arrest or involvement in a crime committed due to opiate addiction, (2) probation for an opiate-related crime, and (3) survival of an opiate overdose.

 ink of Drug-Related Crime Data and Poison Deaths to Prior L Substance Abuse Claims Taking the initial data from the DPD drug-related crime log, the researcher found that of the initial 60 names in the log, 46 had received prior substance abuse or mental health services based on claims data. As a follow-up, we connected the 555 coroner-verified poison deaths from 2011 2014 to the behavioral and mental health claims data for the county. More than 50% of those deaths (56.6%) were people who had sought treatment for behavioral or mental health over the prior decade. Of particular interest, many of those with prior treatment claims had only been treated for mental health issues, but not substance abuse.

Lessons Learned from the Initial Analysis While reported crime was falling, citizen complaints pointed to increased petty burglary and theft that were linked to drug users. The police were able to document the close relationship between solved property crimes and individuals with substance abuse problems. The local researcher documented the concentration of opioid-­ related poison deaths in the NRZ and linked the poison deaths with those committing drug-related crimes as well as those who received prior treatment for behavioral and/or mental health issues. Both property crime and prostitution-related crime

 Personal email communication from Brian John to Richard Stock, 4/1/2016.

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could be linked to the opioid epidemic. While there was some concentration of particular criminal activity along the two major east-west commercial streets, the impact of criminal activity was being felt in every block of the NRZ.

Applying Lessons from the Literature to Program Goals The local researcher’s initial understanding of their role based on the grant proposal and conversations with BCJI administrators was that they should (1) consider what could be learned from the literature on hot spot analysis that could be applied locally and (2) suggest an approach based on that review of the literature. Two things became quickly apparent: first, the literature had very little to say about what a community could do about property crime driven by a drug epidemic; second, the DPD already had realigned toward a problem-oriented policing approach and had already incorporated a sophisticated hot spot mapping tool as a part of that effort. Key findings from the relevant criminological literature were discussed in a series of planning meetings and email exchanges with key stakeholders – including the EECD director of community development and the DPD. Research from Seattle (Weisburd et al. 2011) had documented the relatively concentrated and stable nature of juvenile crime over a 14-year period in hot spot areas. Hibdon and Groff (2014) had documented the relatively concentrated nature of drug crime but noted that mapping drug-related EMS calls for service provided additional information on potential hot spots not uncovered by drug-crime-related data. Following these research implications for policy and program intervention in Dayton, we mapped dispatch call data; unlike in Seattle, we found a far more dispersed distribution of drug activities and overdose calls for service in the NRZ. We concluded that the entire NRZ could be considered a “hot spot.” Two articles suggested active engagement of offenders and their families could be a beneficial strategy. First, work by Kennedy and Wong (2009) documenting the police experience in Highpoint, North Carolina, suggested that assisting low-level offenders and their families, while reducing the use of formal sanctions for low-­ level offenders, could have a positive impact on decreasing drug-related crimes. Warner et al. (2010), writing about the evolution of Shaw and McKay’s social disorganization theory (1942) and linking it to more contemporary conceptions of restorative justice in the service of true community-based crime prevention, are quoted as suggesting the following: Social disorganization theory is built on the premise that neighbors can, and should, directly intervene in inappropriate neighborhood behavior, thereby clarifying and enforcing community norms, and strengthening the neighborhood against more serious criminal behavior. Moreover, they should do so in a manner that is ultimately supportive of all community members. Therefore, we argue that policies that are truly reflective of social disorganization theory would translate these ideas back to the community in terms of community-based programs for crime prevention (p. 360).

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The restorative justice element discussed in this broader work resonated with similar efforts in Dayton. If it made sense for the community to engage offenders and their families in a positive fashion, what was the best approach to engage and assist them? The local researcher suggested there were two possibly fruitful goals that the team could rally around, which included the reduction in overdose deaths and, relatedly, the reduction in opioid addiction. To reduce overdose deaths, the researcher suggested that there might be several ways to increase Narcan use. For example, the literature had indicated many overdoses were associated with recent abstinence due to time inside jail (Strang et al. 2013). Some promising work attempted to identify user’s right before they got out of jail and increase awareness of Narcan in that group. Second, Schwartz et  al. (2013) had documented that between the years 2000 and 2009, the increased availability of opioid agonist treatment (buprenorphine) was associated with a decline in overdose deaths. Getting drug users timely information related to the use of these medications became a goal of the BCJI working group. On the goal of reducing opioid use, the researcher knew that the local substance abuse and mental health agency, ADAMHS, had looked at the SBIRT engagement model (Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment) and was thinking about it from a community-wide perspective.7 He suggested the planning team discuss with ADAMHS how the police and neighborhood could be involved in a systematic SBIRT implementation. The researcher shared with the BCJI team a review of the general literature on drug policy (Strang et al. 2012), a review of the SBIRT literature (Babor et al. 2007), and an article on M.I. (Ilgen and Glass 2012). M.I. involves four basic steps that are relatively easy to implement. These include (1) incorporating “feedback” regarding potential consequences of problematic behaviors, (2) exploring the pros and cons of making changes versus maintaining the status quo, (3) discussing an individualized menu of options that have been shown to be effective for making changes, and (4) supporting or bolstering participants’ personal self-efficacy (Ilgen and Glass 2012 p.  91). One advantage of an M.I. and SBIRT at the neighborhood level was it fits with the operational ethos of ADAMHS.8

Learning from the Practitioners At the critical point in the planning team discussions in late 2013 and early 2014, important contributions were made by DPD and EECS leadership to shape program implementation. The DPD lead had been involved in focused deterrence strategies 7  SBIRT is considered a preventative public health measure designed to motivate people to reduce harmful behaviors and/or seek treatment before a substance abuse or mental health problem worsens. 8  The prior paragraphs summarize a set of email exchanges among planning team members in late 2013.

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to decrease gun homicides in Dayton. Referred to as “community call ins,” these are based on the early “Operation Ceasefire” Boston Gun Project (Braga 2012). On learning about M.I. and SBIRT, the DPD lead suggested a meeting format where known opioid addicts in the community, including those on probation and parole, were invited to a meeting where they could have an M.I. session and be educated on treatment options. The proper role of the police in this effort became an important topic of conversation, due to the coercive nature of past police engagements related to the drug problem. The BCJU team decided the invitations should be noncoercive as this fit with the philosophy of motivational interviewing and its emphasis on bolstering self-efficacy. Police in attendance therefore would not take an active role nor attend in the police uniform. While the local researcher had thought in terms of training EECS staff and neighborhood volunteers in M.I., the EECS lead viewed that as impractical and not what could reasonably be asked of local neighbors and staff. She immediately suggested, based on her own prior experience as a volunteer mediator, the use of a separate nonprofit partner, the Dayton Mediation Center, which had human resources available to successfully implement such a program. Working with the head of the Dayton Mediation Center, the EECS director of community development discovered that the local probation department had substantial experience in M.I. and was happy to conduct the training for the Dayton Mediation Center staff and volunteers. In addition, to supplement the Dayton Mediation Center staff and volunteers, the director contacted the director of the Chemical Dependency Counseling Graduate Program at the local university to see if graduate students there could serve in a supplemental role at the “call in.” The director of the program immediately expressed interest and became intimately involved in the planning process with several of her students. After approval by the DPD Chief, and cooperation from ADAMHS, a draft outline of the proposed “call in” was shared with the wider planning committee. A former addict on the planning committee who was willing to share his story of addiction and recovery as an icebreaker at the call in suggested they should be titled Conversations for Change. This was thought to capture the sense of community caring and involvement so well that it was immediately adopted as the branding slogan for the broader effort.

The Conversations for Change Framework The planned community call in event was produced in four stages. The first stage involved a peer impact statement from a person presently in recovery. Stage two involved a recovery resource panel with trained specialists from various disciplines in opiate recovery. Information was provided by a recovery nurse specialist familiar with medication-assisted treatment; a representative from Narcotics Anonymous, a faith-based recovery model; and specialty groups from the VA. There was a representative on-site from the Medicaid insurance provider to assist in sign-ups for

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Medicaid. The third stage involved personal intervention counseling using mediators trained in M.I.. The fourth and final stage provided opiate overdose education and prevention, which includes basic emergency response and Narcan certification. Following the two initial stages, each attendee would personally meet with support staff trained in M.I. from the Dayton Mediation Center and Wright State University to discuss treatment options, care coordination, recovery coaching, and future steps. While the individual client received personal counseling, their friend, family member, or loved one would receive naloxone training and be provided the medication free of charge. The individual seeking assistance would also be offered the training. A meal was provided as one way of making people feel welcomed. In addition, donated $20 gift cards to a local grocery store were offered as an incentive for participation. Additionally, there was an opportunity to get assistance in signing up for health care.

Program Implementation Challenges and Adaptations Recruitment Issues For the first Conversations for Change event, the DPD and EECS partners went door to door to invite 44 clients, split evenly by gender with 22 women and 22 men from the NRZ who were identified as opioid addicted. The list came from a DPD-­ developed database. The written invitation that came from the EECS was personalized, included a gift card, and provided a short summary of what the Conversations for Change event was about. The first three sessions were held at the community center in the southern part of the NRZ and disappointingly only attracted a total of 16 participants. Concerns were expressed that the southern location was geographically isolated relative to the more concentrated population of addicts in the northern part of the NRZ.  It was thought transportation might be difficult and that EECS, while a community anchor in the southern portion of the NRZ, was less well known in the northern part. The EECS partner then initiated conversations with some receptive churches located in the northern portion of the NRZ to partner. The churches were already assisting a subset of the targeted population because they maintained food banks and meal programs. Recruitment results were vastly improved by engaging partner churches, relocating meeting locations to more central locations, and asking probation and parole officers to encourage their parolees to participate.

Communication Issues Among Partners The core team that developed the Conversations for Change understood that the M.I. strategy was at the heart of the effort. As the Conversations for Change sessions continued, EECS experienced turnover of key staff, while other institutional

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partners were added. New partners used engagement sessions to discuss the treatment options they provided and connected participants to ancillary services. At certain sessions, time taken for the recovery resource panel stage of our process diverted attention from the critical third stage, personal intervention counseling, where the M.I. sessions took place. EECS’s new director of community development responded to concerns from the Dayton Mediation Center staff responsible for the third-stage counseling by convening all the institutional partners and reorganizing the schedule to maintain the central role of the M.I. in the overall intervention strategy.

Systems Learning Linked to the Conversations for Change After the initial sessions, the Dayton Mediation Center volunteers were asked to write summaries of the issues and barriers faced by session invitees as they considered treatment and recovery. These summaries were shared with the key institutional partners including key personnel from the local hospitals, substance abuse treatment providers, university partners, peer counselors, and the mental health agency. The issues discussed included the following: 1 . Long wait times between initial assessment and treatment 2. Pessimism about the effectiveness of treatment 3. Difficulties in finding funds to pay for treatment 4. Difficulties in gaining employment (particularly with a criminal record) 5. Difficulties in staying motivated in unrewarding employment 6. Use of prostitution to support addiction and discussion of the incidental physical assault and rape tied to prostitution 7. Many family issues, including strained relationships, loss of custody, child support, and the addiction issues of other family members Several institutional and community partners noted that they were already familiar with this particular litany of issues. The long wait times between assessment and treatment had been the subject of ongoing conversations between community leaders, treatment providers, and the substance abuse and mental health agency. The professional treatment community was aware that too little medication-assisted treatment was available as the epidemic surged. This was linked to limitations on the number of such patients a medical doctor could assist at any one time. Almost immediately, the police and the community service organization started exploring ways to shorten the time it took to get people into treatment. In the immediate NRZ area, these included a community-based syringe exchange program, police deployment of naloxone on a routine basis, a “front door” option for immediate treatment access, and a post overdose response team. Most critical was the role of the police in conjunction with the community service organization in helping to

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push forward all of these nonenforcement community-based programs. Two of the initiatives were of particular note with respect to driving increased access to treatment. First, EECS entered into conversations with a medication assistance provider about opening a location in the heart of the southern zone of the NRZ, close to the community center. The effort to open this “front door” location was substantial because of a variety of obstacles, including neighborhood opposition. The goal was to provide a location where someone could immediately start receiving treatment upon request. In addition, the idea was that police could offer that service as alternative to jail when dealing with someone on the street. The center opened, after some delay, in June 2016 and remained open until mid-2018 when the treatment provider closed some local operations. It provided 24/7 assistance for officers in contact with people needing recovery services, and in the first year, 125 people accessed services. Second, a continuing collaboration was developed between the DPD and EECS to expand outreach to those who have been saved by naloxone administration. Starting in January 2015, the GROW team conducted weekly visits to the homes of individuals who have overdosed on opiates but whose lives were saved by naloxone administration. The team follows up on overdoses within 72 h, responds to in-­p rogress overdose calls, and also provides on-site Narcan training. In summary, the links between the DPD and the EECS that were forged under the auspices of the BCJI grant program continued long past the funding period. Those links and the outward connections the two organizations have made to other institutional partners as part of that work resulted in an increasingly sophisticated response to the opioid epidemic that continues in the community (Table 3.5).

Table 3.5 GROW program statistics

Type of contact 2017 Responded to in-progress 226 overdose calls In-person follow-ups (contacts 614 attempted) Overdose individuals contacted 213 Family and friends contacted 290 Connected to treatment provided 96 Follow-up letters 1992 Naloxone training/furnished 30

2018 90 618 430 235 170 648 14

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 utcome Evaluation of the Conversations O for Change Intervention Quantitative Aspects There were two measured outputs of the Conversations for Change events. First, claims data for mental health and alcohol and drug abuse were reviewed by ADAMHS to determine the number of participants seeking treatment after a Conversations for Change event. Second, NIBRS crime data for the NRZ relative to the city overall was reviewed. Names of participants were shared with ADAMHS, and that agency provided data at the aggregate level on the number of participants with prior treatment for mental health and alcohol and drug abuse and the number of people who sought treatment after the Conversations for Change events. Across the first 13 events held over a 2-year period (2014–2016), 40% of the participants accessed treatment after attending an event. As Medicaid claims data did not capture treatment tied to private insurance, we believe the true number to be higher (Table 3.6). By the end of 2017, 19 Conversations for Change events had been held in the NRZ and across Dayton, serving 570 participants with 506 participants having also received Narcan administration training. While we had tied our addiction programming to the issue of property crime, the fact is that property crime rates fell dramatically (approximately 40%) for the City of Dayton between 2010 (17,712) and 2015 (10,996). A less dramatic downward trend at 20% was evidenced within the NRZ for the period from 2010 (1551) to 2013 (1251). However, as ground zero in the opioid epidemic, property crimes in Table 3.6  Accessing treatment after participation in a Conversations for Change Program dates 5/31/2014 6/5/2014 7/10/2014 11/15/2014 12/10/2014 3/21/2015 5/28/2015 8/12/2015 9/9/2015 11/19/2015 1/23/2016 3/10/2016 5/10/2016 Total

Estimated number of addicts 2 7 1 9 10 15 15 2 8 24 20 30 34 176

With prior mental health or alcohol or drug treatment history # % 2 100% 7 100% 0 0% 4 44% 10 100% 14 93% 8 53% 0 0% 5 63% 12 50% 2 10% 23 77% 22 65% 109 62%

Accessed treatment after C for C event # % 2 100% 4 57% 0 0% 2 22% 4 40% 4 27% 1 7% 0 0% 4 50% 8 33% 3 15% 23 77% 15 44% 70 40%

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Table 3.7  Property and drug violation crimes, City of Dayton and NRZ (2010–2015) NIBRS category Crimes against property City of Dayton Annual percent change Neighborhood revitalization zone Annual percent change NRZ share of citywide crime Drug-related violations City of Dayton Annual percent change Neighborhood revitalization zone Annual percent change NRZ share of citywide crime

Year 2010 17,712 1551 8.8% 1670 104 6.2%

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

15,673 −12% 1554 0% 9.9%

15,681 0% 1410 −9% 9.0%

14,334 −9% 1251 −11% 8.7%

13,390 −7% 1307 4% 9.8%

10,996 −18% 1329 2% 12.1%

1618 −3% 119 14% 7.4%

1493 −8% 84 −29% 5.6%

1808 21% 127 51% 7.0%

1994 10% 178 40% 8.9%

2158 8% 296 66% 13.7%

the NRZ increased slightly over the next 2 years from 1307 in 2014 to 1329 in 2015. As a consequence, the NRZ share of property crimes in the city rose from 8.7% in 2013 to 12.1% in 2015. The impact of the opioid epidemic is apparent in both citywide and NRZ drug violations counts. For the city as a whole, drug violations fell from 1670 in 2010 to 1493 in 2012 – only to increase substantially in each of the next 3 years to reach 2158 in 2015. A much greater increase occurred in the same time period in the NRZ with 84 drug violations in 2012 more than tripling to 296 in 2015. As a result, the NRZ share of citywide drug violations rose from 5.6% in 2013 to 13.7% in 2015 (Table 3.7). Recall that the key measures that were the focus of this set of interventions were limited to drug crimes, prostitution, property crimes, and drug overdose prevention. Given the increase in overdose deaths due to fentanyl in 2016 and 2017, one might be excused for seeing this program as failing to meet its goals. This observation does not account for a counterfactual possibility, that is, what would the rate of overdose have been without the program? We believe that the deadly overdoses observed in 2016 and 2017 would have been far worse without the series of program interventions that were put in place in the BCJI program. Opioid addicts were less likely to overdose because DPD had supplied naloxone kits to officers, as well as addicts and their families during the Conversations for Change interventions. In addition, the pressure placed on other institutional partners by the police and East End programs to shorten time from assessment to treatment, while also increasing treatment options, meant that more addicts received treatment than otherwise would have as the epidemic worsened.

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Conclusions Police in Dayton understood that crime could not be significantly curtailed by traditional enforcement mechanisms. At the same time, their professional training left them ill-suited to employ approaches that required strong empathetic and listening skills. A key staff member of EECS likened police officers at these initial meetings to “wallflowers at a high school party.” Not knowing their roles led to them being withdrawn and skeptical. Conversely. EECS staff, while professionally trained to bring people together in a collaborative fashion to pursue community goals, found these skills inadequate to facilitate effective engagements with drug offenders and opioid addicts. Some reported feeling unsafe in meetings with troubled members of the community whose responses to dialogue were at times unpredictable and aggressive. What became clear as the program progressed was that our strategy of inviting opiate addicts and drug offenders into a civil community conversation with police and social service providers could not have occurred without both the empathetic listening skills provided by community leaders and the protection that the police presence provided. Continued interaction between those who have been trained to protect and serve and those who have been trained to communicate community concerns will lead to more fruitful police community engagement as each partner realizes the challenges and opportunities contained in their occupational frameworks. The cross occupational learning that occurred during this program permitted the deployment of an innovative, partnership-based strategy that was best suited for a disadvantaged community which has experienced significant trauma over time related to violent crime, substance abuse, and disorder. The sustainability of these partnerships in the future clearly rests with the community side of the partnership. The EECS must continue to be a resourced and competent organization in order to institutionalize these partnership frameworks going forward. The good news is that the EECS has a long history in East Dayton. This history leads to a substantial amount of good will in the community and makes any future partnership with the DPD more likely. In Dayton, the policy innovations that took place required the system contacts, prior knowledge, and skill sets of all of the key participants. Vital information did not reside in any one single institution or person. What the BCJI process did was create a shared space in which participants could bring their contacts, knowledge, and skills together to consider what was possible. While the problems in East Dayton are still in evidence 6 years into the BCJI process, the programmatic innovation detailed in this chapter was only possible through a partnership model that was promoted through the pillars of the BCJI program. Continued collaboration in these efforts, while not sufficient, is certainly a necessary precondition to improved outcomes in crime and drug addiction prevention in Dayton going forward.

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References Babor, T., McRee, B., Kassenbaum, P., Grimaldi, P., Ahmed, K., & Bray, J. (2007). Screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT): Toward a public health approach to the management of substance abuse. In R. Saitz (Ed.), Alcohol/drug screening and brief intervention: Advances in evidence-based practice (pp. 7–30). Philadelphia: Howarth Press. Braga, A. A. (2012). Getting deterrence right? Criminology & Public Policy, 11(2), 201–210. Brighthaupt, S., Stone, E., Rutkow, L., & McGinty, E. (2019). Effect of pill mill laws on opioid overdose deaths in Ohio & Tennessee: A mixed-methods case study. Preventive Medicine, 126, 105736. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2019.05.024. Hibdon, J., & Groff, E. (2014). What you find depends on where you look: Using emergency medical services call data to target illicit drug use hot spots. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 30(2), 169–185. Ilgen, M., & Glass, J. (2012). Brief motivational interventions to change problematic substance use. In Social work practice in the addictions (pp. 87–99). New York: Springer. Kennedy, D., & Wong, S. (2009). The high point drug market intervention strategy (pp. 1–47). National Network for Safe Communities. https://www.nationalpublicsafetypartnership.org/ clearinghouse/Content/ResourceDocuments/The%20High%20Point%20Drug%20Market%20 Intervention%20Strategy.pdf. Accessed 3 May 2017. Schwartz, R., Gryczynski, J., O’Grady, K., Sharfstein, J., Warren, G., Olsen, Y., & Jaffe, J. (2013). Opioid agonist treatments and heroin overdose deaths in Baltimore, Maryland, 1995–2009. American Journal of Public Health, 103(5), 917–922. Strang, J., Babor, T., Caulkins, J., Fischer, B., Foxcroft, D., & Humphreys, K. (2012). Drug policy and the public good: Evidence for effective interventions. Lancet, 379, 71–83. Strang, J., Bird, S., & Parmar, M. (2013). Take-home emergency naloxone to prevent heroin overdose deaths after prison release: Rationale and practicalities for the N-ALIVE randomized trial. Journal of Urban Health, 90, 983–996. Warner, B., Beck, E., & Ohmer, M. (2010). Linking informal social control and restorative justice: Moving social disorganization theory beyond community policing. Contemporary Justice Review, 13(4), 355–369. Weisburd, D., Groff, E., & Morris, N. (2011). Hot spots of juvenile crime: Findings from Seattle. Juvenile Justice Bulletin. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.ncjrs.gov/ pdffiles1/ojjdp/231575.pdf. Accessed 10 May 2014.

Chapter 4

Improving Community Governance to Reduce Crime: The Case of the Philadelphia’s Mantua BCJI Program Robert J. Stokes

Introduction The neighborhood at the center of this case chapter, Mantua, located in the western district of Philadelphia, came into the Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) process with a set of serious economic, social, civic, and physical problems that were long in the making. Like many parts of Philadelphia, Mantua has suffered through a half-century of economic, social, and demographic transformations that were the result of deindustrialization, suburbanization, and municipal fiscal stress. Its approximately 10 square city blocks held just over 6188 residents as of the 2010 census, a decline from a high level of 17,000 residents in 1950. A third of Mantua’s residents live in poverty, well above the citywide average of 25%. Median income is less than half of the citywide average ($17,000 vs $37,000). Other risk factors for crime include high rates of minority racial homogeneity and female-headed households (Glaeser and Sacerdote 1999; Ousey 2000; Cook 2009) and low rates of educational attainment, with only 42% of adults in the community holding at least a high school diploma. The land use in Mantua is primarily residential, composed of two- and three-­ story row homes with a few commercial and former light industrial uses. Mantua is home to a HUD Section 236 property, Mount Vernon Manor Apartments, which has 125 units in 9 buildings. Constructed in the 1980s, this development had fallen on hard times and has been going through a major renovation supported by a HUD Choice Neighborhood planning grant the community received in 2010. The neighborhood also contains a number of Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) scattered-­ site units, as well as a high number of Section 8 voucher holders. It is estimated that one quarter of Mantua residents live in some form of low-income housing owned and operated by PHA. Another set of crime drivers include low rates of R. J. Stokes (*) School of Public Service, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. J. Stokes, C. Gill (eds.), Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43635-3_4

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66 Table 4.1  Mantua vs citywide demographics

R. J. Stokes

Population Total households Median HH income Poverty rate Female-headed HH High school grad rate Percent homeowners Vacant households Percent African-American Percent under 18 years old

Mantua 6188 2268 $22,223 34% 68% 42% 33% 20% 93% 31%

Philadelphia 1,526,006 685,900 $39,770 25% 60% 70% 52.2% 15% 40% 21.8%

Source: US Census

homeownership and high levels of dwelling vacancy, with over 700 vacant lots and 350 vacant structures, many of them considered dangerous (Skogan 1990; Spelman 1993; Accordino and Johnson 2000) (see Table 4.1). The various difficulties facing the neighborhood have led to a concerted effort by local stakeholders to improve the area through investments in its community planning capacity, zoning and land use reform, public service coordination, and youth-­ focused programming. Over the past decade, Mantua has been the recipient of three major federally funded grant programs – including HUD’s Choice Neighborhood, BCJI, and the Promise Zone grant programs. The area has also been the site of intense interest from private developers due to its proximity to growing Drexel University, as well as extensive social and civic programming produced by the university itself. Indeed, over the past decade, with neighboring Drexel University expanding and other areas of West Philadelphia well into a gentrification cycle, many developers have turned their attention to Mantua, largely due to its affordable land in close proximity to Drexel, the UC Science Center employment hub, Center City, mass transit, and many attractive cultural/recreational amenities. While redevelopment and housing infill development can be seen as a positive for a community long in decline, this process has caused myriad problems for Mantua residents due to ineffective zoning regulations and a larger lack of a community transition plan (McCabe 2017). Developers have tended to favor the student rental market over single-family infill. These units attract a young, civically detached population whose lifestyles conflict with residential working family hours and activities. Thus, complaints about trash, loud parties, public drunkenness, and distant, unreachable building owners have proliferated in Mantua. To address the issue, Drexel University has been extensively investing in on-campus student housing options while also requiring that students live in dorms for their first 2 years as a way to reduce the number of students living in adjacent neighborhoods. Concomitantly, the university has made the improvement of Mantua a core institutional goal. The programmatic efforts made by the university in Mantua have been

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extensive. These have included engaging faculty and students in service and research programs (including in the BCJI grant program); creating a home purchase subsidy program for faculty and staff in the area; opening the Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships, which was created in Mantua from a $10 million private gift; creation of an accredited university police department that has patrol jurisdiction in surrounding areas (including parts of Mantua); and the currently planned development of a new primary school that will serve the broader area (Fielder 2014). Mantua’s private disadvantages have engendered public and civic disadvantages. At the start of the BCJI program (2013), Mantua lacked a set of legitimate, community-­based organizations. They possessed neither a civic association nor a community development corporation. This is notable because the neighborhood had traditionally possessed a strong set of community planning activists and civic leaders. The positive effect of community-based organizations on crime has been a key theme in the urban sociology literature (see Shaw and McKay 1942; Skogan 1987; Bursik 1988; Bursik and Grasmick 1993; Sullivan 1998; Slocum et  al. 2013; Sharkey 2018). The results of a recent study indicated that for each additional 10 of these organizations in US cities of 100,000 or more (n = 264), the violent crime rate is reduced 6% (Sharkey et al. 2017). Earlier research also points to their positive role in reducing fear in neighborhoods (Taylor et al. 1984; Sullivan 1998). Like many neighborhoods located in postindustrial legacy cities around the United States, Mantua’s arc of decline began in the 1960s. Both white flight and middle-class black flight to the suburbs created a changing social dynamic that left abandoned residential and commercial property in its wake (see Binzen 1971; Taub et  al. 1984; Wilson 1987). As drug markets began to flourish and armed gangs fought over newly formed drug market turf, small disagreements commonly erupted into gun violence. During these turbulent times, outbreaks of racial protest and street rioting were commonplace, many times inflamed or exacerbated by incidents of citizen mistreatment at the hands of the police. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mantua became one of the most troubled neighborhoods in a city that seemed to be creating such places at an accelerating clip. In many ways, the civic activism that has ebbed and flowed in Mantua since the late 1960s was required in order to address the chronic problems of drugs, crime, and violence. While troubled, it is a neighborhood that honors its prior political and civic leaders. Andrew Jenkins was an early local leader in community-based planning and started the Mantua Community Planners, a community-based organization (CBO) that sought to add local citizen voices in opposition to the top-down development planning undertaken by such programs as the Federal Urban Renewal program (see  Anderson 1964). They honor their heroes through both narrative and visual display. A mural of Herman Wrice, who famously devised a confrontational strategy, Mantua Against Drugs (MAD) in the 1980s to interrupt street narcotics sales while also acting as an agent for youth engagement and recreation, is a prominent visual feature in Mantua. Another community hero, Miles Mack, aged 42, was shot and killed while handing our trophies after a youth basketball tournament that he hosted as part of a broader youth engagement program at the McAlpin Playground in Mantua in 2008.

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This tragic event, where 17 shots were fired – with 2 killed and 10 injured – was a seminal moment in Mantua. The local city-owned recreation center was subsequently named after Mr. Mack, and his dream for youth engagement programming that included sports, academics, and arts continues to be offered in the same location where he was tragically killed in the prime of his life. A community plan, completed for Mantua in 2005 by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, identified a fractured governance system in the neighborhood as a key planning weakness (PCPC 2005). While there were leaders and organizations active in Mantua at this time, including a community development corporation located in neighboring West Powelton, People’s Emergency Center, and  a nonprofit group focused on street cleaning and beautification, the Mantua Community Improvement Committee (MCIC), the neighborhood lacked a dominant organization to serve as a lead in planning efforts. This all changed with the organization of a core planning group that came about in 2009 to seek funding for a HUD Choice Neighborhood grant. Called We Are Mantua!, this group was formed in a partnership with the city, local nonprofits, and key senior staff of neighboring Drexel University. Described fully below, this group helped address some of the local governance weaknesses that had beset Mantua in the prior decade.

Mantua and the Problem of Weak Public Safety Governance Communities that are bereft of organizations in which to plan, coordinate, launch, and monitor community improvement efforts are often unable to collectively respond to threats, such as poorly performing schools, crime, poorly designed or zoned housing, predatory businesses, or the physical erosion of public spaces (Bursik and Grasmick 1993; Sampson 2011). Places with weak place-focused governance organizations also tend to miss opportunities, such as public sector improvements in parks and recreation programs, green infrastructure, public lighting, school-based programs, and regulatory assistance through stronger code enforcement or zoning efforts (Slocum et al. 2013). Poorly organized communities also are skipped over by philanthropic organizations that tend to reward neighborhoods that already possess viable, professional organizations in which to run programs or grants through. Mantua provides an interesting case example of a community that has sought to utilize a set of federal programs to build a locally legitimate governance organization that can work toward addressing the social and built environment problems (Taylor and Harrell 1996) that contribute to crime, as well as gaining the political standing necessary to negotiate with public agencies and elected officials for more and better services (Putnam 1993). As documented in the following case, Mantua has principally utilized the BCJI program as a way to build a stronger set of community governance capacity. It has done so, in part, by blending the BCJI program resources with other programs, such as the HUD Choice and Promise Zone programs, while also overlapping some

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resources with those supplied by other stakeholders, specifically local community-­ based nonprofits and higher education anchor institutions. As such, the impacts explored in this case cannot be properly isolated from other interventions applied in Mantua or on larger citywide policy efforts related to policing strategies. Moreover, the time frame explored within the BCJI program also overlaps with larger, national influences on declining community trust in the police, especially within African-­ American communities. Indeed, the nationally publicized incidents of public safety and police use of force controversies exhibited in places like Ferguson, MO, and Baltimore, MD, to name a few, have contributed to a changing political dynamic around public safety provision. With these limitations in mind, this chapter has four main goals: (1) documenting the process of Mantua’s efforts to utilize three federal grant programs (Choice, BCJI, Promise Zone) to build a comprehensive, sustainable, community governance organization to deliver a crime reduction-focused community plan; (2) detailing a key programmatic intervention of the Mantua BCJI program – a block leadership program – with a summary of its impacts of observed disorder; (3) an analysis of crime trends over the course of the program, including overall crime in the area, with an effort to control for larger citywide trends, while also examining the changing geographic distribution within the neighborhood (crime hot spot trends); and (4) a set of conclusions that are focused on the prospects and challenges of building a crime-centered community development program.

 uilding Local Governance Capacity: Choice, BCJI, B and the Promise Zone Over the course of 4 years (2010–2014), We Are Mantua sought and received all three major grant programs under the Obama Administration’s White House Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative (NRI). In 2010, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), awarded Mantua a 2-year $250,000 Choice Neighborhood planning grant. Through the Choice program, HUD sought to support community planning efforts in distressed neighborhoods that possessed public housing developments in need of substantial renovation. As noted above, Mantua is home to a HUD Section 236 development, Mount Vernon Manor (MVM), which was the focal point of their Choice application.

Choice The Choice planning process involved a set of key partners, including adjacent Drexel University, the Philadelphia office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), and the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA). A larger planning group, which also included planning consultants, a network of local and

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citywide nonprofit organizations, public agencies, and over 150 involved residents, became to be known as We Are Mantua! (WAM). In the summer of 2012, with the support of the Choice grant, WAM published the Mantua Transformation Plan, a document that included eight areas of policy and programmatic focus: 1 . Improve educational and recreational opportunities for Mantua’s youth. 2. Promote economic opportunities for adults. 3. Make Mantua a safer place. 4. Promote healthier lifestyles. 5. Expand housing opportunities for all income levels. 6. Improve access to retail and services. 7. Revitalize the physical environment. 8. Improve capacity for civic engagement. In creating WAM, the planning group had offered what was, in effect, a placed-­ based governance overlay to address broader community problems that recursively influence and are influenced by the problem of crime. The stated areas of concern are already, to a large extent, under the purview of an assortment of public agencies, each with their own set of bureaucratic functions and geographic boundaries. These included the School District, the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Streets Department (which includes trash and recycling operations), the Planning Commission, the Department of Licenses and Inspections (codes), the Housing Authority (which has its own policing unit), the Department of Commerce, the Department of Public Health, and the Police Department (PPD). These areas of policy interest also involve a set of geographically defined and issue-­ defined nonprofit organizations. Place-focused nonprofit organizations included the People’s Emergency Center Community Development Corporation (PEC-CDC), a nonprofit development corporation that has largely focused on neighboring areas to Mantua by providing planning and funding resources for social services for homeless families, affordable housing, and commercial development. Issue-based organizations included LISC and the Philadelphia Horticultural Society (PHS). In addition to strengthening community planning capacity, HUD’s Choice program provided funds for substantial renovation of affordable housing units. In Mantua, this has led to an impressive transformation of the MVM development: a renovation that has both improved the interior quality of housing for tenants and provided a visually striking design improvement for the neighborhood at large (see Fig. 4.1). Throughout the planning process, WAM took on a core governance role, despite the fact that, unlike public agencies, they possessed no regulatory or enforcement powers – nor did they control the public resources needed to directly effectuate the large-scale changes needed to foster community revitalization in Mantua. WAM was created as a geographically focused governance overlay focused on improving the organizational capacity for programmatic and policy coordination between and among the various public and nonprofit organizations working on the ground to fulfill the stated planning goals. The growing need for this type of flexible governance arrangement acknowledges the failure of public bureaucracies. These organizational types also benefit from the marriage of public and civic frameworks that

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Fig. 4.1  Mount Vernon Manor restoration, pre and post

can more easily collect and consider a range of usable information in decision making (Bogason and Musso 2006). New governance networks like WAM have arisen out of a need to address problems of public service delivery and coordination in complex environments: specifically, networks have arisen to develop coordinated solutions to policy problems

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such as urban redevelopment, environmental management, low-income housing, and crime prevention to name a few (Katz and Nowak 2017). While the eight elements that emerged through the Choice plan each have a connection to crime and safety outcomes, WAM’s published Transformation Plan focused on public safety as an independent silo of concern. The public safety sub-­ goal included five priority strategies that extended beyond any one agency’s or organization’s ability to implement. These included (1) improving lighting, (2) addressing drug market hot spots, (3) establishing a neighborhood watch, (4) encouraging anonymous crime reporting for the MVM residents, and (5) reinforcing and expanding drug-free school and recreation center zones. These safety planning considerations were identified without direct input from public safety officials, as the police were not included in the Choice planning process. This changed when the WAM group, in order to support the safety portion of the Choice plan, received a BCJI grant in 2012.

BCJI The Byrne program, named to honor a fallen police officer, Edward Byrne, originated out of the 1968  US Omnibus Crime Bill. This law sought to increase the capacities of local law enforcement through a direct federal allocation. Along with increasing civil disturbances at the time, city police departments were being doubly stretched due to skyrocketing crime rates.1 Historically, cities have used Byrne funds for law enforcement equipment such as police vehicles, firearms/tasers, body armor/vests, and surveillance and communication equipment. With the BCJI program, the Obama Administration sought to link federal support for crime prevention more directly to urban revitalization programming – with the stated goals of addressing the core social and built environment drivers of crime. The program also was focused on using police resources more strategically through a hot spot policing approach; making efforts to build police and community trust, especially in minority communities; and engaging a research partner to inform best practices and track local data trends. With MVM serving as the fiscal agent for the BCJI program, WAM’s safety partnership expanded to include the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD), the US Attorney’s Office, and an academic research partner (RP) from nearby Drexel University. As the BCJI program required an additional 6-month planning phase, this new group went to work to meet the requirements laid out in the BCJI request for proposals (RFP), which required that any proposed community safety program plan be both integrated and place based. Special consideration in the RFP was made for programming that was focused on hot spot policing (Braga and Bond 2008), 1  The total crime rate in the United States (property and violent crime) went from 1887 per 100,000 in 1960 to 3984 per 100,000 in 1970. It went higher still through the 1970s and hit its peak in 1980 with 5950 crimes per 100,000.

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physical disorder (Wilson and Kelling 1982), the social and economic status of residents, and community civic capacity stocks (Jacobs 1961). Planned interventions were also required to be evidence based and data driven, with the RP charged with being conversant with the scientific literature in criminology as well as routinely collecting, analyzing, and reporting on crime, land use, environmental, social, and citizen attitudinal data. The planning period included substantial community engagement in related research activities. During the planning phase, the RP assisted in a community survey (n  =  300), stakeholder focus groups, interviews, and geographic analysis of officially reported crime. As the focus of the BCJI RFP called for the working group to collaborate with policing officials on high-crime geographies (hot spots), as well as the causal drivers of crime and violence, much of the analysis centered on plotting spatial and temporal trends in crime and testing land use crime predictors, such as alcohol-serving establishments, vacant lots and buildings, parks, and schools. The RP also had an interest in developing baseline data for community disorder, community civic infrastructure, trust in the police, and youth-based programming and engagement strategies. Some of the planned activities directly attributable to the BCJI program included: 1. Creation of a community-led public safety committee, in partnership with the newly created civic association 2. Creation and maintenance of a block leadership program that promoted block-­ level stewardship of property maintenance, sanitation, crime, health, and civic/ social capacities functions 3. Two Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) interventions 4. Promotion of green space plan and execution through Mantua Greenway 5. Increased recreational and afterschool mentoring programs for Mantua youth 6. Development of a delinquent youth mentorship program 7. Creation of a school-based youth court 8. Leadership capacity for community planning and engagement activities 9. Facilitation of community and police trust-building activities While WAM had built some momentum and interest in the community development and engagement aspects of the proposed program, the early phases of the BCJI partnership with the PPD proved challenging. This was largely due to a general misunderstanding of the new iteration of the Byrne program, as well as difficulties in getting a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) from the city in order to set up a budget for police overtime allocations in the grant. The PPD representatives had assumed the grant would support police equipment, as former Byrne grants had done. Also, the city bureaucracy struggled with the fact that they were not the direct recipient of the grant, as the fiscal agent was MVM, and the budget manager was a contracted community organizer. Thus, efforts to get the city to sign off on a work plan for the overtime funds they would receive as a subcontractor did not seem to be within their normal operating capacities. Thus, a MOU was never signed, and the fiscal agent redirected budget funds originally allotted for police overtime to other, more community development-oriented activities. These issues led to delays in

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delivering interventions, as budget changes required approval from the Department of Justice. They also led to an erosion of trust between local PPD partners and the fiscal agent, a relationship that did not improve until a new district captain took over 2 years into the grant program. Much of this misunderstanding stemmed from the process by which such grants get awarded. While early planning meetings included the local police leadership, the grant itself was signed off on by senior police leaders. Thus, there was no evidence that the local PPD partners understood the exact nature of the proposal. Another challenge was related to the difficulty in identifying and contracting with organizations that could effectively deliver programming that addressed the serious needs evident in the community. Various contractors were engaged to deliver limited impact programs such as a delinquent youth mentoring program, an afterschool program, and a youth court program. As noted, the neighborhood lacked a strong social service organization, a deficit that, over time, was partially filled by Drexel University’s Dornsife Center (Fielder 2014). It was not until the city applied for and received a Promise Zone designation that more resourced program providers were identified and engaged.

Promise Zone In early 2014, the BCJI team assisted in writing a successful proposal for a federal Promise Zone (PZ) designation, which included an expanded service area covering Mantua and neighboring sections of West Philadelphia. The PZ program, at first, did not provide any additional direct resources for the governance group. What it did provide was extra points on federal grant applications across agencies that had a focus area within the PZ (Stoker and Rich 2019). The increased civic interest for substantial funding related to the PZ program did lead to a larger, more politically connected group of people being involved. The PZ partners created a public safety subcommittee, which was largely culled from the existing core BCJI group, while also adding representatives from well-established groups outside of Mantua; as well as more city agencies, such as the local councilwoman’s staff, parks and recreation, Community Empowerment and Opportunity (the city’s anti-poverty office), the Public Housing Authority, and a new mix of public safety organizations. These new public safety participants included higher-ranking policing officials from the PPD, which sent a chief inspector in addition to the district captain, the University City District (a local special services distict)  security staff, and Drexel’s newly minted  police department. This growth of the public safety group expanded the partnership to more organizations while also deepening the power to get things done with the inclusion of higher-ranking city and policing officials, as well as other well-established nonprofit agencies. It also increased the size of the public safety governance overlay to include more than one policing district, four additional complete neighborhoods (and portions of six more), and a population increase from 6000 in Mantua to over 30,000 in the larger PZ.

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In 2016, the PZ planning group won a substantial federal financial commitment from the Promise Neighborhoods Program Implementation Grant. This $30 million grant (over 5  years) is being directed toward improving academic outcomes and educational services for children in the PZ catchment that includes Mantua and its only school, Morton McMichael primary school. Currently, Drexel University has planned to work with partners on building a new school for the PZ area, located just west of the campus on land the university bought from the school district in 2017. In the following section, I will discuss and evaluate one of the key programmatic initiatives of the Choice/BCJI/PZ program, the creation of a civic association, and a block leadership program.

 nhancing Governance Capacity: Mantua’s Civic Association E and Block Leadership Program Despite a long history of civic activism, Mantua had become embroiled in a period of political dysfunction and community infighting. For almost a decade, this created a void in civic governance as the community did not have a functioning civic association. Recreating a civic association that spoke for all of Mantua was one of the first and most important tasks undertaken by WAM in the process pursued both in the Choice Neighborhood and BCJI groups. Created in 2014, the Mantua Civic Association’s (MCA) mission statement centered on the challenges facing the neighborhood: affordability, cleanliness, safety, educational quality, and gentrification issues related to nonfamily and student housing development. The MCA became the official registered community organization (RCO) in the neighborhood soon after its creation. This designation allows it to assert its collective voice in any proposed zoning changes in Mantua.2 The MCA has also taken a keen interest supporting programs at the McMichael School, including a program to get adult male residents of Mantua more involved in the lives of children as role models (Parker and Reckdenwald 2008). The Men of Mantua is a program where men greet children as they enter school in the morning and encourage them to do well. They have also pursued fundraising efforts for school uniforms. MCA has also interfaced with Drexel University to work through issues raised by college student housing in the area. It has also taken seriously its mission to maintain the neighborhood as a good place to live for residents, many of whom are fixed-income seniors, by working to stem any displacement effects related to neighborhood change and gentrification in the area. As noted above, as the neighborhood gets safer and less disorderly, its many empty lots and vacant structures have piqued the interest of developers who seek to profit off the area’s potential through the development of student rental housing. As housing values increase, so do the rents

2  The process of RCO designation involves the approval of city council. As of 2018, there were 242 RCOs in the city of Philadelphia.

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and property taxes of longtime residents long used to an affordable tax rate. The fear that raising rents and taxes could force long-term residents out of the community has led to organized assessment challenges, as well as broader policy efforts to adapt the real estate tax rates in the interest of fixed-income residents, especially seniors. MCA is also involved in broader beautification efforts through their “bulbs not bullets” flower planting initiative. Each spring, tens of thousands of tulips emerge from the ground in Mantua to both lend a hint of natural beautify to the neighborhood and inspire residents to feel a sense of pride in their community. They also coordinate with the University City District, a local special service district focused on clean and safe services, over the placement of dumpsters within the neighborhood. This is especially a problem when students move in and out of apartments in the area and tend to leave their trash out on move-out day rather than on trash day, as well as leaving large items on the sidewalk without arranging for a bulk pickup. Soon after its formation, the MCA became a key partner in the BCJI effort. Early on, they developed a public safety subcommittee that worked closely with the 16th District Community Relation’s Officer. Emerging out of this subcommittee was the development of a block leadership program. This program sought to recruit, identify, train, and engage with a set of block-based community leaders. The program also had a programmatic link to another BCJI effort to identify and address crime hot spots.

Block Leadership Program A key programmatic effort of the WAM-BCJI project was an invigorated and locally managed block leadership recruitment and training program. This program supported a few of the planning goals of the WAM-BCJI, including increasing levels of social capital and collective efficacy (Putnam 1993; Sampson et al. 1997), as well as promoting greater levels of citizen stewardship on city blocks (Taylor et al. 1984; Newman 1995). The city, through its Philadelphia More Beautiful Committee (PMBC), housed within the Streets Department, has had a block captain program for decades. This citywide program, which is largely focused on litter/graffiti abatement and common area gardening/greening, is not well resourced and thus only provides nominal training and support. As a matter of policy, the city has long refused to release to citizens, media organizations, or researchers a list of block captains due to privacy concerns.3 Word among community leaders and interviewed block leaders was that the city program was not robust enough to offer significant governance improvements. Moreover, due to age, failing health, lack of interest, or

3  In 2017, the city released a map of block captains (though without names or addresses) as a way for civic associations to find the blocks that were devoid captains.

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relocation, many blocks had a captain in name only. In the WAM-BCJI reboot of this program, block leaders are more active in various service/policy areas and were designed to become part of a larger problem identification network linked back to the MCA.  Trained block leaders offered an important place-specific resource for civic and public leaders by acting as a locally legitimate point of contact for neighborhood information flows between program principals and residents. They could also report back informally to program leaders about conditions on their blocks, as well as organize events such as block parties, cleanups, and larger civic events. The WAM-BCJI program invested a fair amount of resources into the recruitment, training, and engagement of block leaders. They dedicated one full-time organizer along with part-time and volunteer personnel to develop and implement the program. In total, WAM identified, trained, and engaged 75 block leaders in Mantua. The training program focused on four key programmatic elements: 1 . Beautification and Greening 2. Energy Efficiency and Weatherization 3. Neighborhood Building 4. Resource Sharing and Safety Nearly all (95%) block leaders received all four block leadership modules, and the WAM organizer documented the date of each engagement, the respective action plans for each element, the completion outcomes, and the service networks that have been created or expanded within these efforts.

Focus Group Results of Block Leaders The RP, in conjunction with the programmatic staff of WAM-BCJI, paneled a focus group of trained block leaders in the summer of 2016. The main discussion points of this group focused on their emerging roles as neighborhood stewards and how they saw the support they had gotten from training and organizational assistance from BCJI-supported staff. This group was composed of eight people – six women and two men – who largely represented blocks that had been determined to be crime hot spots during the planning phase of this project. Six of the participants were seniors who had raised now-adult children in the neighborhood, and two were younger women who were currently raising children in the community. One of the themes of the session was the difficulties of attracting young people into the ranks of community leadership, as the current crop of established leaders is largely retired seniors. There are obvious reasons for this, as young people tend to be busier working or raising children; they are also less likely to be homeowners, which tends to drive community participation in city neighborhoods due to homeowners having both a financial and a personal stake in their communities.

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Each member of the block leader focus group shared a concern for the fate of the children in the community. Indeed, Mantua’s kids were a common thread through interviews, focus groups, and survey responses through this endeavor. Noting the difficulty kids face with young, inexperienced mothers and often absent fathers, the block leaders expressed some interest in providing a safer, healthier, and more nurturing public environment for the neighborhood children. As many of the older folks in the group noted being raised at a time when disorganized family and community settings were less prevalent, they wanted to look for ways to provide some of the benefits of stability to kids in Mantua. There was also a focus on making the neighborhood’s growing elderly population feel safer and more secure as they age in place. Focus group respondents referenced how occasional violent outbursts in the area caused elderly residents to be too afraid to go outside to sit with friends, take walks, use public transportation, go shopping, or even visit the doctor. The connection between crime and the inability of older citizens to enjoy the social and physical aspects of life was a clearly articulated problem among focus group participants. Block leaders, not surprisingly, took an active responsibility in what criminologists would call place management (Felson 1995). While limited in power and resources to make their blocks ideal places for children and adults, they do what they can to keep common areas clean while producing organized social activities such as block parties. Block parties are a tradition in Philadelphia. These events, usually held in the summer or early fall, can require significant community organizational activities. They involve seeking a city permit to close off the street, event advertising through neighbors, hiring entertainment for children (face painters, bouncy houses, etc.), raising funds for activities, coordinating food and drink, etc. A disorganized block struggles to produce such events. Interviewed block leaders expressed appreciation for the WAM-BCJI-supplied block training program – largely due to how the articulation of the training made them see the interconnectivity of the problems they face on a daily basis, as well as the myriad organizations that come together to govern urban spaces. They also appreciated seeing how their work is actually making a difference. Block leaders have made hundreds of calls to 3114 for sanitation, public space management, city lights, etc. Having a centralized system of motivated reporters provides a consistent source of follow-up for problems that one person might just give up on. Block leaders also coordinate street tree planting programs, home renovation and weatherization programs, information sessions on earned income tax and property tax issues, public health information and access programs, city code enforcement issues, etc.

4  Created in 2008, 311 is web-based Citizen Request Management (CRM) system that gives citizens the opportunity to report noncrime problems. The most frequent types of problems reported by citizens have been street light outages, abandoned autos, vacant and unkempt properties, and trash dumping. Reports are routed to the appropriate city agency, and cases are tracked from report, to response, to closure (Morgan et al. n.d.).

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 ssessment of Block Leadership Program on Observed A Community Disorder As part of the block leadership recruitment process, the RP and trained student research staff assessed the condition of 52 block faces in Mantua where there had been a newly trained block leader. This effort was designed to serve as a baseline to gauge whether the condition of selected blocks improved over the course of the program. These blocks were assessed both in the autumn of 2013 and again in the autumn of 2016.5 The first rating involved an overall assessment of the quality of the block based on a 5-point scale (1 = terrible block, 5 = great block).6 From T1 to T2, the average block rating increased from 3.1/5 to 3.9/5, which was statistically significant to 0.05 (p = 0.047). A simple, three-point problem scale was developed to assess whether blocks had no (1), some (2), or a big problem (3) in six disorder categories (Table 4.2). Most of the assessed blocks suffered from at least moderate to severe physical and social disorder at T1. While five of the six disorder categories trended in a positive direction, the problem of vacant structures and lots has proven a consistent problem in the community, one that would not be particularly elastic to the efforts of a trained block leader. The worst problem category in T1 was the condition of the sidewalks (1.9). As maintenance of sidewalk infrastructure is generally the responsibility of the property owner, expensive sidewalk repair and replacement often suffers from neglect in disadvantaged communities. The second largest problem in T1 was the issue of litter. Litter is a common problem in many Philadelphia Table 4.2  Block disorder data T1 (2013) vs T2 (2016)

Litter Graffiti Vacant houses and lots Poorly maintained dwellings Groups loitering Sidewalks in poor repair Problem scale (add scale)

Scale mean 1 = no problem; 2 = some problem; 3 = big problem T1 – 2013 T2 – 2016 1.8 1.2 1.5 1.0 1.7 1.8 1.7 1.1 1.5 1.9 1.9 1.4 10.1 8.4

5  Efforts were made to also assess a set of matched control blocks at baseline (T1), but program leakage into control blocks at T2 precluded this comparative analysis. 6  Block raters were trained in identifying block elements by visiting various blocks and being shown photographs of different types of blocks in the neighborhood. Blocks that had significant abandonment, vacant lots, graffiti, trash, and broken or nonexistent sidewalks (a common issue in Mantua) were rated as the worst. Blocks that showed no signs of disorder, but instead showed signs of order such as well-tended community gardens, and flower boxes received the top ratings. Each block was rated by two raters, with the final rating comprising an average case of disagreements.

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neighborhoods due to various systemic issues relating to the city’s public sanitation practices, such as an abundance of empty lots, which encourage dumping; a lack of mechanized trash receptacle pickup due to the uneven availability of back alleys and narrow streets which means that trash is often placed curbside in plastic bags that rip open and cause litter; and mixed land use, where discarded food and beverage packaging drives litter rates near corner stores and take out restaurants. Litter was rated as less of a problem in T2, which is not surprising, as much of the work of the block leader program is focused on organizing blocks around cleanup activities. The third and fourth biggest problems – poorly maintained occupied properties (1.7) and abandoned structures and vacant lots (1.7) – are strongly correlated as the area has suffered from significant abandonment over the past 50 years. In some sections of Mantua, specifically the eastern end, the redevelopment of two public housing facilities and private market infill development directed toward the student housing market have improved the issue of empty lots and derelict properties. In the western and northern ends of the community, there are still serious levels of abandoned lots and structures. While vacant lots and dwellings have not improved, the condition of dwellings has shown improvement based on block ratings. One possible reason for improvements in the appearance of structures is a recent city ordinance that requires property owners to secure vacant properties with working doors and windows rather than using plywood and or sheet metal, an intervention that has also shown crime reductions across the city (Kondo et al. 2015). While this intervention was performed outside the efforts of WAM-BCJI, the reporting of noncompliance with this ordinance is enhanced through active block leaders. The two least serious problems evidenced in block assessments were group loitering (1.5) and graffiti (1.5). The issue of people loitering in groups is a problem area fraught with constitutional and legal issues. US citizens have a constitutional right to free assembly and speech. Groups of young people loitering on city street blocks, however, have become synonymous with illegal activities, whether or not crime is actually occurring (Taylor  2001; Sampson and Raudenbush 1999). This association can lead to resident fear and avoidance, a point raised in our focus groups. Group loitering tends to be driven by land use and transit considerations, as loitering is more likely to occur on public property such as parks, at or near transit stops, commercial corridors, storefronts that serve alcohol and/or food, on street corners, or in make-shift recreational areas set up on vacant lots (Zahnow 2018). Graffiti is also a problem largely driven by land use considerations, with infrastructure related to fixed-rail transit systems and abandoned industrial property driving graffiti issues. Like loitering, graffiti is less likely a problem on residential street block faces. This is especially the case in Philadelphia due to a very active public mural program, where the faces of public buildings or the street end walls of private buildings have become larger canvasses for public art. Mantua is home to eight sanctioned Mural Arts projects as of 2017. In addition to signs of disorder, we also observed positive signs on blocks, specifically the presence of tree and flower plantings in both private and public areas (and empty lots) at T1 and T2. These 1–3 scales were combined into one variable referred to as “green.” This scale could range from 2 (no evidence of trees or

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plantings) to 6, many trees or plantings. At T1, on the 52 assessed blocks, the green scale was 3.1/6, while at T2, this score rose to 3.9/6 (p. = 0.014). As cleaning and greening are at the core of most collective civic programming at the block level, it is clear that having 75 engaged block leaders showed some positive results in the quality of the built environment. Recent research in Philadelphia has shown that there is positive mental health (South et al. 2018) and crime impacts on lots that have been cleaned of debris and greened with grass and trees (Branas et al. 2011; Branas et al. 2012).

Neighborhood Crime Impacts Analysis of Officially Reported Crime (2012–2016)7 To assess the crime impacts of this program on Mantua, officially reported UCR Part 1 crime data, including the offenses of assault, burglary, homicide, rape, and robbery, were aggregated, geocoded, and analyzed. Monthly crime averages were developed to reflect four time frames within this project: (1) pre-program period (January 2008–September 2011), (2) program planning period (January 2012– March 2013), (3) program implementation period (July 2013–December 2014), and (4) post-implementation period (January 2015–July 2016). This data was aggregated to the Mantua service area and listed by crime type and by month of occurrence (see Table 4.3). A hot spot map for all crime was created, as well as a nearest neighbor analysis to examine the trends in the geographic clustering of crime over time. This analysis focused on trends within the program area related to the diffusion of identified hot spots. The crime prevention and suppression theories driving our interventions were organized around the concentration of community problem-­ solving activities, directed toward consistently problematic micro locations within Mantua. These so-called “hot spots” are localized crime drivers, largely due to Table 4.3  Historical monthly rate comparisons

Assaults Burglary Homicide Rape Robbery Total

1/1/08–9/30/11 Offenses per month 5.5 5.71 0.288 0.6 2.36 14.36

1/1/12–3/31/13

7/1/13–12/31/14

1/1/15–6/30/16

3.53 4.46 0.133 0 3.07 11.19

4.4 3.88 0.055 0.72 2.61 11.66

4.83 3.22 0.33 0.33 2.33 11.04

7  Geographic analysis of crime was performed by the Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Analysis Lab (GISSA) at Drexel University. Dr. Tony Grubesic, director.

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specific social and spatial land use dynamics that converge in these sites (Weisburd and Wire 2018). In addition, I offer a comparison of the share of robbery in Mantua to citywide trends, controlling for the populations of Mantua and the city as a whole. Table 4.3 provides a clear glimpse of the crime trends over time using a consistent geography, data source, and rate comparison. Crime trended down in Mantua after the BCJI grant was awarded. It went from an overall rate of 14.36 crimes per month prior to the grant award to 11.19 during the planning phase, which was a point of intense community involvement. It ticked up a bit during the intervention phase (11.66) but dropped overall in the post-implementation phase (11.04). Trends with individual crime types were more mixed, as assaults, murders, and rapes were down, but rose again in the post phase. Burglaries were consistently down across the four time frames, while robbery has stayed fairly consistent over the time periods. Robbery is a particular problem in Mantua due to the opportunity structure the neighborhood presents, with a wealth of potential targets (college students) frequenting the neighborhood. Robbery will be examined more closely below in a share analysis comparing Mantua’s robbery trends with citywide averages controlling for population.

Crime Clustering: Average Nearest Neighbor (ANN) Analysis An average nearest neighbor (ANN) analysis is a measure of the clustering of crime across space, reported by the average distance (in feet) per reported offense. The shorter the distance, the more clustering there is (i.e., the location is a hot spot). The analysis places each offense point, measures the distance to its next closest offense point, and then reports the average distance for all the reported offenses. It also derives an expected distance. This measure is an estimate of how far the nearest neighbor would be if all the reported crime were spread equally over the chosen geography. Dividing the observed by the expected distances provides a ratio. The closer the ratio is to one, the more observed crime is spread out in the area of study. Given the same number of crimes and the same geographic capture area, this expected measure would be the same distance to the observed nearest neighbor if crime were randomly distributed across Mantua. Table 4.4 reveals relatively stable but consistent increases in crime clustering patterns prior to BCJI starting from 2010 to 2012, followed by less clustering at the start of the BCJI program in 2013–2104, with a reversal in this positive trend in 2015. The best year in absolute and relative terms was 2014, where crime occurred Table 4.4  Average nearest neighbor (ANN) Observed distance Expected distance Ratio

2010 49.27 79.83 0.617

2011 48.52 81.59 0.594

2012 50.64 87.69 0.577

2013 55.39 83.76 0.661

2014 59.80 88.84 0.673

2015 46.31 87.36 0.530

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at an average distance to the nearest neighbor or 59.8 feet and with a ratio of 0.673 to the expected distance of 88.8 feet. Again, 2015 was the worst year with the lowest average distance between observed incidents (46.31 feet) and lowest ratio of 0.530 to expected distances of 87.36 feet. While the ANN is not a perfect measure of hot spots as it does not indicate the exact locations of specific hot spots, it does provide a general measure of clustering across an area over time.

Hot Spot Crime Incidents 2012–2015 One of the key policy drivers of this program was to address, through a comprehensive set of interventions, extreme criminogenic places or hot spots. As part of the early planning process for this program, hot spots were identified through a mixed-­ method approach. First historic clusters of crime in Mantua using data from 2008 to 2012 were observed. The program team also decided to engage the community in determining these hot spots, largely due to some of the weaknesses of official Part 1 crime reports. These reports tend to underreport crime in certain areas for a number of reasons. First, reporting is lighter in areas with less population. Some areas of Mantua, especially some street blocks that are largely devoid of occupied households, have fewer eyes and ears around to report crime. Second, certain types of crime, such as drug sales or prostitution, get underreported because they are considered “victimless crimes.” While they often result in a call for service from concerned or fed-up neighbors, they often do not lead to an official crime incident being reported unless there is also an arrest made. The percentage of incidents of drug sales and/or prostitution that turn into an arrest is quite small and very variable based on directed and focused police activity. Thus, the selection of hot spots was augmented  by engaging with community leaders through interviews and focus groups. Through this process, nine hot spots were chosen for the purposes of localized problem-solving and engagement with block leaders, policing officials, and other civic organizations. An examination of Table 4.5 and Fig. 4.2 reveals a wide Table 4.5  Yearly trends in identified hot spots Total part 1 crime 2012 2013 2014 2015 Total Brown St between 38th and 39th 5 3 3 5 16 N. 32nd St at Mt. Vernon St 4 6 4 2 16 N. 33rd St between Haverford Ave and Wallace St 8 10 5 1 24 N. 34th St between Wallace St and Mt. Vernon St 2 8 3 1 14 N 38th between Haverford Ave and Aspen St 16 10 14 9 49 N 39th between Haverford Ave and Aspen St 18 17 13 17 65 Union St between Wallace St and Fairmount Ave 2 1 1 2 6 34th St and Haverford Ave 3 3 2 5 13 35th St and Haverford Ave 3 5 3 4 15 Yearly totals 61 63 48 46 54 Avg.

Trend Same Down Down Down Down Same Same Up Same Down

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Fig. 4.2  Identified hot spot areas in Mantua

variation in the geographic size and intensity of criminal offenses across these areas. Again, while it may look like some of these hot spots were not that hot to begin with, this is hidden a bit by the limitations of our data related to drug arrests and calls for service. A set of kernel density maps was generated to facilitate the identification of crime hot spots for Philadelphia and Mantua (see Fig. 4.2). For Philadelphia, the spatial footprints of the hot spots were relatively consistent between years. However, for Mantua, there were notable differences between years. Looking at annual trends in the nine identified hot spots reveals an overall downward trend in Part 1 crime, which sat in the low sixties from 2012 to 2013, then dropped into the high and mid-­ forties in 2014–2015. As these areas were the source of the most intensive interventions related to the BCJI program, the drop in reported crime is promising. The annual average across these nine hot spots was 54 Part 1 incidents per year. Four of the less crime-affected areas stayed consistent across time, four were down, and one went up slightly (from an average of 4 per year to 5 per year in 2015).

Mantua Trends vs 16th Policing District and Citywide Trend As shown in Fig.  4.3, the crime rate per thousand in Mantua has tended to stay pretty consistent with overall citywide averages save for a few quarters, especially in 2010 and again in 2013 and 2015 when it was noticeably higher. Smaller

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Fig. 4.3  Annual crime trends in Mantua, 16th district and citywide

geographic aggregations will see greater rate fluctuations or crime spikes when compared to a larger aggregation such as a city of 1.5 million. For instance, a crime spree pursued by a few individuals will tend to show up more in neighborhood crime trend lines; conversely, effective place-based crime prevention programming will also be realized more directly in a smaller place. Breaking out one crime of particular importance, robbery, shows how Mantua has fluctuated around the share of these incidences compared to citywide totals. Robbery is one of the more damaging crimes to a community as it tends to involve a weapon and also tends to occur on public streets. It also seems to be driven by the ready availability of victims coming across motivated offenders. Robberies are often premeditated and at least semi-planned based on a larger set of circumstances related to neighborhood permeability, access, egress, lighting, and surveillance capacity (Brantingham and Brantingham 1981). Table 4.6 below reveals some interesting insights into the relative share of Mantua to citywide crime issues. As noted in the section on Mantua’s history, the neighborhood in the past had an extremely disproportionate level of violent crime compared to its relative share of the city population. Looking at Mantua’s share of one kind of violent crime is illustrative of how larger reductions in crime in the city might not get revealed in localized subareas. For three of the eight reporting periods, Mantua had fewer robberies than their share of the city’s population (2010, 2011, 2016), while in four periods, they have had a greater share of robberies (2012, 2013, 2015). In the end, over this 7-year period, Mantua’s share of robberies committed in the city is almost identical to its share of the city’s population (0.4% vs 0.41%). Mantua presents itself as an average crime community in the city. This is a rather remarkable historical trend, as Mantua spent a few decades over-contributing to its relative share of violent crime in the city.

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Table 4.6  Mantua robbery share Year 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 Total Population

Citywide robberies 8285 8129 7902 7462 6880 6705 2843 48,206 1,529,000

Mantua robberies 32 28 34 33 30 31 11 199 6188

Mantua share (%) 0.38 0.34 0.43 0.44 0.43 0.46 0.38 0.41 0.4

Conclusion Decades of disinvestment and abandonment had rendered Mantua one of the more historically challenged neighborhoods in the city of Philadelphia, with concentrated poverty, wide-scale property abandonment, lagging education attainment, insufficient government services and drug market-related gun violence leaving the community in a difficult position. Its economic, social, and cultural isolation from better invested neighborhoods in West Philadelphia, as well as the cultural chasm between it and its institutional neighbor to the south, Drexel University, has fostered a mistrust of outsiders that had exacerbated this isolation. The WAM-BCJI project, as designed, was a comprehensive effort to address both situational and structural drivers of crime and violence. It sought to curtail crime in the present while also building the framework for a larger, more sustainable structural fix for crime in the future. Interventions applied within WAM-BCJI included policing strategies and tactics that focused on geographic hot spots and on individuals known to be violent. Structurally, it sought to build the civic infrastructure of the community through the development of a civic association. It also focused on extending this governance capacity beyond the community meeting rooms by recruiting, training, and empowering block leaders to get more involved in an embedded collective problem-solving network. The main outcome of the Mantua BCJI endeavor was to recreate a local organizational capacity that was largely absent, fragmented, and politically contentious prior to the operational phase of this project. These newly created organizations have become, in a very short time, a resource for local residents to assist in community problem-solving. With a network of engaged block leaders to hold city agencies and property owners/managers accountable for results, and citizen expectations rising for a higher quality of life, the cycle of hopelessness that had gripped parts of Mantua has been slowly eroding and is being replaced with confidence and a redoubled interest in addressing harder issues related to youth socialization, economic development, and human capital development.

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While the WAM-BCJI program in Mantua has made great strides to rebuild a flagging civic infrastructure in the community, building civic infrastructure is a necessary, if not sufficient, task in addressing a crime and community disorder problem that had been decades in the making. This insufficient nature of civic organization is partially borne out by crime trends in the community, which after years of consistent declines, saw an uptick in the most pernicious forms of violent crime. While no doubt frustrating for residents, the good news is that the concentration of crime has been less pronounced, as the number and intensity of crime hot spots have been reduced and the average distance of crime across space has increased. That said, as crime gets more diffuse in its geographic dispersal, it gets harder to police, requiring more patrols and citizen focus. And as expectations for safety grow – that is, a new normal is created  – the pressure on police and communities grows to not only address evident crime issues, but also to work toward reducing less serious crimes and disorder problems. Further, safe neighborhoods also expect and demand civil and fair treatment from the police. As crime goes down in Mantua, the job of reducing it further will get more difficult and will require different tactics and police-­ community relational structures. This point is instructive, as having a set of solid, well-organized local partners to co-develop anti-crime plans is an important asset for police. This is especially true in the age of further eroding citizen-police trust in minority communities. The perils of bad relations between citizens, their organizations, and the police are well documented. People are less inclined to report crime, act as a witness, or work with police to collectively solve problems. In Mantua, the WAM-BCJI program got off to an inauspicious start, as program planners and local policing officials were not on the best of terms due to some basic and predictable misunderstandings. One of the perils to a trust-building enterprise in police-­ community relations is that they are often built on interpersonal trust. While this is true in many aspects of human relations, the rate of transfer, promotion, and retirement among policing leadership is high. Thus, time spent getting to know and trust someone who is not likely to be around in a few years can be seen as time wasted. In the case of Mantua, the district has had at least three local precinct leaders over a recent 6 year period. This high turnover rate makes it all the more important to have stable leadership at the community level, leadership that can engage police and other city agencies with a consistent and confident voice. Mantua is poised to exploit the benefits of the hard work it put into building the organizational structures that are now evident in the community. While crime will not be eradicated any time soon in Mantua due to long-standing problems related to economic and social dislocation  – which led to widespread abandonment and spasms of violence associated with active illicit drug markets – the data suggests that Mantua is now an average Philadelphia neighborhood in terms of many types of Part 1 crime. Mantua’s residents have suffered through decades of disorderly environments and the human tragedy of family, neighbors, and friends losing their lives to violence and imprisonment. To say they now represent an average city neighborhood indicates how far they have come.

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References Accordino, J., & Johnson, G. (2000). Addressing the vacant and abandoned property problem. Journal of Urban Affairs, 22(3), 301–315. Anderson, M. (1964). The federal bulldozer: A critical analysis of urban renewal, 1942–1962. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Binzen, P. (1971). Whitetown USA. New York: Vintage Books. Bogason, P., & Musso, J. (2006). The democratic prospects of network governance. Public Administration Review, 36(1), 3–18. Braga, A., & Bond, B. (2008). Policing crime and disorder hot spots: A randomized controlled trial. Criminology, 46(3), 577–607. Branas, C., Cheney, R., MacDonald, J., Tam, V., Jackson, T., & Ten Have, T. (2011). A difference-­ in-­differences analysis of health, safety and greening vacant urban space. American Journal of Epidemiology, 174(11), 1296–1304. Branas, C., Rubin, D., & Guo, W. (2012). Vacant properties and violence in neighborhoods. International Scholarly Research Network: Public Health. https://doi. org/10.5402/2012/246142. Brantingham, P., & Brantingham, P. (1981). Environmental criminology. Beverly Hills: Sage. Bursik, R. (1988). Social disorganization and theories of crime and delinquency: Problems and prospects. Criminology, 26, 519–551. Bursik, R., & Grasmick, H. (1993). Neighborhoods and crime: The dimensions of effective community control. New York: Lexington Books. Cook, P. (2009). Crime control in the city: A research-based briefing on public and private measures. Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research, 11(1), 53–80. Felson, M. (1995). Those who discourage crime. In J. Eck & D. Weisburd (Eds.), Crime and place: Crime prevention studies (pp. 53–67). Monsey: Criminal Justice Press. Fielder, E. (2014, June 12). Accessed at https://whyy.org/articles/offering-drexel-resources-westphilly-center-aims-to-solidify-ties-with-neighborhood/. Accessed July 15, 2019. Glaeser, E., & Sacerdote, B. (1999). Why is there more crime in cities? The Journal of Political Economy, 107 , S225–S258. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. New York: Random House. Katz, B., & Nowak, J. (2017). The new localism: How cities can thrive in the age of populism. Washington, DC: Brookings Press. Kondo, M., Keene, D., Hohl, B., MacDonald, M., Branas, C., & Chen, Y. (2015). A difference-in-­ differences study of the effects of a new abandoned building remediation strategy on safety. PLOS ONE 10(7), pp. 1–14. McCabe, C. (2017, July 14). In long impoverished Mantua, signs of change spark hope, and gentrification fears. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 14. Accessed at https://www.inquirer.com/philly/ business/real_estate/ residential/in-long-impoverished-mantua-signs-of-change-spark-hopeand-gentrification-fears-20170714.html. Morgan, P., Friedman J., & Carrington Lue, R. (n.d.). Philly311: The first 100 days. Washington, DC: ICMA. Accessed at https://icma.org/sites/default/files/102137_pdf Newman, O. (1995, Spring). Defensible space: A new physical planning took for urban revitalization. APA Journal. Ousey, G. (2000). Deindustrialization, female-headed families, and Black and White juvenile homicide rates, 1970-1990. Sociological Inquiry, 70, 391–419. Parker, K., & Reckdenwald, A. (2008). Concentrated disadvantage, traditional male role models, and African-American juvenile violence. Criminology, 46(3), 711–730. Philadelphia City Planning Commission. (2005). A plan for Mantua. City of Philadelphia. Putnam, R. (1993). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Sampson, R. (2011). The community. In J. Wilson & J. Petersilia (Eds.), Crime and public policy (pp. 210–236). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sampson, R., & Raudensbush, S. (1999). Systematic social observation of public spaces: A new look at disorder in urban neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 603–651. Sampson, R., Raudenbush, S., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277, 918–924. Sharkey, P. (2018). Uneasy peace: The great crime decline, the renewal of city life and the next war on violence. New York: Norton. Sharkey, P., Torrats-Espinosa, G., & Taykar, D. (2017). Community and the crime decline: The causal effect of local nonprofits on violent crime. American Sociological Review, 82(6), 1214–1240. Shaw, C., & McKay, H. (1942). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Skogan, W. (1987). Community organizations and crime. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research (Vol. 10, pp. 39–78). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Skogan, W. (1990). Disorder and decline: Crime and the spiral of decay in American cities. New York: Free Press. Slocum, L. A., Rengifo, A., Choi, T., & Herrmann, C. (2013). The elusive relationship between community organizations and crime: An assessment across disadvantaged areas of the South Bronx. Criminology, 51, 167–216. South, E., Hohl, B., Kondo, M., MacDonald, J., & Branas, C. (2018). Effect of greening vacant land on mental health of community-dwelling adults: A cluster randomized trial. JAMA Network Open. Spelman, W. (1993). Vacant properties, magnet for crime? Journal of Criminal Justice, 21(5), 481–495. Stoker, R., & Rich, M. (2019). Obama’s urban legacy: The limits of braiding and local policy coordination. Urban Affairs Review, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087419849490. Sullivan, M. (1998). Evaluating the effects of community development corporations on conditions and perceptions of safety. Security Journal, 11, 51–60. Taub, R., Taylor, G., & Dunham, J. (1984). Paths of neighborhood change: Race and crime in urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, R. (2001). Breaking away from broken windows: Baltimore neighborhoods and the nationwide fight against crime, grime, fear, and decline. Boulder: Westview. Taylor, R., & Harrell, A. (1996). Physical environment and crime. National Institute of Justice. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice. Taylor, R., Gottfredson, S., & Brower, S. (1984). Block crime and fear, defensible space, local social ties and territorial functioning. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 21, 303–331. Weisburd, D., & Wire, S. (2018). Crime hot spots. Oxford research encyclopedia of criminology and criminal justice. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.12. Wilson, W. (1987). The truly disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson J., & Kelling, G. (1982, March). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. Atlantic Monthly, pp. 29–38. Zahnow, R. (2018). Mixed land use: Implications for violence and property crime. City and Community, 17(4), 1119–1142.

Chapter 5

Building a “Beautiful Safe Place for Youth”: The Story of an Effective Community-Research-Practice Partnership in Rainier Beach, Seattle Charlotte Gill and Claudia Gross Shader

 ranslational Criminology: The Challenge of Bringing T Research into Practice Translational criminology—the practice and process of bringing research evidence into strategies and decision-making in the criminal justice field—is growing in importance. However, there remain significant barriers to the development and sustainability of evidence-based policy and practice. In the United States, federal funding initiatives like the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) program1 have provided the impetus to further translational criminology efforts by promoting sustainable, data-driven partnerships between researchers, police and local government agencies, community organizations, and residents. In this chapter, we describe the factors needed to develop a successful partnership through a case study of the Seattle, WA BCJI program, Rainier Beach: A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth (ABSPY).2 We begin with a discussion of the literature on translational criminology, including barriers to and facilitators of successful translation. We then describe the history, characteristics, and key stakeholders of ABSPY and how we built an approach that reflects best practices in 1  https://www.bja.gov/ProgramDetails.aspx?Program_ID=70#horizontalTab1 (accessed May 27, 2020). Formerly called the Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation program. The authors of this chapter are, respectively, the research partner and City of Seattle Office of City Auditor’s research liaison for the Seattle BCJI program and members of the ABSPY Core Team. 2  http://www.rb-safeplaceforyouth.com (accessed May 27, 2020).

C. Gill (*) Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Gross Shader City of Seattle Office of City Auditor, Seattle, WA, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. J. Stokes, C. Gill (eds.), Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43635-3_5

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researcher-practitioner partnerships. We conclude with lessons learned and recommendations for sustaining similar efforts in collaborations between communities, local governments, and academics. Translational criminology is defined as “the process of knowledge creation through scientific research and its subsequent use to inform policy and practice in criminal justice” (Pesta et al. 2019; see also Laub 2011). There has been a surge in interest over the last 25 years in the generation of rigorous scientific evidence on “what works” to prevent and address crime (e.g., Sherman et al. 2006; Weisburd et al. 2016) and its application to various areas of the criminal justice system, such as policing (e.g., Weisburd and Eck 2004; Lum et al. 2011) and corrections (e.g., MacKenzie 2000; Lipsey and Cullen 2007). There is also a growing commitment to researcher-practitioner partnerships, which advance the goals of translational criminology through direct connections between researchers, practitioners, community members, and/or policymakers for the purposes of conducting research and embedding it into practice. These partnerships can range from short-term, informal, and/or single project cooperative relationships to ongoing long-term collaborations (Rojek et  al. 2015), but they go beyond the traditional “evaluator” model in which a researcher may come in to collect data on a program and then produce a final evaluation report. Research-practice partnerships involve a wide-ranging process in which all the stakeholders work together to identify problems, assess data, develop and test solutions, and monitor progress. In some cases, criminologists have become “embedded” within justice agencies to consult with decision-makers on an ongoing basis (e.g., Braga 2013; Petersilia 2008; Braga and Davis 2014). However, as in many other areas of public policy, the influence of criminological research and the success of research collaborations on actual policy and practice in the field have often been limited (Weisburd and Neyroud 2011; Prewitt et al. 2012; Rojek et al. 2015; Pesta et al. 2019). The most basic challenge to evidence-based policy is that justice professionals and policymakers do not often read or have access to the scientific literature, where much of the information on program and policy evaluations is published (Lum et al. 2012; Telep and Lum 2014; Telep and Winegar 2016). Beyond this limitation, there are a number of substantial, systemic barriers to the development and integration of scientific knowledge.

Barriers to Evidence-Based Policy and Practice Despite the growing interest in translational criminology, a 2012 National Research Council report (Prewitt et al. 2012) found that across a range of fields, social science has had very little impact on public policy (see also Pesta et al. 2019). A number of scholars and criminal justice practitioners and policymakers have highlighted the barriers to knowledge translation, which include both organizational and political constraints and fundamental cultural differences between the research and practice communities.

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Lum (2009) characterizes the key barrier to knowledge translation as the need to overcome “non-evidence-based habits,” i.e., convincing practitioners to prioritize scientific evidence over experience, “craft,” and anecdotes. On the other hand, Weisburd and Neyroud (2011) argue that practitioners (they specifically focus on the police) feel that research is irrelevant to the reality of their work (see also Rojek et al. 2015). Unlike, for example, medicine, where teaching hospitals offer opportunities for practitioners and academics to collaborate and test new ideas within a shared cultural framework (e.g., Shepherd 2003), there are few if any institutionalized models for researchers and justice agencies to engage. As a result, practitioners and researchers develop different questions of interest and view the role of scientific evidence in decision-making differently (Rojek et al. 2015). Given this environment, Pesta et al. (2019) note that resistance to research among justice agency leadership is a significant barrier to translation (see also Nutley and Davies 1999). Unsurprisingly, this resistance limits the use of evidence on the “frontlines” in multiple ways. In particular, skeptical and/or untrained leaders are unlikely to provide training opportunities for their staff, leading to a lack of awareness of evidence-based practices or inability to implement them at all levels of the organization. Even if frontline practitioners are engaged with research (such as the growing number of police “pracademics” who have received research training while continuing to serve in the field), it is a significant risk to push back against an unsupportive organizational culture and challenge the hierarchical leadership structure inherent in many justice agencies (Huey and Mitchell 2016; Willis 2016; Mitchell and Lewis 2017). Further barriers in the field highlighted by Pesta et  al. (2019) include budgetary constraints, political and ideological challenges, and “crisis-­ driven policymaking.” Nutley and Davies (1999 p. 51), citing Pawson and Tilley (1997), note that the political context in which criminal justice policy typically develops leads research to function “not as a valid, tested body of propositions, but as ammunition for political debate and intraorganizational arguments.” Related to this, justice agencies are often called on to rapidly roll out new policies in response to high-profile yet rare cases. Their timeline for doing so is usually at odds with the slow process of research and program evaluation (Rojek et al. 2015; Pesta et al. 2019). The academic community has created its own barriers to research translation. In the criminal justice context, Pesta et al. (2019) describes a number of difficulties similar to those in the field, including time constraints, research that is difficult to interpret, and a lack of training and incentives for researchers. Most universities prioritize the publication of research in scientific journals, which are not widely read by practitioners (and are often paywalled so that those outside academic institutions cannot access them without paying a substantial sum of money; Telep and Gross Shader 2019), and do not value dissemination in nontraditional outlets. This can be a turnoff for young scholars in particular, as their ability to get tenure depends on the university’s publication standards. Furthermore, scientific journals require a level of technical detail that is inaccessible to many practitioners. In the social sciences, there are few clear-cut results, and researchers are expected to consider the nuances and limitations of their methodologies, while practitioners want concrete directions on what to do and how to do it. It is not unusual for academic articles to

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conclude that “it depends” or “more research is needed” or focus on theoretical and methodological arguments rather than recommendations, but this does not help a decision-maker who is under pressure to implement something now, as we discussed above. “Public” or “administrative” criminology, which aims to bridge this gap by addressing issues of public concern and making the research accessible to the agencies or communities it seeks to serve, has traditionally been viewed as lacking in academic rigor by the scholarly community (Uggen and Inderbitzin 2010; Mayhew 2016), further reducing incentives for academics to devote time to it. The lack of a strong culture of public or translational criminology in the academy also sheds light on the skepticism of research among some practitioners. Researchers have been criticized for what Rosenbaum (2010) calls “hit-and-run” research, where the researcher obtains data from the agency (sometimes without building a relationship with agency leaders or staff first; for example, through Freedom of Information Act requests) and writes a paper that may satisfy their academic publication requirements but does not further the needs of the agency or take into account important context that would have been apparent had they engaged with practitioners. In some cases, the research may not be shared with the agency at all. Further, Bradley and Nixon (2009) note that policing research in particular has traditionally been carried out by scholars who ascribe to a particular ideological lens that is critical toward the police. As a result, from police leaders’ perspectives, not only is research disengaged from their needs and priorities, but they have also had to adopt a defensive stance rather than finding common ground.

Components of Successful Translation The preceding discussion shows that, while there are a number of challenges around producing high-quality research to support evidence-based practice, the bigger difficulty is creating an environment in which researchers and practitioners can successfully work together. The barriers we have explored may explain why many translational efforts so far have followed what Davies et al. (2008) call the “rational-­ linear” or “two communities” model of research use (see also Rojek et al. 2015; Fyfe and Wilson 2012), in which researchers produce knowledge that may be disseminated to and used by practitioners in a one-way process, but the role of practitioner experience and knowledge exchange between the two “sides” are minimal.3 As Rojek et al. (2015 p. 18) point out, this unidirectional model “assumes the practitioner is utilitarian in nature and scientifically produced knowledge is the best resource for improving their decisions and maximizing results.” However, many other factors relating to organizational structure, culture, and relationship building clearly affect research use. 3  Davies et al. (2008) argue that the term “knowledge translation” suffers from the same problems, but we continue to use the term “translational criminology” in this chapter as it is well-recognized in the field.

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Furthermore, there is growing interest among both researchers and criminal justice practitioners in collaborating on research projects and policy development, so the need for improvement is clear. In the policing context specifically, Rojek et al. (2015) note that agencies want to develop partnerships because researchers bring a different perspective to problems (both substantively and methodologically), research can bring credibility to decision-making, and research partnerships offer opportunities for community input. For researchers, partnerships offer the opportunity to see the real-world application and benefits of their work, provide access to agency data and staff, and create mentorship opportunities for junior colleagues and students (Alpert et al. 2013). The second part of the definition of translational criminology, then, is crucial—what is the process for bringing research into practice, and what strategies are most effective for successfully disseminating and integrating scientific knowledge (Lum 2009; Laub 2011; Telep and Gross Shader 2019)? We summarize three key components of successful translation in the “research translation triangle” in Fig. 5.1: compelling research and motivated practitioners, underpinned by a supportive context. Compelling Research Research is compelling if it is rigorous, clear, and easy to find. Fyfe and Wilson (2012) note that research is more likely to be used by agencies if it is of high quality; provides clear, uncontested findings; is aligned with agency priorities and needs and has political support; is timely and relevant; is presented in a user-friendly format; and is shaped by the characteristics of the “end users” (see also Pesta et al. 2019). While we have identified some challenges in producing rigorous and clear research in criminology and criminal justice, Nutley and Davies (1999) highlight a

Fig. 5.1  Triangle model for successful research translation

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number of strengths in the field that are conducive to this element of successful translation. For example, even in the late 1990s when Nutley and Davis wrote this article, they described an established culture of evaluation research in criminology that drew upon a variety of methods and practices to assess effectiveness, which has continued to grow in the decades since. They also note a disciplinary interest in theory and understanding causal linkage and mechanisms. While there has been debate about the reliance on randomized controlled trials as the “gold standard” of evaluation research in criminal justice settings (e.g., Berk 2005; Sampson 2010), well-designed and implemented experiments remain the most rigorous method for determining causal inference. There has been a substantial increase in the number of randomized experiments in criminology: in 2005, Farrington and Welsh noted that the number of experiments more than doubled between 1981 and the early 2000s, while Neyroud (2017) identified 122 randomized trials completed and reported by 2016 in policing alone. Clarity remains a challenge in criminological research. As we have noted, there is a great deal of nuance in social settings, and it is difficult to point with certainty to many interventions that truly and conclusively “work.” Furthermore, more rigorous evaluation designs tend to find less favorable results than weaker approaches (Weisburd et al. 2001; Welsh et al. 2011). Nonetheless, Nutley and Davies (1999) note that the field of criminology has increasingly adopted systematic reviews, which involve a rigorous and transparent search process to identify and synthesize all relevant research on a topic, and meta-analysis, which is a quantitative approach to calculating an average effect across the body of research. These related methodologies can help to make sense of a set of studies that may have varied or conflicting results individually, as the overall results of the review may point to a preponderance of evidence in one direction or another. At the same time, proponents of realistic evaluation (e.g., Pawson and Tilley 1997), qualitative or mixed-method research (e.g., Maruna 2010), and implementation science (e.g., Fixsen et  al. 2005; Gottfredson et al. 2015) have highlighted the importance of incorporating theories of change, going beyond quantitative methods, and measuring implementation fidelity to understand why programs do or do not work and how they can be scaled up or ported to other settings. A number of translational tools and repositories have been developed to make evaluation research easier for practitioners to find and digest (e.g., Lum 2009; Telep and Gross Shader 2019). For example, CrimeSolutions.gov, which is maintained by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice, rates programs, practices, and policies as effective, promising, or ineffective based on the strength and quality of the research evidence. A similar initiative operated by the national College of Policing in the United Kingdom, the Crime Reduction Toolkit,4 also incorporates cost and implementation information. Also in policing, the Center for Evidence-­ Based Crime Policy at George Mason University hosts the Evidence-Based Policing

 https://whatworks.college.police.uk/toolkit/Pages/Welcome.aspx (accessed May 27, 2020).

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Matrix (Lum et  al. 2011),5 which organizes evaluations of policing initiatives according to their geographic focus and levels of proactivity and specificity. The Campbell Collaboration6 (Doyle et al. 2010; Farrington et al. 2011) disseminates practitioner-friendly summaries of rigorous systematic reviews of interventions and policies in crime and justice (as well as education, social welfare, international development, and business management). Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development summarizes the impacts, benefits, and costs of programs to promote youth development and prevent bullying, aggression, and other risky behaviors.7 These tools are often connected to more active translational efforts (for example, the Matrix Demonstration Project8 associated with the Evidence-Based Policing Matrix and the housing of the Crime Reduction Toolkit within the organization that oversees police training and standards for England and Wales). Finally, in addition to the research itself being compelling, it is important that the researchers themselves are viewed by the agency as a trustworthy person and able to adapt to the practitioners’ environment. It is typically the responsibility of the researcher to prove this before the partnership can be fully established (Boba 2010; Engel and Whalen 2010; Rojek et al. 2015). In general, researchers must have the personality, skill set, and desire to engage in partnerships and be comfortable with or able to respect the culture and environment of the agency (Rojek et al. 2015). Scholars who prefer to work alone or focus on questions and methodologies that do not lend themselves well to an applied context or cannot afford to put in the time required to build relationships over the course of months or even years because of publication timelines and other personal or professional constraints may not have the ability to fully engage as a research partner (Uggen and Inderbitzin 2010). Researchers must also show a genuine interest in helping the agency and not appear to be judgmental about existing problems and practices (Rojek et al. 2015). Motivated Practitioners While the burden of establishing the right conditions for a partnership falls primarily on the researcher, the importance of practitioners who are well-placed, empowered, and action-oriented cannot be understated. The growth in interest in researcher-practitioner partnerships can partly be attributed to early pioneers, including (using policing as an example) organizations such as the Police Foundation9 and numerous police chiefs and scholars who valued the role of research in furthering agency goals (Sherman 1998; Lum 2009). The success of

 https://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/the-matrix/ (accessed May 27, 2020).  https://www.campbellcollaboration.org (accessed May 27, 2020). 7  https://www.blueprintsprograms.org (accessed May 27, 2020). 8  https://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/the-matrix/matrix-demonstration-project/ May 27, 2020). 9  https://www.policefoundation.org (accessed May 27, 2020). 5 6

(accessed

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these partnerships, such as the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (Kelling et al. 1974) and the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment (Police Foundation 1981), is vital for advancing translational criminology because high-profile practitioners who benefit from them go on to become advocates for the approach (Rojek et al. 2015; see also Beal and Kerlikowske 2010, Bratton 2006, Engel and Whalen 2010). However, successful partnerships do not necessarily need a “big name” chief or agency leader to spearhead the effort, although supportive leadership is crucial to instilling a culture of evidence-based practice throughout the organization. In general, partnerships are successful when practitioners value the role of research and researchers approach collaboration with an open mind (Rojek et  al. 2015). Practitioners who “take the plunge” and engage in a partnership also have the unique opportunity to see how research is actually conducted, which can help them better visualize its utility to their daily activities (Pesta et al. 2019). Of course, practitioner motivation is helped or hindered by organizational constraints; for example, partnerships may suffer if there is high turnover and a leader or line-level practitioner who has served as a champion for research leaves the agency. Pesta et al. (2019) finds further support that relationship building (trust, credibility, and reciprocity) matters in overcoming these organizational barriers and encouraging agency decision-­makers to embrace research. More broadly, another strength of criminal justice agencies identified by Nutley and Davies (1999) is a renewed belief among both researchers and practitioners that justice interventions work, which in turn has helped attune agency staff to the idea that the effectiveness of their practice can and should be evaluated. The “nothing works” era of the 1970s is well-documented, but the idea that nothing can be done to address crime has long been replaced by the more positive “what works” orientation, supported by the increased production of compelling evidence (see above) and the development of successful researcher-practitioner partnerships (e.g., Cullen and Gendreau 2001; Martinson 1974; Palmer 1975; Weisburd et  al. 2016, 2017). In policing, Lum (2009) points to several additional developments that have created a supportive infrastructure for the use of scientific evidence, including technological advancements that facilitate data collection and improved police-community relations, which lead to an increased focus on transparency around policies and procedures. Supportive Context While compelling research and motivated researchers and practitioners are vital to the establishment of successful partnerships, these collaborations can only thrive in the longer term if they exist in a supportive context. This involves support from high-level decision-makers (both in the organization itself and the broader political and social environment that shapes organizational culture), sufficient funding, and an emphasis on sustainability. Sustainability is a particularly important consideration when partnerships are formed as part of a time-limited project; for example, they risk fizzling out when the grant requirements are satisfied and the funding ends.

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As we noted above, the success of existing researcher-practitioner partnerships can be very important in shaping higher-level policymakers’ attitudes toward the use of research. Over the long term, this can shape the entire field’s orientation toward evidence-based policy, which in turn shapes leaders’ expectations and political support (Pesta et  al. 2019). For example, Lum (2009) notes that the rise of evidence-­based policing has been facilitated in part by increased expectations for police chiefs to engage with researchers (driven by the efforts of early pioneers), increased infrastructure for police membership organizations that also conduct their own research and/or promote translation efforts (for example, the Police Executive Research Forum10 and the International Association of Chiefs of Police)11, and the US Department of Justice’s focus on rigorous evidence. Nutley and Davies (1999) also point to the support of government agencies and practitioner bodies as an important factor in encouraging the evaluation and use of effective and innovative practices in the criminal justice arena more broadly. Research partnerships may arise informally when a researcher reaches out to a local agency or vice versa to request data or evaluation of a new initiative, but Rojek et al. (2015) point to the adoption by grant-making agencies of the Office of Justice Programs, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, of the participatory action research (PAR) model (e.g., Kidd and Kral 2005; Whyte 1989; McTaggart 1991) as a key contributor to the growth of researcher-practitioner partnerships in criminal justice. In the PAR model, members of the organization or community being studied play an active role, along with the researcher, in defining problems, research questions, and solutions. PAR supports the development of the type of meaningful, two-way collaborations between researchers and practitioners that we have described here. As Rosenbaum (2010) explains, researchers who are embedded within the agency or community rather than observing it from the “outside” are likely to have a better sense of the contextual factors that support and explain their findings. Agency leaders who are willing to engage in PAR are more likely to listen to the researcher’s recommendations and find them credible, given the researcher’s relationship with the agency. In turn, this increases the chances that evidence-based recommendations will be implemented. Numerous examples of legislated or “forced” researcher-practitioner partnership initiatives to support crime prevention and community revitalization have emerged over the last three decades (Sherman 2004; Rojek et al. 2015). At the state and local levels, Petersilia (2008) highlights an example of a state commission to review justice practices that incorporated an “embedded criminologist,” which grew out of political demand for sentencing reform. At the federal level, the Drug Market Analysis Project (Weisburd and Green 1995) and, in the area of community-­oriented policing, the Locally Initiated Research Partnerships (McEwen 2003) and Weed and Seed initiatives (Dunworth et al. 1999) paired researchers, police departments, and communities together in problem-solving efforts supported by research and data

10 11

 https://www.policeforum.org (accessed May 27, 2020).  https://www.theiacp.org (accessed May 27, 2020).

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analysis during the 1990s. Rojek et  al. (2015) also identify Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, and its subsequent replication and expansion under the Strategic Approach to Community Safety Initiative (SACSI) and Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN; McGarrell et al. 2009, Roehl et al. 2005, Rosenbaum and Roehl 2010, Grunwald and Papachristos 2017), as significant developments in the proliferation of research-­ practice partnerships. Over the past 10  years, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, an agency of the U.S.  Department of Justice, has rolled out the “Innovations Suite” (formerly the “Smart Suite”) of grant programs, which calls for action research partnerships in a variety of criminal justice domains including policing, community-led crime prevention, prosecution and defense, correctional supervision, and reentry.12 The Innovations Suite also supports the sustainability of translational criminology by providing specific training and technical assistance around partnership development and maintenance, such as a “Fellows Academy,” which both the researchers and the practitioners in a partnership jointly attend to learn and share information about the process and challenges of action research, including data collection, research design and methodology, and implementation.13 The Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) program was a part of the Innovations Suite.14 First awarded in fiscal year 2012, BCJI funds multi-sector partnerships that focus on neighborhood revitalization. BCJI was, at its inception, closely tied to the Obama White House’s Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative15 and incorporates many of the legacies of SACSI and a related National Institute of Justice-funded initiative from the early 2000s, Community Mapping, Planning, and Analysis for Safety Strategies (COMPASS; e.g., Boba et al. 2009), which emphasized jurisdiction-wide GIS and data sharing systems to proactively inform community problem-solving. In keeping with translational and action research principles, BCJI partnerships must include a research partner, who is expected to work as a member of the partnership throughout the duration of the grant period to help identify and prioritize problems and collaboratively develop solutions, as well as evaluate the effectiveness of the efforts. BCJI programs are designed around four key components: 1. Place-based. Although neighborhood revitalization is the overall goal of BCJI, the partnership is expected to develop strategies at specific geographic locations within the neighborhood, known as “hot spots.” A strong body of research (summarized by Weisburd 2015) shows that crime concentrates heavily in very small geographic areas, sometimes as small as a single address or street block. About 5% of such places in larger cities account for 50% of the entire city’s crime rate.  https://www.bja.gov/programs/crppe/innovationssuite.html (accessed May 27, 2020).  https://cj.msu.edu/community/smart-suite.html (accessed May 27, 2020). 14  https://www.bja.gov/ProgramDetails.aspx?Program_ID=70 (accessed May 27, 2020). 15  https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/oua/initiatives/neighborhood-revitalization (accessed May 27, 2020). 12 13

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This has implications for crime prevention in that substantial gains can potentially be made by focusing resources at a small number of locations (e.g., Braga et al. 2014; Weisburd and Telep 2010; Lum et al. 2011). Thus, the logic of BCJI is that by identifying and targeting small places within a community, crime can be reduced across the entire neighborhood. 2. Community-oriented. BCJI recognizes that no one agency or group is equipped to solve the complex risk factors that underpin crime problems at places and that neighborhood residents (who may have lived at a place for many years, outlasting local politicians and police leaders) have considerable expertise in the history of prior efforts—what has worked and what has not—local crime concerns, and the needs of the community. They are considered equal partners, along with criminal justice agencies, in identifying and addressing the problem. 3 . Data-driven. Through its emphasis on researcher-practitioner partnerships, BCJI requires grantees to use a range of data (not necessarily limited to police or crime data) to assess the risk factors at hot spots and to develop evidence-­ informed strategies to address them. 4 . Partnership-building. The components described above require grantees to develop comprehensive cross-sector partnerships, including law enforcement, criminal justice, service providers, community members, and researchers to address the range of risk factors and social challenges that can contribute to crime at hot spots.

BCJI in Seattle: Forming an Effective Partnership The City of Seattle has a long history of partnerships between researchers and practitioners to address public safety through community-led, place-based, and data-­ driven approaches. Seattle has participated in many of the initiatives described above, including Weed and Seed and PSN. The city was a pilot site for COMPASS in the early 2000s, and its Rainier Beach neighborhood was awarded one of the original BCJI grants in FY2012 for the Rainier Beach: A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth (ABSPY) collaboration. In the remainder of this chapter, we trace the development of ABSPY in the context of the city’s broader commitment to research and translation and the community’s engagement in grassroots organizing and evidence-­ based strategies. We describe the ways in which compelling research and motivated practitioners and community members came together within a supportive local and national context to develop, implement, and sustain the partnership and how the lessons we learned can be distilled and applied to other communities.

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Rainier Beach: A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth Rainier Beach: A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth (ABSPY) is a collaboration between community stakeholders, local government, grassroots community organizations, and researchers that oversees the development and implementation of non-­ arrest community-led, place-based, data-driven interventions in hot spots of juvenile and youth violence and crime in the Rainier Beach neighborhood.16 ABSPY is both a partnership and a problem-solving process. At the outset of the initiative, the Rainier Beach community itself was at the forefront of identifying place-based risk factors for youth crime in the hot spots and developing their own innovative and evidence-informed strategies. To achieve this, they used a systematic problem-­ solving framework inspired by the Communities That Care prevention science model (Hawkins et al. 2002), the SARA problem-oriented policing model (Goldstein 1990; Weisburd et al. 2010), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Strategic Prevention Framework17 and adapted for place-based rather than person-based issues by the ABSPY team in collaboration with a technical assistance partner, Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA; see Yang et al. 2012).18 ABSPY is overseen by a cross-sector Core Team that provides expertise, strategic planning, and implementation support to help residents build capacity for crime prevention. The Core Team comprises a diverse group of partners from the City of Seattle (the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative, which is described more below and was originally housed within the Department of Neighborhoods; the Office of City Auditor; and the Office of Planning and Community Development); Seattle Police Department (SPD); Seattle Public Schools; the Seattle Neighborhood Group, a community crime prevention nonprofit organization; the Rainier Beach Action Coalition, a local alliance of community members and businesses; the Boys and Girls Club of King County; and research partners from the Center for Evidence-­ Based Crime Policy at George Mason University. Numerous other local government and community partners have been involved with planning and implementation activities since the initiative was developed (Gill et al. 2016). ABSPY brings together several key areas of research: the concentration of crime at place, environmental theories of criminology, and the importance of non-arrest, community-focused interventions to address youth crime. As the BCJI program recognizes, crime is highly concentrated at small hot spots, offering opportunities for highly focused interventions to address crime. Juvenile crime is especially concentrated at small places. Weisburd et al. (2009) found, using data from Seattle, that one-third of all arrests of juveniles in the city occurred at just 86 of more than 26,000 street segments (0.29%) between 1989 and 2004. They suggest that this  The development, design, and goals of ABSPY are described in more detail in Gill et al. (2016).  https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/20190620-samhsa-strategic-prevention-frameworkguide.pdf (accessed May 27, 2020). 18  https://www.cadca.org (accessed May 27, 2020). 16

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concentration is driven by environmental characteristics of the places themselves and the routine activities of young people who use them. For example, children tend to have more predictable patterns of travel and activity than adults because they are required to be in school at specific times and are restricted in certain ways (for example, curfews or bans on entering places such as bars: Brantingham and Brantingham 1995; Gottfredson et  al. 2001; Roman 2002, 2005; Felson 2006; Felson and Boba 2010). Thus, the streets with the highest concentration of juvenile arrests identified by Weisburd et  al. (2009) tended to feature the types of places where young people were likely to hang out with limited supervision or structured activity, such as shopping malls, outside schools, and parks, whereas residential streets and those with concentrations of bars and nightclubs were not juvenile hot spots (see also Osgood and Anderson 2004; Osgood et al. 1996). Despite the research evidence for the effectiveness of policing interventions at hot spots (Sherman and Weisburd 1995; Weisburd and Green 1995; Braga et  al. 1999, 2014; Skogan and Frydl 2004; Weisburd and Eck 2004; Braga and Bond 2008; Lum et al. 2011; Ratcliffe et al. 2011; Telep et al. 2014; Groff et al. 2015), little research has examined their application at specific juvenile crime hot spots (cf. Gill et  al. 2018b). However, other theoretical and empirical perspectives suggest that community-focused problem-solving interventions may be more appropriate than deterrence-based hot spot policing approaches for young people (e.g., Braithwaite 1989; Greenwood 2008; Lipsey 2009; Gill 2016), given that juveniles who are arrested and formally processed through the juvenile justice system are more likely to reoffend than those who are diverted to services (Petrosino et  al. 2010, see also Lowenkamp and Latessa 2004, Lundman 1993, Shelden 1999). Thus, while SPD are key members of the ABSPY Core Team, they did not lead the problem-­ solving effort as in traditional problem-oriented community policing. ABSPY aimed to empower residents of the hot spots to take ownership of their space and help to build social cohesion and collective efficacy (Sampson et  al. 1997). The ABSPY problem-solving process, then, centered around community members identifying the social and environmental drivers of unstructured, unsupervised youth activity at the hot spots and working with Core Team partners to develop opportunities for guardianship, education, volunteer opportunities, and community building. During the first 9 months of the BCJI grant (January–September 2013), the Core Team engaged in a comprehensive planning process to identify hot spots in Rainier Beach, build a “Community Task Force” (CTF) of hot spot residents and train them in problem-solving, and collaborate with the CTF to develop a suite of evidence-­ informed interventions for each hot spot. Our hot spot analysis was based on 2012 data provided by SPD (see Gill et al. 2015, 2016 for full technical details of this approach). Five hot spots were identified in collaboration with Core Team members. Seattle Neighborhood Group (SNG), along with Public Outreach and Engagement Liaisons (POELs) from the city, developed a culturally and linguistically inclusive community outreach strategy to recruit residents, business owners, and other space users from these hot spots to the CTF. In October 2013, the CTF convened for a one-day training session on the problem-solving framework described above. Over

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the next 6  months, the CTF met regularly to delve deeper into each stage of the framework: (1) What is the problem? (2) Why is it occurring, and why here? (3) What can we do about it? (4) Why do we think it will work? (5) What is the expected outcome? This process ultimately led to the development of a logic model for each of the five hot spots. Over the next 2 years, the Core Team focused on securing support for and implementing the interventions proposed by the CTF for each site. The CTF had considerable discretion in choosing approaches they thought appropriate for their hot spot, but to ensure the interventions generally aligned with evidence-based or theoretically informed place-based strategies for youth crime prevention, the research partners provided a broad framework to guide and inspire the teams. Interventions could fall within one or more of the following categories: (1) increasing supervision and providing structure for youth, (2) changing the physical environment through situational crime prevention and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), (3) changing policies and rules (for example, emphasizing place management and civil remedies), and (4) building collective efficacy. Examples of ABSPY’s signature interventions include the Corner Greeters—pop-up events, information sharing, and activities such as dancing and crafts, which are organized by young people through the Rainier Beach Action Coalition, geared toward “changing the narrative” about the neighborhood from the inside out, and planned to coincide with typically high-crime days and times in the hot spots; the Safe Passage team, which provides guardianship and encouragement for students on their way to and from Rainier Beach schools; and business engagement, which included crime prevention education, cleanups, and repairs. Funding for ABSPY through the BCJI program continued through September 2016, which included a 1-year no-cost extension to the grant. In 2015, Core Team members and young people from Rainier Beach developed a successful proposal to the Seattle City Council to request continued funding for project coordination, implementation, and research activities through 2016, and this request has subsequently been renewed each year through 2020. Core Team members also built on ABSPY’s successes to leverage further federal funding for related initiatives, including a Comprehensive School Safety Initiative grant from the National Institute of Justice to build links between the Rainier Beach community and its schools based around Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and restorative practices. Additional funding leveraged includes around half a million dollars in annual matching funds through in-kind contributions from partner agencies and smaller project grants from city agencies. ABSPY has been evaluated for its effect on crime and community perceptions using a quasi-experimental design in which crime and survey data from the five Rainier Beach hot spots were compared to the same data in five matched hot spots elsewhere in SPD’s South Precinct. The first evaluation report, in 2016, showed that the hot spots were becoming less “hot” over time, particularly in terms of violent crime, and promising improvements in hot spot residents’ perceptions of collective efficacy, the police, and crime rates (Gill et al. 2016). The most recent report (Gill et al. 2018a), which includes four waves of survey data collection, shows significant

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longer-term improvements in perceptions of crime rates, collective efficacy, and police satisfaction and legitimacy.

Elements of the Partnership: Research, Practice, and Context ABSPY is emerging as a successful initiative, in terms of both evaluation findings and its potential for longer-term sustainability. This is particularly remarkable given that, unlike the policing and other criminal justice initiatives described earlier, ABSPY was developed, implemented, and sustained almost entirely outside the traditional bureaucratic structure of a government agency. The Core Team’s model of shared governance across multiple partners ranging from grassroots community groups, nonprofit organizations, and large bureaucracies such as the police department, local government agencies, and universities inevitably led to concerns about whether ABSPY’s power was truly concentrated in the hands of the community and how much influence each person and institution should hold. We understood at the outset that this presented challenges for successful translation of research into practice, because the research reviewed earlier in this chapter indicates the extent to which this relies on leadership and organizational culture. To understand the ways in which ABSPY was able to transcend these issues, we turn back to the “research translation triangle” (in Fig.  5.1) to examine which elements were in place or emerged over the course of ABSPY’s development that situated it for success. A key strength of ABSPY is its combination of compelling research and motivated practitioners. In this context, ABSPY “practitioners” cover the spectrum from Rainier Beach residents and community organizations such as RBAC and the Boys and Girls Club; nonprofit organizations such as SNG; and agencies more traditionally viewed as criminal justice practitioners and stakeholders, such as local government and the police department. Several of the practitioners on the ABSPY Core Team serve in multiple roles; for example, a number of representatives from across ABSPY’s member organizations live or grew up in Rainier Beach. The research basis for ABSPY is compelling in a number of the ways outlined earlier. First of all, its place-based focus is grounded in a strong research tradition highlighting the connection between crime and the physical environment and the “tight coupling” (Weisburd et  al. 2012) of crime and place. In contrast to mixed findings on the effectiveness of many criminal justice theories and interventions, the evidence for crime concentration at place is sufficiently clear and compelling that Weisburd (2015) has described it as a “law” in the field of criminology: “for a defined measure of crime at a specific microgeographic unit, the concentration of crime will fall within a narrow bandwidth of percentages for a defined cumulative proportion of crime” (p. 138). For example, in Seattle, 50% of the city’s crime was concentrated at just 5% of its street segments (Weisburd et al. 2004). Furthermore, the research supporting this law is rigorous. A number of studies have used innovative statistical methods such as group-based trajectory analysis (e.g., Nagin and Tremblay 2001) to show not only that the law of crime

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concentration at place exists but that the bandwidth of concentration is relatively similar in cities around the world and across different types of places (e.g., urban or suburban) and that it persists over time—in Seattle, the level of concentration remained stable for 14 years (Weisburd et al. 2004, 2009, 2012; see also Andresen et  al. 2017; Groff et  al. 2010; Weisburd and Amram 2014; Curman et  al. 2015; Wheeler et al. 2016; Bernasco and Steenbeek 2017; Gill et al. 2017; Hibdon et al. 2017; Lee et  al. 2017; Levin et  al. 2017; Favarin 2018). In addition, rigorous research—including randomized controlled trials—of interventions such as hot spot policing, which were developed specifically to take advantage of the benefits of focusing criminal justice resources at the highest-risk places, has showed that such strategies are effective in controlling crime (e.g., Braga et al. 2014). There are also a number of randomized trials supporting ABSPY’s other primary focus—the problem of young people becoming entrenched in the criminal justice system through formal processing and the need to support them with community-based services and support—which have been summarized in several meta-analyses (e.g., Lipsey 2009; Petrosino et al. 2010). Whether or not the clear and rigorous research underpinning ABSPY met our third criterion for compelling research—“easy to find”—is less apparent. However, the fact that the flagship studies on the concentration of crime and juvenile crime at place were conducted using Seattle data (Weisburd et  al. 2004, 2009) certainly increased its appeal to stakeholders in the city. Consistent with the difficult history of translational criminology, these studies were not shared with city policymakers when they were conducted, and thus were virtually unknown prior to the lead-up to the BCJI grant application. In 2010, in her role as assistant city auditor, the second author of this chapter came across them by chance in her research while responding to a request from two Seattle City Council members to conduct an audit on the city’s response to littering and graffiti (Gross Shader 2011). This discovery and the subsequent report, which focused heavily on the need for a “hot spots” focus and also included information about the Strategic Prevention Framework on which ABSPY’s problem-solving model is based, set off a chain of events that directly led to the foundation of ABSPY. The Office of City Auditor (OCA) report also illustrated the motivation of practitioners in the city. In addition to writing up their audit report, OCA provided the City Council members who requested it with Weisburd et al.’s 2004 and 2009 studies. City Council member Tim Burgess, as chair of the Council’s Public Safety Committee and a former Seattle police officer, was motivated to delve into the research and understand the opportunities it presented.19 As a result, SPD implemented a hot spot policing pilot at a long-term hot spot in the city’s Central District and began to integrate other related initiatives, such as directed patrol, into their everyday operations.

19  The early history of Seattle’s partnership with the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy is documented in Gross Shader (2011).

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At the same time, OCA also contacted Professor David Weisburd, who was now based at George Mason University’s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy (CEBCP) along with his co-author on the 2004 study, Professor Cynthia Lum, to discuss the research. This initial interest from the city and subsequent contact led to Lum and the first author of this chapter visiting Seattle in 2011 to meet with the City Council, police department, community members, and the media and present on the crime and place research. Among the audience at one of their meetings were the director of the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative, Mariko Lockhart, and Rainier Beach Action Coalition managing strategist Gregory Davis. As we discuss in the following section, their motivation to understand the research and its potential to support young people, which led them to attend these meetings, meant that when the BCJI solicitation was announced the following year, they were poised for the collaboration and their eventual role as key ABSPY partners. We have focused on the development of the ABSPY partnership here, but ABSPY could not have been sustained over time and produced such promising results without the continued strength of the relationship between the researchers and practitioners. We suggest that the continued relationship between the researchers and all the ABSPY practitioner stakeholders is characterized by three themes: clarity, agility, and generosity. Clarity involves a shared vision—both the researchers and city and community stakeholders have worked together to co-author grant proposals, develop project materials, and brief funders and policymakers. The Core Team has articulated goals and procedures for decision-making that prioritize community governance to shift the power balance away from large institutions and bureaucracies. The practitioners have also served as translators to support the research, drawing upon their knowledge of different agencies and functions (in the case of OCA) and helping the research partners tap into community resources and connections (RBAC, SNG, Boys and Girls Club, city departments). Agility refers to the ABSPY team’s ability to react and adapt to changing conditions. The practitioners have played an important role here in facilitating partnerships and making an effort to understand the research. For example, all members of the Core Team have worked to ensure that interventions developed by the community are implemented in the spirit of the four evidence-informed categories and the overall place-based, non-arrest focus and have come together to advocate for the ABSPY approach when it appeared to be veering off track. In one significant example of the Core Team’s agility and commitment to the research basis, when a new business manager in one of the hot spots began aggressively cracking down on young shoplifters, Core Team members—including SPD representatives—highlighted the non-arrest approach, investigated why the shoplifting was occurring (often because the young people were hungry and could not afford food), and developed a free lunch program to discourage further problems. Two-way data sharing has also been a key influence on the Core Team’s agility. While the research partner provides some of the data analysis, based on police incident and calls for service records and community surveys, the Corner Greeters have also played a vital role in both gathering and disseminating data in partnership with local residents. This allows more “real-time” data collection to complement the

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larger, more expensive survey efforts carried out by CEBCP, which can only be done once a year. The Corner Greeters also use data reports provided by the researchers to tailor their activities to “hot” days and times within the hot spots, in an effort to reclaim the space. City and community partners have also brought back information about promising practices from other jurisdictions to share with the research team and build into ABSPY processes and subsequent funding support. For example, the City of Seattle learned about Oakland Unified School District’s use of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and restorative practices, and this knowledge was incorporated into the ABSPY framework via a National Institute of Justice Comprehensive School Safety Initiative grant.20 Finally, as we noted above, not all researchers (or practitioners) are suited to translational partnership work. We suggest that generosity among all parties is the crucial quality for successful partnerships. The ABSPY research partners are hands­on and work in real time, are responsive to changing needs, and are willing to adapt models from other areas to ensure the program is responsive to the community. ABSPY’s community and city partners understand and support the use of evidence and data-driven processes, incorporate flexibility into implementation to remain responsive to data, and regularly request data to inform practice. This model of mutual respect and responsivity is markedly different from the one-way flow of information and siloing of expertise within the researcher or practitioner “side” that characterizes weaker or less successful translation partnerships. While ABSPY is clearly grounded in research, supported by multiple stakeholders throughout the city, and benefits from a clear, agile, and generous relationship between the researchers and practitioners, we described earlier the importance of a supportive context in sustaining research-practice partnerships over time. Seattle and the Rainier Beach neighborhood were also able to provide this element of the research translation triangle, which supported the compelling research and motivated practitioners and led to successful implementation and outcomes. Crucially, ABSPY was supported across multiple contexts: federal (through the BCJI funding and its emphasis on developing successful partnerships, as discussed above), local, geographic, and community. As we discussed above, there are multiple models for developing research-­ practice partnerships, for example, creating demand for them within the practitioner community, legislating or “forcing” them through grant programs that require collaboration, and embedding researchers. ABSPY reflects elements of all three. City government practitioners discovered the basic research, forged initial relationships with the researchers, and generated community engagement around the topic by inviting researchers to the city to share the findings. This provided the opportunity to apply for the BCJI grant, which required the researchers to play a more active, “embedded” role in the community problem-solving process rather than simply evaluating the program at the end.

 See http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/CityAuditor/auditreports/SYVPI%20 Summary%20MemoFinalReport100915.pdf (accessed May 27, 2020).

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The involvement of the Office of City Auditor in this process was particularly important, because Seattle’s overall inclination toward research and evidence-based practices meant that OCA had a specific mandate to focus on research partnership and translation. OCA was originally established to audit local government departments and city contracts, but in 2009, the City Council tasked the office with helping city departments to conduct rigorous evaluations and bring research into practice (see Telep and Gross Shader 2019). Locating these functions within OCA was beneficial for the development of ABSPY for two reasons. First, through its auditing role, OCA has an overview of all the local government departments and initiatives, allowing it to facilitate multiagency partnerships and collaboration. Second, OCA directly responds to requests from Council members, so its work is read and actionable at the highest level of local government. Gross-Shader and Gill (2013) describe the chain of events set off by the publication of the OCA hot spot report in 2011 as the birth of a “translation community” in Seattle, which they define as a “coalescence and collaboration among the various agencies and stakeholders that can play a role in bringing science to bear on practical decision making.” Of particular relevance here, they note that the breadth of stakeholders included in this translation community was vital to the sustainability of local partnership and translational efforts. Rather than relying on champions within a specific agency, such as the police department, whose tenures may be too short to support the integration of research into practice, Seattle’s efforts brought together elected policymakers, various city departments, the media, and community members to ensure a broad range of expertise and multiple opportunities to fund and sustain innovative partnerships in the longer term. The inclusion of local residents and community groups in Seattle’s “translation community” became especially salient for the development and sustainability of ABSPY.  Seattle has a particularly strong culture of community engagement— around one-third of residents are involved in volunteer work, and there is a robust infrastructure of organizations and processes (both within and independent of local government) that support the development of grassroots efforts and the inclusion of diverse community voices (Gross-Shader and Gill 2013). This culture lends itself to more organic community engagement efforts, rather than top-down, bureaucratic initiatives to implement new approaches. The two community processes upon which ABSPY was originally built—the Rainier Beach Neighborhood Plan Update (RBNPU) and the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative (SYVPI)—formed part of this infrastructure. Since the late 1990s, the City of Seattle has supported a neighborhood planning process across the city, which brings together residents and community organizations to develop a vision and strategic plan for improving specific neighborhoods. In 2011, participating neighborhoods, including Rainier Beach, set out to update their plans around the same time as the CEBCP researchers visited Seattle, and RBAC, as the community organization responsible for managing and implementing the RBNPU, attended those meetings as part of the planning process. The RBNPU identified several community priorities that aligned with BCJI, including a focus on risk factors, community-led empowerment efforts to improve the neighborhood,

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economic development, and supporting young people. The ultimate vision of the plan was to make Rainier Beach “A Beautiful Safe Place.” The Rainier Beach neighborhood itself was also well-placed for such an effort, as not only a vibrant, diverse community with a strong tradition of community organizing but also one that faced challenges around crime and a lack of economic investment. SYVPI was a multiagency city initiative involving the Departments of Neighborhoods, Human Services, and Parks; SPD; SPS; the juvenile court; and community partners such as the Boys and Girls Clubs of King County. It was created in 2008 by the Mayor’s Office in response to the murders of five teenagers in Seattle that year. SYVPI provided outreach and services to young people at risk of violent crime involvement or victimization, connecting evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies with innovative grassroots programming in three “neighborhood networks” believed to be most affected by youth violence. The Southeast network encompassed Rainier Beach. The inclusion of the community in the CEBCP researchers’ visits to Seattle also ensured that key RBNPU and SYVPI stakeholders were present to learn more about the hot spot approach. The results of this were that (1) the RBNPU explicitly called for a hot spot approach to addressing the root causes of violence and improving community health and (2) SYVPI was identified as being well-placed to serve as the fiscal agent for the BCJI grant. As a government agency, SYVPI was able to handle the administrative aspects of a large federal grant, while its existing links with the Rainier Beach neighborhood and other ABSPY partners facilitated implementation and provided legitimacy. As a result of these two processes, RBAC and the Rainier Vista Boys and Girls Club (which provided SYVPI services in the Southeast network) were also identified as core members of ABSPY, playing crucial roles in delivering the ABSPY interventions and connecting with the local community. ABSPY was also able to leverage connections between the city and community to engage the POELs (described above)—ambassadors from the various linguistic and cultural communities in Rainier Beach—who provided language interpretation and translation and support to ensure that as many local voices as possible were included in the planning process.

 onclusion: Lessons from ABSPY for Sustaining C Research–Practice Partnerships In this chapter, we reviewed the facilitators and barriers to translational criminology, using Rainier Beach: A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth (ABSPY)—Seattle’s FY2012 Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation grant program—as a case study to demonstrate these concepts in practice. We proposed that successful research-practice partnerships rely on three components: compelling research, motivated practitioners, and a supportive context. Our case study suggests that ABSPY has remained sustainable beyond the expiration of the BCJI funding and is associated with

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long-­term improvements in community perceptions of the Rainier Beach neighborhood because each of these elements has been in place since the development of the partnership. The research bases for ABSPY—crime concentration at place and community-based intervention for youth—are compelling because they are both rigorously supported and (in the case of crime and place research) directly relevant to the Seattle context. ABSPY has benefited from community and local government practitioners and research partners whose relationships are built on clarity, agility, and sustainability. And these relationships have grown and persisted against the backdrop of Seattle’s “translation community,” which not only ensures that research and evidence are prioritized and actioned at the highest levels of government but also ensures that community voices and involvement are woven into the implementation of evidence-based policy and practice citywide. Connecting back to the scholarship on research translation, two aspects of ABSPY’s process stand out as particularly salient to its success. As we have suggested, it is vital that knowledge translation and integration extends beyond simply one group having expertise that they bring to bear on others (Davies et al. 2008; Rojek et  al. 2015). This is why Davies et  al. (2008) prefer the terms knowledge “interaction” or “intermediation” rather than “transfer” or “translation.” They note that these descriptors better capture the “messy engagement of multiple players with diverse sources of knowledge” (p. 190). True “action research” partnerships can help to develop the types of relationships that allow for two-way, rather than one-way, knowledge sharing (Rosenbaum 2010). Second, and related to the above, ABSPY shows the importance of elevating practitioner and community expertise and considering the “organizationally and culturally embedded nature of extant policy and practices” (Bradley and Nixon 2009 p.  432) in research partnerships. ABSPY requires a level of community engagement and support that simply could not be achieved by a researcher showing up and expecting to receive data and implement a program. It took almost 2 years of planning to develop the problem-solving process and come up with a set of actionable strategies, and the relationships among Core Team members and community residents are continually being critically examined and renegotiated to this day (Nazaire 2018). In the community setting, and especially when focused on crime and public safety, researchers must also recognize that these partnerships are likely to be formed in the shadow of institutional racism and intergenerational community trauma that has often been caused by the collaborating institutional partners— police, local government, and researchers themselves. Thus, as Bradley and Nixon (2009) note, research must be a shared enterprise between all partners and cannot be linear or “top-down.” Furthermore, they indicate that scientific evidence cannot automatically be privileged over the influences and pressures that drive practitioner behavior, such as craft, procedural knowledge, routines, and culture. While Bradley and Nixon (2009) make this statement in the context of police organizations, ABSPY suggests that the same is true—perhaps even more so—for community-led partnerships.

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What lessons does the ABSPY experience offer for the further development of the research translation triangle? In terms of compelling research, we hope that researchers and practitioners will continue to broaden the variety of different translation products to help communities develop shared understanding and build their own “translation communities.” Many of the existing translational tools we described at the beginning of this chapter rely on practitioners knowing about them and being able to find them. However, Gross Shader and Gill (2013) describe how Seattle expanded translational efforts around the 2011 CEBCP visit through the use of community forums, public access television shows, and radio interviews to take the research on hot spots to a different audience. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs maintains a Web site dedicated to translational tools for PBIS, a behavioral support program that has been incorporated into ABSPY.21 The site hosts a wide variety of videos, instruments, policy documents, and blueprints to guide implementation across a range of organizational levels (e.g., school district administrators through to individual classroom teachers) and incorporates a vibrant community of practitioners who meet up in person at conferences and online to share best practices. Related to our earlier point about elevating the practitioner voice, we hope that the motivated practitioner element of the research translation triangle will ultimately include a more equitable and inclusive perspective on the role of practitioners, especially community members and small, grassroots organizations. It is vital that partnerships include a “feedback loop” that includes and empowers those most affected by the programs being studied. As we noted, research has often been weaponized in marginalized communities, and at the very least, community members often tell us they feel “over-researched and underserved.” We must ensure that practitioner “motivation” to use science and evidence is appropriately placed and governed by those who stand to benefit from (or be harmed) by it. Vu Le, the Executive Director of the nonprofit Rainier Valley Corps in Seattle, provides compelling arguments and suggestions for “de-weaponizing” data and research in the context of communities like Rainier Beach (Le 2015). Finally, we hope that researchers and practitioners will develop a more methodical approach to ensuring a supportive context to sustain research translation. Sustainability rarely happens by accident, and even research showing a program’s effectiveness does not automatically guarantee that it will be integrated into regular practice. ABSPY’s sustained funding came about precisely because the three components of the research translation triangle were in place at the outset and continued to develop over time. However, sustainability is not always under the control of the partnership. For example, after 2019, the ABSPY model will go out for competitive tender under the City of Seattle’s sole-source contracting rules, meaning there is a risk that the existing partnerships, relationships, and history on which the process is built will be lost. A significant strength of the BCJI program, as well as the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s other “Innovations Suite” grants, was that it forced applicants to 21

 https://www.pbis.org (accessed May 27, 2020).

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consider sustainability as early as the grant proposal stage. Emerging examples of tools that help partnerships to plan for the likely facilitators and barriers to longterm success include the Program Sustainability Assessment Tool, developed by the Center for Public Health Systems Science at the Washington University in St. Louis.22 The tool has been validated across a variety of settings, allowing partnerships to be systematic and intentional about ensuring successful research and practice efforts continue to provide their intended benefits for organizations and communities. Overall, the ability of ABSPY to both produce successful outcomes and leverage sustainability indicates that well-designed and implemented community-research-­ practice partnerships can be a powerful tool for research translation and the development of innovative practices. While the chain of events that led to the development of ABSPY may seem serendipitous on their face, we have demonstrated that they in fact reflect a carefully crafted blend of compelling research; community members, researchers, and practitioners who exercised clarity, agility, and generosity in relationship building, data sharing, and implementation; practitioners and community members who were willing to take risks; and a supportive environment at all levels of government. ABSPY and both the BCJI and local Seattle frameworks within which it was developed show that hard work and attention to the three elements of the “research-practice triangle” can produce successful, sustainable partnerships. Acknowledgments  This research was funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Grant # 2012AJ-BX-0006 and City of Seattle Human Services Department contracts DC-16 - DC-20. The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this chapter are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the funders.

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Chapter 6

Cleveland, Ohio: A Community Law Enforcement Partnership for Sustainable Neighborhood Change Daniel J. Flannery, Liuhong Yang, Mark I. Singer, and Michael Walker

This chapter describes the program implementation process and selected outcomes of the Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) initiative in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, which took place from 2014 to 2017. In discussions with community partners, we understood that it was important to focus on a few key elements of our strategy: (1) identifying a high-crime-, violence-, and gang-involved neighborhood that would benefit from BCJI resources; (2) implementing intelligence-­led policing strategies known to be effective in reducing firearm violence; (3) involving community members and organizations in planning, implementation, and sustainability efforts; and (4) selecting a target area small enough so that effective intervention could realize neighborhood change and improved safety. Originally, our proposed activities were law enforcement driven and community complemented, but our planning process soon reversed that focus so that our activities became more community driven with intelligence-led policing activities (i.e., task force interdiction) supporting those efforts. One advantage we had in the city of Cleveland was the long-standing existence of several community-law enforcement partnerships and other efforts that could serve as foundation for BCJI activities. One significant partnership continues to be Cleveland’s Stand Together Against Neighborhood Crime Every Day (STANCE) program. Emerging from a 2006 grant via the US Department of Justice’s anti-gang initiative and continuing for the past decade through Project Safe Neighborhoods and other efforts, STANCE is a collaborative group of local and federal law enforcement, community partners, and agencies who meet on a quarterly basis under the D. J. Flannery (*) · L. Yang · M. I. Singer Begun Center for Violence Prevention, Research and Education, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. Walker Partnership for a Safer Cleveland, Cleveland, OH, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. J. Stokes, C. Gill (eds.), Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43635-3_6

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auspices of the US Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio. STANCE focuses on evidence-based activities addressing prevention, law enforcement interdiction, and the reentry of formerly incarcerated individuals into the community. Recognizing that community safety is essential to neighborhood vitality, STANCE identified a small geographic area most in need of expanded crime reduction initiatives. The planning for the BCJI initiative occurred in 2013. Our initial task involved the review of historical crime data, including gun-related crimes, calls for service, and information on active gangs. We also looked at data related to drivers of crime in places, including poverty rates, housing foreclosures, vacant properties, youth graduation rates, the last known location for open arrest warrants, and the locations of returning prisoners. The data overwhelmingly showed us that the area of Cleveland most in need of innovative crime reduction programs was a small area (about 2.2 square miles) in the 4th Police District encompassing a portion of the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood. Cleveland ranks among one of the most violent and poorest cities in the United States. According to 2012 UCR data, Cleveland Police recorded 30,060 part I crimes, including 84 homicides and 1750 aggravated assaults. There were also 49,101 priority-one calls for service, 5880 calls related to shots fired, and 3586 cases involving guns. Considered an epicenter of the foreclosure crisis that linked to the great recession of 2009, 21.7% of the city’s housing stock in 2012 was vacant compared to 12.5% nationally. Cleveland families also disproportionately experienced poverty, with 34.2% of all families living below the poverty level, compared to 14.9% nationally (US Census Bureau 2012). While violence and poverty tend to move in tandem, these social problems do not affect neighborhoods equally. Mt. Pleasant was hit particularly hard by the confluence of economic hardship and crime and thus provided an excellent choice for the BCJI program.

The Mt. Pleasant Target Area Social indicators for Mt. Pleasant, relative to the rest of the city, revealed a set of both vulnerable and high-risk populations in the neighborhood. In addition to families in poverty, seniors comprised roughly 15.6% of the population. Roughly 7.7% of adults in Mt. Pleasant had a college degree compared with 15% of Cleveland residents and only about 50% worked full time. Teen pregnancy rates for the area were higher than the rest of the city as was the percentage of low birth weight babies (Table 6.1). In addition to relatively high measures of economic and social disadvantage, Mt. Pleasant statistically presented as a high crime area. In the most recent 5-year period prior to BCJI implementation (2008–2012), Cleveland’s 4th Police District was responsible for 27% of all priority one calls for service. Of the five police districts, the 4th District, with only 24% of the city’s population, accounted for 36% of the homicides, 36% of the shootings, and 35% of the city’s aggravated robberies. This district represented over 30% of the juvenile warrants issued throughout the city

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Table 6.1  Selected demographics, Cleveland and Mt. Pleasant compared to the United States, 2012a, b Total population  Black  White Population aged 18–24 Idle youth (5-year est.) Poverty rate Median household income Unemployment rate Vacant housing

United States 309,138,711 12.6% 74.2% 30,913,871 6.5% 14.9% $53,046 9.3% 12%

City of Cleveland 397,972 52.6% 40.6% 42,185 6.7% 34.2% $26,556 19.5% 21.7%

Mt. Pleasant 15,540 97% 1.8% 1838 11% 35.3% $22,479 18% 22%

Information for the City of Cleveland and the target area represent 5-year estimates. All other figures are based on available data b Data from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Fact Finder a

(2009–2012) and 35% of all aggravated murders, 42% of all felony murder charges, and 35% of murder charges for juvenile offenders (2008–2012). Eleven identified gangs operated within the target area, and delinquency offenses accounted for over half of those in the 4th District and 11% of offenses throughout the city. Felony firearm charges over the 5 years prior to implementation made up roughly 14% of Cleveland’s total firearm charges, and in the year immediately preceding BCJI, firearm recovery in the target area accounted for a third of all firearms recovered in the city (Fig. 6.1 and Table 6.2). While the final BCJI target area covered parts of four different zip codes, we focused on three police zones in the 4th district: 4.3, 4.6, and 4.7. The final geographic area covered about 2.2 square miles, highlighted in Fig. 6.2.

Building Upon Existing Effective Strategies Because residents told us they felt they were generally “over-surveyed and underserved,” we used as much available data as we could in planning and implementation, including law enforcement data, information on population and housing surveys, juvenile court data, and school performance data. We also utilized information and lessons learned from the planning and implementation of other large multisystem initiatives such as STANCE, our Defending Childhood initiative, the Violence-Gun Recovery Intervention Program (V-GRIP), an education- and literacy-­focused P-16 intervention, and our nationally implemented Fugitive Safe Surrender (FSS) program. Planning and implementation on these initiatives included frequent community meetings and focus groups. These existing strategies are briefly summarized below and include prevention, interdiction, and reentry strategies that seek to increase community capacity to reduce crime and violence in a sustainable

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Fig. 6.1  Homicides, shootings, and robberies within the originally proposed target area. (Source: City of Cleveland Division of Police) Table 6.2  Selected crime statistics for City vs. 4th Police District vs. Final BCJI target area All Crime (2010)  Violent crimes rate (per 100,000)  Homicides  DV assaults rate (per 100,000)  Property crimes rate (per 100,000)  Part I crimes rate (per 100,000)  Part II crimes rate (per 100,000) Juvenile Court (2008)  Total delinquency offenses  Delinquency offenses rate (per 1000)  Total violent offenses  Assaults  Robberies  Property offenses  Burglaries, number  Illicit drug violations  Weapon law violations Source: City of Cleveland Division of Police

City of Cleveland

4th District

Target area

1507 76 1439.5 5920.6 7427.6 8331.3

1695 21 1479.7 5769.4 7464.4 8132

1548.9 11 1322.4 5655.2 7204.1 7730.8

5037 109 1803 769 356 1627 280 524 227

1056 123 373 157 91 355 66 103 52

569 129 187 83 44 209 41 61 24

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Fig. 6.2  Final target area map with zip codes. (Source: City of Cleveland Division of Police)

way. Lessons learned from these strategies formed the basis for many of the activities in our BCJI program in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood. Defending Childhood Initiative  Defending Childhood is an initiative of former US Attorney General Eric Holder that sought to (1) reduce childhood exposure to violence and trauma by developing and implementing activities that prevent children’s initial and repeated exposure to violence, (2) increase knowledge and awareness of the impact of childhood exposure to violence and trauma, and (3) reduce the negative impact of exposure by improving systems and services that identify and assist youth and families impacted by violence to reduce trauma, build resilience, and promote healing. In our community, the Defending Childhood model was developed with input from over 70 community partners, agencies, and systems. We decided to develop two screeners to assess children’s exposure to violence (as witness or victim) and trauma symptoms. We developed one screener to be completed by the child’s caregiver for youth birth through age 7 and a child self-report screener for youth ages 8 to 18 (Kretschmar et al. 2016). As of 2019, Cleveland’s county child welfare and juvenile justice systems (as well as several community providers) have screened over 35,000 youth for exposure to violence and trauma. For those who reach a threshold on the screening or are referred by a caseworker, a fuller assessment of violence victimization and trauma is completed, and as appropriate, children and families are referred to an evidence-based trauma-informed provider for services. Fugitive Safe Surrender  The Fugitive Safe Surrender program started in Cleveland in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood in 2005 and continued nationally in partnership with the US Marshal Service until 2012 (Flannery 2013; Flannery and Kretschmar

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2012). The program continued to be implemented in cities across Ohio and nationally through 2016. FSS sought to provide an opportunity for individuals with open warrants to voluntarily surrender at a faith location in order to receive favorable consideration in the resolution of their open warrants. In each city, the entire justice system was relocated to a local church, usually a Baptist church given their size and facilities. As such, the FSS program was a formal collaboration between the local faith community, the local and federal law enforcement, and the criminal justice system and service providers. Lessons from FSS were incorporated into our BCJI implementation including the importance of the faith community, the ideas about improving police-community relations, and the impact of open warrants on community life. P-16 Program  P-16 is an initiative now in 41 states around the country. Its aim is to create a coordinated and seamless educational system from preschool through a 4-year college degree that promotes access to quality instruction, high standards, accountability, and life-long learning (Davis and Hoffman 2008). Within this context, there is an emphasis on improving the transition from high school to college by enhancing teaching quality and reducing remediation in high school as well as college drop-out rates to raise student achievement and ultimately increase workplace readiness. In our Cleveland, P-16 is primarily supported by the Third Federal Foundation which is located in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood. The foundation works closely with the Cleveland Metropolitan School District to implement the P-16 model in three elementary, one middle, and one high school in Slavic Village. P-16 works to identify and remove barriers to academic achievement, connecting young people and their families to quality neighborhood-based programs and resources. In our local initiative, there is an emphasis on access to high-quality preschool, literacy, and workforce development. For example, Slavic Village is also a My Commitment, My Community (MYCOM) neighborhood, a youth development initiative supported by the Cleveland Foundation focused on out-of-school time programming and youth employment. Together, MYCOM and P-16 created opportunities for youth development, including mentoring, academic tutoring, and recreational youth engagement programming. Examples of successful P-16 efforts include an increase from 30 free quality preschool Head Start seats in Slavic Village in 2014 to more than 300 in 2017 and a scholarship program at Cleveland Central Catholic High School wherein family members and students can earn tuition support by participating in community service projects and activities (Slavic Village Development 2017). Violence-Gun Reduction and Interdiction Project (V-GRIP)  V-GRIP is an innovative intelligence-led policing program using research-based best practice. It is a collaboration between Cleveland Police and eleven local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, ATF, US Marshal, US Attorney’s Office, Cleveland Housing Authority, Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center, Adult Parole Authority, and County Prosecutor’s Office. Cleveland Police use data and geo-­ mapping on gun crimes that is overlaid with current gang areas of concern and other

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intelligence to designate the V-GRIP area of operation. Consistent with law enforcement best practices, components include (1) a focus on locating violent- and gang-­ involved fugitives, (2) knock and talk where officers interview residents of every home so no one appears to be a “snitch,” (3) a focus on parolees, and (4) saturation enforcement (US Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs 2013). According to the CDP Narcotics Unit Commander, the first V-GRIP program in Cleveland in 2012 resulted in a 33% reduction in homicides and a 13% reduction in felonious assaults in the targeted hotspot.

Infrastructure to Support Implementation Our BCJI was purposely implemented within the structure of the existing STANCE initiative, a comprehensive prevention/intervention, enforcement, and reentry effort that was originally created to help mitigate gang problems in the City of Cleveland. On February 15, 2006, the former US Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales identified gang violence as a top priority in America’s fight against violence. The Attorney General announced the implementation of a Comprehensive Anti-Gang Initiative (CAGI) (McGarrell et  al. 2012). Cleveland was selected as one of six cities to receive funding to implement a three-pronged enforcement, prevention, and reentry strategy over a 3-year period. Since CAGI’s initial implementation, Cleveland’s stakeholders have expanded CAGI’s mission and created an integrated partnership among social services and law enforcement agencies. Cleveland stakeholders renamed the citywide, multiagency, multimission program as STANCE to reflect a broader mission focused on prevention, evidence-based interdiction strategies, and reentry. Today, STANCE operates under the direction of the US Attorney’s Office Northern Ohio District and has an Executive Committee that includes elected officials, educators, public safety, law enforcement, community leaders, juvenile justice officials, faith-based organizations, foundations, service providers, and the private sector. The Executive Committee of STANCE, chaired by the US Attorney, meets monthly and oversees the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the initiative. We held a series of 30 community planning meetings over a 2-year period (2013–2015). In these meetings, residents raised concerns about firearm violence, abandoned properties, lack of police presence, and the need for community-police relationship building. In early 2015, we took the knowledge gleaned during these community meetings and moved into an implementation phase. Our strategy would involve four complementary preventive intervention strategies: (1) strategic enforcement, or the implementation of intelligence-led policing via a task force focused on violence- and firearm-related crimes, gangs, and homicides, utilizing lessons learned from V-GRIP; (2) building a community-police problem-solving collaboration with a focus on managing the negative impacts of abandoned properties, as well as enhancing community policing activities such as bike and foot patrols; (3)

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neighborhood revitalization, organized around small grants for resident-led community improvement projects; and (4) community engagement, education, and empowerment, including a revamped approach to block club organizing to support inclusion of homeowners, renters, youth, and seniors. STANCE selected Mike Walker, the Executive Director of Partnership for a Safer Cleveland (PSC) and a well-recognized violence prevention expert, as Project Director. Both nationally and locally recognized, PSC was created by the Cleveland Bar Association in 1981 to counteract the fact that Cleveland was the 5th most dangerous city in America. The mission of the Partnership is to promote promising practices and effective violence prevention programs in the Greater Cleveland area through collaborations with public and private partners, for the purposes of preventing youth crime and violence and reducing youth involvement in the justice system. PSC has been successful in collaborating with other agencies and has facilitated diverse working groups of policy makers, researchers, law enforcement, schools, and community-based organizations. This made PSC the ideal community partner to oversee implementation of our BCJI efforts. In particular, the Partnership provided support for the development of community-law enforcement partnerships and the identification of neighborhood-based small grant projects in Mt. Pleasant.The City of Cleveland Division of Police (CDP) was the fiscal agent for BCJI. This was important because it helped ensure their participation in a significant way and contributed to conversations about sustainable efforts that could change the concern to the CDP because it was the highest violent crime neighborhood in the city. They were also responsible for the staffing and implementation of the strategic law enforcement initiatives including targeted task force interdiction, bike patrols, and regular attendance at community meetings and events. In our target neighborhood, the Mount Pleasant Community Zone (MPCZ) was engaged to galvanize community input and support. Specifically, MPCZ focused on economic development, enhancing education and life-long learning, improving physical environment and safety, and community and family empowerment. As such, MPCZ was a key community partner to help us strengthen neighborhood assets and facilitate change that could be sustainable. The Dr. Semi J. and Ruth W. Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University served as research partner for the initiative. The Begun Center has a long record of applied community-based research, training, advocacy, and technical assistance over the past two decades. Research staff at the Begun Center include nationally recognized scholars from a variety of disciplines who research exposure to violence, mental health, youth gangs, correctional management, and organizational culture. The Begun Center has had a strong working relationship with many of Ohio’s law enforcement agencies, community partners, and existing community-­ based initiatives (Flannery and Singer 2014). One important facet to the success of our efforts was that each of the above partners was already providing services to the target area. The BCJI allowed us to build

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off of these existing efforts, improve implementation and intervention strategies based on lessons learned, and more effectively engage community members and youth. This involved a grass roots effort to directly ask community stakeholders what they needed to improve their neighborhood and reduce crime and violence. Having a historically effective and locally legitimate community partnership already in place ahead of the BCJI program provided an important head start in developing and implementing the BCJI plan. Our overall focus was to implement data-driven community and law enforcement strategies in our targeted geographic area. What began as a law enforcement-driven/community-complemented model was reversed through the planning phase into a community-driven/law enforcement-­ complemented effort. All tasks were undertaken with the long-term goal of advancing sustainable neighborhood revitalization. We wanted to ensure that programs would be evidence-based, coordinated, and wherever possible build off of existing strategies. We also believed that a vital part of revitalizing the neighborhood was reducing crime and the fear of crime, changing community norms regarding crime, and reaching out to high-risk youth and providing them with alternatives to violence. The overarching goals of our STANCE BCJI were to (1) improve community safety in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, (2) support the residents and other stakeholders in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood in the design and implementation of effective approaches to addressing crime, and (3) advance neighborhood revitalization through cross-sector community-based partnerships.

Strategies That Were Implemented in Our Target Neighborhood As noted above, rather than create a whole slate of new programs, we sought to coordinate and focus on existing evidence-based programs designed to reduce and prevent crime, increase community capacity, and improve the neighborhood conditions in Mt. Pleasant. In addition to building upon the efforts summarized above, there were two main areas of focus in our initiative: community engagement and strategic law enforcement intervention. Strategic law enforcement interdiction based on the V-GRIP model meant addressing violent crime by targeting two of the most common sources of harm in the United States: guns and drugs (Husak 2004). V-GRIP was implemented primarily by CDP’s gang and narcotics units. At the intersection of community engagement and strategic law enforcement intervention lies community policing efforts, which became a focus of our initiative. In addition to targeted task force interdiction focused on firearm violence and gang activity, we utilized several strategies briefly described below such as increased foot patrols (walk and talk), bike patrols, neighborhood improvement activities, and housing violation enforcement. Table 6.3 shows the increased commitment by the CDP in these areas that have been sustained since the implementation of BCJI.

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Table 6.3  Community policing activities 2016–2018

Hours of community policing Foot patrols Bike patrols Car patrols Citizen contacts Business contacts Business meetings

2016 530 h

2017 1200 h

11 65 31 480 303 13 meetings w/ 25 attendees 5

43 231 23 4000 984 15

2018a (projected) 805 h 1610 190 175 25 8000 1040 40

14 (made 700 contacts w/ citizens) 20 54 enforcement w/ 214 citations

25 (800 contacts w/ citizens) 22 30 enforcement w/ 140 citations

Block club/ community meetings School contacts 31 Housing enforcement 1 enforcement w/ numerous citations

Projected based on data from January through July 2018 Source: Cleveland Division of Police

a

Bike Patrols Bike patrols had not been previously utilized by the CDP, and implementing them in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood became a pilot effort helping to prepare the division for strategies to be used for the Republican National Convention (RNC) held in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2016. The Bicycle Unit committed to employing community and problem-oriented strategies and worked proactively with community groups to solve neighborhood problems. Specifically, officers on bike patrol purposely sought to be nimbler in addressing quality of life issues, responses to minor crimes in progress (e.g., traffic and minor misdemeanor offenses), and victim assistance. Bike patrol provides more opportunities for personal police-community interaction and can make police officers more approachable to the public. While officers on bikes were to focus on responding to code 3 and 4 calls for service, they were also available to assist other zone car officers who were responding to more serious code 1 and 2 calls as needed. Bike patrol officers were also to maintain high visibility and were regularly in attendance at neighborhood special events and meetings. Their core mission was to actively engage in the community to create relationships with citizens, business owners, and community leaders. Officers assigned to the bike patrol units were also required to undergo 32 h of initial specialized training and certification as well as ongoing training annually through the Law Enforcement Bicycle Association (LEBA) and the International Police Mountain Bike Association (IPMBA). Specialized trainings in crowd control, hotspot deployment, bike safety, and community-oriented policing strategies were at the core of this training. Outfitting and training of bike patrol officers had to occur in addition to traditional training for patrol car officers, so sustainability of

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bike patrols as a community policing strategy required significant resources. Subsequent to the 2016 RNC convention, for which 28 officers from the 4th Police District were trained, 12 volunteered to continue on bike patrol in Mt. Pleasant (Cleveland Division of Police, 2016).

Community Street and Block Clubs in Mt. Pleasant The Mt. Pleasant Community Zone (MPCZ)played a critical role in organizing community meetings, providing leadership training, and facilitating the identification and implementation of community improvement grants. One of the most important initiatives facilitated by the MPCZ-BCJI project was the implementation and support of block clubs. MPCZ facilitated the identification of neighborhood leaders who were willing to hold regular block club meetings where patrol officers and command level staff were invited and who regularly attended. At block club meetings, residents discussed strategies to improve community safety, generated ideas for small community improvement grants, and discussed solutions and response to challenges arising in the neighborhood (e.g., a local shooting incident). One of the BCJI-supported block clubs in Mt. Pleasant was the East 108th Street Club, which formed almost 50 years ago in the early 1970s. The BCJI team worked closely with members of the East 108th Street Club to hold a set of monthly meetings that rotated across different homes. The street clubs worked to improve collaborations and relationships with the local development corporation, the local recreation center, the local councilman, and the district police commander. The club bolstered these activities and also started a new movie night which saw regular attendance by adults and youth in our target neighborhood. A new approach supported by BCJI was a focus on depressed housing stock in the target neighborhood with efforts to identify properties in need of renovation or repair, that might act as places for criminal or drug activity, and/or might be occupied illegally. In Cuyahoga County, houses are rated from grade A through F, with F grades requiring demolition. The 4th District, which includes our target BCJI neighborhood, had the most D and F homes in Cleveland, as well as a significant number of homes with serious code violations. The number one complaint officers received in the 4th district was housing code violations. With over 1100 abandoned homes in the 4th district, it is estimated that it would cost $1 million to merely demolish these homes, let alone the more expansive costs associated with corrective actions and repairs. Our strategy was to assign a patrol car in the target area to focus on housing issues and to be a resource for residents to support them and report their concerns directly to city and county officials. This could include performing code inspections, cleaning up vacant lots, razing abandoned buildings, and evicting problem residents in a coordinated effort with the housing authority. During our BCJI intervention, the MPCZ focused on home repair assistance using various strategies. They provided curbside surveys and inspections of homes and lots to identify code and compliance issues and provided recommendations on

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the best ways to address those issues. They conducted home repair workshops to provide residents with information on topics such as security and energy conservation, resources on tool loan, painting and senior housing assistance programs, and hands-on experience with minor repairs. They also aided residents who appeared before Cleveland’s housing court. An early innovator in legal issues in housing, the Cleveland housing court has decided cases involving such issues as eviction and code compliance since 1980 (Pianka 2012).

Neighborhood Advisory Council and Pilot Grants Early in our BCJI implementation in 2014 we recruited community members to participate as part of a neighborhood advisory council. The group decided to name the advisory council Our SPACE3 which stands for Our Sustainability: People Advocating for Community Engagement, Education, and Empowerment. The Our SPACE3 group met regularly with a goal of increasing civic and community engagement of residents, youth, faith-based institutions, schools, businesses, and law enforcement in Mt. Pleasant to build safer streets, trust and communication, and community connections, inspire youth development, and revitalize their community. The group also developed five formal goals: (1) to create an inclusive and committed resource of community residents to serve as positive voices and ambassadors; (2) to value and promote sustainable streets to live, worship, work, and play for all community residents; (3) to engage youth in creating innovative leadership programs connecting the community’s past to the present and being positive participants in the future; (4) to foster understanding, trust, and communication between police and the community, based on mutual respect; and (5) to foster community engagement activities with police, neighborhood partners, and block clubs. The residents of the Our SPACE3 neighborhood advisory group specifically recommended increased foot patrols, the implementation of the bicycle patrols, and an increased focus on property issues by law enforcement and the city. They also requested an increased presence of command level staff and officers at their regular meetings as well as community events. They made multiple recommendations regarding youth including the revitalization of the youth police academy with a focus on recruiting neighborhood youth and the implementation of a youth leadership institute. Last, Our SPACE3 served as the facilitators and reviewers for a small grants program implemented in Mt. Pleasant. For the small grants program, a key neighborhood component of our BCJI, local organizations serving Mt. Pleasant were offered the chance to submit proposals for up to $5000 for projects that would contribute to neighborhood revitalization, promote youth and adult leadership and prosocial opportunities for collaboration, and promote community norms that value cooperation with law enforcement. In round 1 in 2014, 8 organizations were funded to conduct the following projects: (1) a night out against crime neighborhood movie night, (2) two site grants for planting a community garden, (3) intervention services and resources for reentry, (4) a street level

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beautification project, (5) youth engagement and leadership development workshops, (6) Juvenile Justice Jeopardy game days and a teen summit, and (7) a 2-day painting project with youth and police officers. In a second round of funding in 2016, many of the above projects received additional support, but a few other types of programs were also funded including (1) painting local fire hydrants, (2) taking neighborhood youth on local college tours, and (3) a youth photography program to document positive images in their neighborhood. In total, 15 different projects in the two rounds were funded and completed by neighborhood organization in Mt. Pleasant.

Evidence of Impact One of the most significant challenges we faced was gathering systematic information on impacts and outcomes related to efforts specifically implemented in our target neighborhood. We were able to glean some information citywide that reflected shifts in community-police relations, and we have recently been able to survey youth and residents. We were able to track some specific law enforcement information for our three target police zones in Mt. Pleasant, and that information is presented further. Citywide Data  While not specific to our target area of the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, there is some information that has been collected citywide that reflects improvements in police-community relations. For example, we have been able to document a consistent decline in the number of civilian complaints against police offers. There were 294 such complaints in 2015, which declined to 263 in 2016 and 241  in 2017, an 18% reduction in 2017 versus 2015. As part of the city’s settlement agreement with the US Department of Justice on police use of force and misconduct, we have also conducted a number of surveys on community members. In a recent 2018 survey of several hundred community members from every sector of the city, 71% of respondents who had significant interaction with police in prior 12 months said officers treated them with respect. Improvements in the most violent neighborhoods in Cleveland contributed to these citywide changes. Youth Perceptions of Police  Four hundred five (405) youth with an average age of 12.2 years from Cleveland completed a 10-item survey on their attitudes and feeling toward police. Half of the youth were male and half were female. Over 80% of the youth self-reported ethnic minority status. Forty-five percent of youth strongly agreed or agreed with the statement “Police officers do a good job,” while nearly 24% disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement. Almost 60% of youth agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Police officers work with residents to solve issues,” while only 16% of respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed with that statement (Singer et al. 2018).

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Table 6.4  Number of reported crimes in target police zones 4.3, 4.6, 4.7 (2013–2016) Crimes Burglary Total part I Simple assaults Vandalism Total part II

Oct–Dec 2013 245 868 316 204 820

Oct–Dec 2014 210 822 347 166 870

Oct–Dec 2015 183 634 257 125 691

April–June 2016 38 396 299 107 565

Police Calls for Service in Our Target Zones While we were not able to formally compare V-GRIP interdiction strategies to non-­ V-­GRIP (non-BCJI) neighborhoods, we were able to collect specific law enforcement data on reported crimes in each of our target zones within the 2 square miles of the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood. Table 6.4 below reflects the raw (unadjusted for population) numbers of crimes reported for burglary, total part I (violent) crimes, simple assaults, vandalism, and total part II (non-violent) crimes for each quarter from October 2013 through June 2016. This period of time covers the main time during which our BCJI law enforcement interdiction and community activities were occurring in the target zones. October to December 2013 should be viewed generally as a baseline reporting period. For simplicity and comparison purposes, data for the same year-over-year reporting period (October to December) is presented. April–June 2016, while not a perfect comparison due to the seasonal nature of crime, is included because it was the last quarter of BCJI implementation. As would be expected, there is some variability to the numbers depending on the period of time (summer vs. winter), but the data in Table 6.4 illustrate a generally consistent decline in the number of crimes reported across three target zones. In addition, we know that calls for violent part I crimes continued to decline. Specifically, according the CDP, from 2017 to 2018 in zone 4.3 total calls for violent crime decreased from 202 to 113 (a 44% decline), in zone 4.6 from 371 to 162 (54%), and in zone 4.7 from 273 to 126 (56%). We also know that overall calls for part I crimes continued to decline in 4th Police District. From 2017 to 2018, there was a 36% decline in felonious assaults, a 52% decline in burglaries, a 52% decline in arrests for weapons, and a 40% decline in priority 1 calls for service (2017 = 6857 to 2018 = 4097) when comparing the first 6 months of 2017 to the first 6 months of 2018. While we cannot attribute declines in calls for violent crime in these years directly to specific BCJI activities, this does suggest continued improvement in rates of violent crime in our target neighborhood zones.

Challenges to Implementation and Evaluation There were several challenges to rigorously evaluate the interventions that were implemented in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood. From a pragmatic standpoint, the police zones where we finally focused efforts shifted from what were initially

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proposed. Changes in violent crime rates and shifts in gang activity necessitated some changes so that law enforcement could effectively target current activity. This resulted in some adjustments to resource allocation and implementation strategy, which also changed the focus of information to be gathered. Activities also covered a larger geographic area than originally planned, but this was also to encompass the highest violent crime police zones within our target neighborhood. One of the positive aspects of the program involved the shift in priority and perspective from BCJI as a law enforcement-driven community-complemented initiative to a community-­ driven, law enforcement-complemented effort. This shift led to a greater emphasis on community and youth voice and also contributed to the viability of sustainable efforts in the community rather than temporary law enforcement-driven interdiction efforts. From a community perspective, we experienced the preparation and the occurrence of the Republican National Convention (RNC) during the implementation of BCJI programs. In some ways, our work in Mt. Pleasant served as a pilot site for law enforcement strategies that were utilized during the RNC. In particular, the introduction of the bike patrol units in Mt. Pleasant presaged their effective implementation during the national conference. There were also significant changes occurring within our division of police including the agreement with the US Department of Justice to implement division-wide changes related to police misconduct and use of force. The settlement agreement led to substantial changes in technology, which affected our access to timely and accurate information on the nature of violence and crime in our target neighborhood. Changes also lowered our confidence about the reliability of some of that information that was lost in the transition to new data collection systems, particularly in our first year of BCJI activities. In addition, both the RNC and the settlement agreement led to significant changes in workforce allocation by officers. On the positive side, the agreement created shifts from officers being assigned on rotating platoons and across districts to a more neighborhood-­ based patrol deployment strategy, so officers could become more familiar with local residents. There were also officers assigned specifically to the bike patrol and housing units in our target neighborhood, and task force officers specifically dedicated to intelligence-led interdiction in our three police zones that were the focus of our BCJI. The settlement agreement also focused on changing our division’s approach to policing to reflect a greater emphasis on community engagement and improving relationships with citizens. This resulted in an increase in the number of community meetings and the presence of law enforcement, both officers and command level staff, at local block club meetings, neighborhood council meetings, and community events such as picnics, ice cream trucks, a mobile video game truck, and holiday parades. With respect to challenges, changes in workforce deployment meant that in some cases officers and command level staff with whom we had worked hard to establish relationships and to garner buy-in for our efforts were reassigned or transferred to other units. The implementation of the settlement agreement requirements also demanded significant resources and attention to the development of new policies

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and training requirements, which caused other grant-funded efforts to receive less attention. Many of our efforts were aimed at improving the neighborhood’s capacity to sustain programmatic efforts to effect long-lasting change. To do this, it was imperative that as research and evaluation partners we engaged fully with our community partners, and not just program providers and agencies but individual citizens. This meant making a commitment to regularly attend community meetings and events, to actively seek out resident input and support, to talk to them on a regular basis, and to actively listen to their suggestions, concerns, and criticisms. It was important in the beginning to focus on a few small neighborhood-driven projects that helped residents see the impact of their efforts, and evidence of change. Helping residents understand the value of information in garnering resources for things they wanted to accomplish was also an important researcher-community partnership activity. In sum, it is imperative in an initiative like BCJI that researchers remain fully engaged, active participants in the process, and not sit idly by as a distant third party in offices waiting for others to provide the data they need to report to funders and policy makers.

Looking Forward As illustrated in some of the information presented above, we were unable to gather a great deal of rigorous evaluative data on specific BCJI strategies implemented in our target neighborhood, especially during the initial years of implementation. We were, however, able to collect information from a variety of community and law enforcement sources about recent trends in violent crime, community satisfaction with law enforcement, and reports from youth and adults on their perceptions about safety. The information we report on here suggests that in the midst of ongoing challenges and the need to continue efforts to comply with the settlement agreement, there is evidence of improvement, especially in the last couple of years – and we have some confidence that these trends may be sustainable. We have also been able to use lessons learned from BCJI in Mt. Pleasant to contribute to several other community efforts to reduce crime and violence. Specifically, the city of Cleveland was named by the Department of Justice as a National Youth Forum (NYF) city, which recognized the efforts we had engaged in through law enforcement activities like V-GRIP, Project Safe Neighborhood, and community-­ driven interventions such as the Defending Childhood initiative. The designation of Cleveland as a NYF city provided additional resources to develop a public health approach to violent crime reduction. In our community, we focused on limited resources on our highest risk population of youth and young adults for violence victimization and perpetration. Our current IMPACT25 initiative is supported under the STANCE Executive Committee of the US Attorney’s office and spearheaded by the Partnership for A Safer Cleveland. IMPACT25 is currently being implemented

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in our highest crime neighborhoods with a focus on such programs as Rites of Passage, emergency department and community-based violence interruption strategies, and an active collaboration with a youth group Empowering Youth, Exploring Justice. We have also recognized a significant challenge with youth who have been detained with domestic violence-related charges in our juvenile detention facility. These youth tend to be much younger than the typical detention center detainee and tend to be detained for less serious offenses. Project CALM has been implemented as a diversion program that provides respite care for these youth- and community-­ based treatments. Youth are referred by responding officers who continue to seek out better community-based solutions to violence prevention and crime reduction as alternatives to incarceration. We are also in the process of expanding police as first social responder programs such as the Police Assisted Referral (PAR) program. This program has been in place via our county public housing authority police department (CMHA) for the past 10 years. It requires officers who respond to incidents to make an immediate referral to community-based agencies for resident services and support. We have gathered evidence to show that PAR has resulted in significant improvements in police-community relationships (Bartholomew et al. 2013) and that residents who participated in PAR increased their calls for service on quality of life issues in public housing. Most recently, a study of 337 residents who received PAR services indicated that residents had high levels of satisfaction with the police who served them and thought all police should have the ability to make referrals for services (Singer, 2016). The BCJI-Mt Pleasant program provided the target neighborhood with a series of successful community-based initiatives. One of the main explanations for our success was that we were able to tap into a set of established relationships and organizational partnerships between the police, community groups, and targeted social service providers. We were not required to build a governance structure from scratch, which afforded our programming strategies a leg up. We were challenged by several emerging events that we did not control, namely, the massive security concerns and policing attentions required for hosting a national political convention and the implementation of a settlement agreement related to police use of force and misconduct with the US Department of Justice. While these events created challenges to implementation and evaluation, they also led to opportunities to attempt strategies that might not otherwise have been considered, namely, the implementation of bike patrols and dedicated housing zone police patrols, both of which continue today. BCJI also emphasized the important role of youth and community voice in neighborhoods. The youth in our program told us loud and clear that they felt overstudied and underserved. Those voices led us to be more appropriately focused on developing and delivering programs, rather than time- and resource-consuming research efforts. Navigating the tension between knowledge generation and informed action will continue to be a challenge going forward across the many BCJI sites and beyond.

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References Bartholomew, J., Singer, M., Gonzalez, A., & Walker, M. (2013). Police assisted referrals: Empowering law enforcement to be first social responders. Law Enforcement Executive Forum, 13(4), 38–49. Cleveland Division of Police. (2016). Cleveland Division of Police: Bicycle Unit. Personalized community engagement [PowerPoint slides]. Davis, R. P., & Hoffman, J. L. (2008). Higher education and the P-16 movement: What is to be done? Thought & Action, 123–134. Flannery, D. J. (2013). Wanted on warrants: The fugitive safe surrender program. Kent: Kent State University Press. Flannery, D. J., & Kretschmar, J. M. (2012). Fugitive safe surrender: Program description, initial findings, and policy implications. Criminology and Public Policy, 11, 437–459. Flannery, D., & Singer, M. (2014). The Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education at Case Western Reserve University. Research on Social Work Practice, 25(2), 278–285. Husak, D. (2004). Guns and drugs: Case studies on the principled limits of the criminal sanction. Law and Philosophy, 23, 437–493. Kretschmar, J. M., Flannery, D. J., Tossone, K., & Gearhart, M. C. (2016). The Cuyahoga County Defending Childhood Initiative: An outcome evaluation. Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education. Accessed at https://case.edu/socialwork/begun/sites/case.edu. begun/ files/2018-09/DCI-2016-Evaluation.pdf McGarrell, E. F., Corsaro, N., Melde, C., Hipple, N., Cobbina, J., Bynum, T., & Perez, H. (2012). An assessment of the comprehensive anti-gang initiative: Final project report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Pianka, R. (2012). Cleveland Housing Court: A problem solving court adapts to new challenges (pp.  44–49). National Center for State Courts. https://www.ncsc.org/sitecore/content/ microsites/future-trends-2012/home/Courts-and-the-Community/~/media/Microsites/Files/ Future%20Trends%202012/PDFs/ClevelandHousingCt_Pianka.ashx. Accessed 15 Dec 2019. Singer, M. (2016). Police Assisted Referral (PAR) study results. Cleveland: The Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education at Case Western Reserve University. Singer, M., Flannery, D., & Yang, L. (2018). Youth and police questionnaires results. Cleveland: The Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education at Case Western Reserve University. Slavic Village Development. (2017). Slavic Village P-16/a MyCom neighborhood 2015–2017 Impact report. Retrieved from http://www.slavicvillage.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ BA17-SV-833-MYCOM-P-16-Report_P10.pdf U.S.  Census Bureau. (2012). 2008–2012 American Community Survey. Retrieved from https:// factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml U.S.  Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs. (2013). FY13 Byrne Criminal Justice Innovative Program project abstract. Retrieved from https://www.bja.gov/Programs/BCJIClevelandOH.pdf

Chapter 7

Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Grant Program in Providence, Rhode Island Sean Varano and Stephanie Manzi

Project Background The City of Providence is the largest city in Rhode Island, with an estimated 2015 population of just under 180,000, making it the third largest city in New England (U.S. Census Bureau 2017). Providence has experienced challenges associated with both personal and property crime over the years. Some published reports, for example, have indicated Providence has one of the largest crime rates among larger-sized cities in the nation, and by some estimates, the problem has gotten worse in recent years (Nagle 2014). For example, in the year leading up to the US Department of Justice funded Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) grant program in 2013, Providence experienced an increase in some categories of serious assaultive and property crime. There was, for example, a 3% increase in aggravated assault, a 4% increase in robbery, and an almost 10% increase in weapon-related offenses (see Nagle 2014).

Project Target Area The Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) initiative was focused in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence. The target area is located in the western part of Providence (see Fig. 7.1) and is a neighborhood that covers approximately .55 of this 18.2 square miles city. According to the 2010 census, Olneyville1 has a population of approximately 5559 people living in 1891 households in 2010.  See data for Census Tract 19 in Providence, RI.

1

S. Varano (*) · S. Manzi School of Justice Studies, Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. J. Stokes, C. Gill (eds.), Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43635-3_7

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Fig. 7.1  Olneyville neighborhood, Providence, RI

Olneyville is a diverse neighborhood where over 59% of the households were Hispanic (2010). In terms of race, 37% of the population is estimated to be white, 15% African American, 4% Asian, and 44% multiracial or other race alone. American Community Survey (ACS) estimates for 2010 indicate that approximately 48% of the population in Olneyville was foreign born and that 66% of Olneyville residents spoke a language other than English at home. Olneyville has a much younger population than the state as a whole, with 43% of the neighborhood being 18 or younger compared with only 28% statewide. The ACS estimated median household income in Olneyville was $32,795 in 2010, compared to a state median of $52,254. Thirty-six percent of households in Olneyville were estimated to earn less than $25,000 in 2010, compared to 25% of households in Rhode Island. The Olneyville section of Providence has a history closely tied with the textile industry, and the industry’s collapse in the mid-twentieth century distressed the neighborhood in many ways we still see today. For example, Olneyville has a disproportionately high number of chronically vacant (more than 3 months) residences compared to other similarly situated neighborhoods. Similarly, Olneyville has a disproportionately large percentage of vacant land, residential parcels in 1+ year tax delinquency, and property foreclosures. It is currently among the most economically distressed neighborhoods in Providence (Geller and Belsky 2009). It is well documented that abandoned and blighted properties attract criminal behavior and neighborhoods with a high concentration of abandoned and blighted properties experience heightened crime (Spelman 1993); this has certainly been the case in Olneyville. Like other distressed neighborhoods across the United States, Olneyville has experienced its own challenges relating to crime. The neighborhood has long held a reputation as a higher crime area within Providence and has a reputation for significant challenges associated with drug sales/use and prostitution. Olneyville reported

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the highest number of violent crimes between 2010 and 2013 when compared to other neighborhoods in Providence. For example, there was a 19% increase in violent crime between the years 2010 and 2012 within Olneyville, while the entire city experienced a 7% decline between the same period. These crime challenges are notable and have been persistent challenges for decades. The story of Olneyville, however, is much more than just its historic challenges associated with shifting economic conditions and crime. Olneyville has a deep legacy of community engagement and resiliency that makes it the perfect laboratory in which to implement concepts such as creative place-making and community policing. Olneyville is one of those neighborhoods which has demonstrated over the years there is sufficient levels of commitment from community leaders, residents, local political officials, and other vested stakeholders to make things happen. This neighborhood, for example, has been the site of previous efforts focused on innovative approaches to making long-term, sustained improvements in the area of crime and disorder.

BCJI in Providence Known locally as CaPA (Community and Police Alliance), the BCJI initiative was a community-led approach that provided a framework for local stakeholders to inform the direction of the overall initiative. The BCJI project team held a series of focus groups in 2013 to solicit community input on the project plan and revised the plan according to this feedback. In the end, the BCJI plan focused on the following five priority outcomes: 1 . Reduction in Crime: Reductions in crime, particularly serious assaultive crime. 2. Reduction in Quality of Life Problems: A focus on less serious crime and disorder, especially prostitution, which have challenged the Olneyville community. 3. Improve Physical Environment to Reduce Crime/Disorder: Another project goal was to positively impact aspects of the physical space in key areas known as hotspots of quality of life problems. 4. Redevelopment of Nuisance Properties/Increase in Affordable, Low-Income Housing: Olneyville’s long-term community plan largely revolves around redevelopment of blighted property into high-quality affordable housing. Reductions in blighted properties were intended to not only reduce the presence of locations that served as crime attractors (Green 1995) but also increase the density of affordable housing which provides new anchor points for families and growth. 5. Community-Building Strategies: A final of Providence’s BCJI project was to also create opportunities for community-building. Community-building strategies were intended to not only foster positive social interactions and increase the capacity for local residents to positively contribute to their community but also create forums of police-community engagement.

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Providence’s CaPA Intervention CaPA is a multidisciplinary approach to community safety based on three core pillars: prevention, community mobilization, and sustainability. When conceptualizing community problems and the prioritization of responses, strategies can be vastly different based on decisions about the relative place of prevention-, intervention-, and suppression-based approaches. Approaches to crime and disorder, particularly those with a heavy police presence, often take a suppression-based approach that tends to prioritize responses such as proactive patrol which leverage “enforcement strategies” as the key programmatic response. While suppression approaches can be effective at reducing crime, at least in the short term (Braga and Weisburd 2012), the most effective long-term strategies are those which couple strategic enforcement with prevention and intervention approaches (Bond and Gebo 2012; Kennedy et al. 2017). Long-term problem-solving focused on building strong communities through the creation of partnerships, shared visions, and sustainability should be the goal. With this background in mind, below is a summary of the core program components: Housing Redevelopment  One Neighborhood Builders (ONB), a housing developing corporation with a long history in Olneyville, was a key community partner that served as the lead community organization in the BCJI project. A cornerstone of ONB’s BCJI project was focused on long-term sustainable crime/disorder reductions through the redevelopment of dilapidated and blighted housing. The creation of affordable, high quality housing lies at the core of Providence’s BCJI initiative. There are two substantive aspects of ONB’s efforts. ONB’s redevelopment strategies target blighted properties that are both physical eyesores and attractors of undesirable problems such as nuisance behavior and criminal activity. The short-term impacts of most redevelopment efforts involve the removal of a problem. ONB’s strategy, however, involves redeveloping properties to increase the overall inventory of affordable housing units for both rental and purchase. Properties are redeveloped in ways that stress energy efficiency, quality, and affordability. In the event a unit is redeveloped as a rental unit, the property is managed by ONB’s property management entity that ensures it is properly maintained. Properties that are sold are also deed-restricted affordable housing units to ensure the long-term presence of housing to meet the needs of low-income families in Olneyville. Focused Deterrence  The CaPA initiative included a suppression-based component that largely involved the use of overtime patrols in the targeted areas of the precinct during high crime time periods. Overtime patrols were expected to increase the visible presence of PPD uniformed officers, increase the proactive surveillance of hotspot areas, and, where appropriate, increase the number of proactive ­encounters. Providence Police Department (PPD), in partnership with ONB and the larger CaPA initiative, agreed to allow project staff to inform how the focused deterrence component of the initiative would be operationalized, including providing input on the time and locations of overtime patrols. The primary focus on the overtime patrol was to decrease the problems with serious assaultive and property crimes that have created significant community challenges in Olneyville for generations.

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Strategic Community Outreach  In addition to serious assaultive and property crime, CaPA focused on reducing nuisance problems that created significant local challenges. During the course of the project planning period, local residents regularly articulated concerns about the presence of prostitutes and “customers” spending time in the community engaging in illicit activity. In order to address this problem, the CaPA team developed an innovative community partnership team between members of the PPD and Project Renew to provide outreach services to prostitutes. Two seasoned police officers worked in partnership with Project Renew to conduct ride-a longs with an intervention focus. As opposed to more traditional “arrest-based” approaches, the community outreach program was intended to create a mechanism for police to connect prostitutes with service providers who were better able to get them the resources and help to transition off the street and into safer and more suitable environments. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design Strategies  The BCJI project also involved implementing Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) strategies intent on reducing characteristics of particular areas which serve as crime attractors. CPTED has emerged as a place-based concept intent on implementing environmental strategies effective at “designing out” criminal/nuisance behavior (Saville and Cleveland 2008).

Outcomes Crime Trends For purposes of the evaluation, the start of the implementation phase of the BCJI project is identified as April 2014. When considering the impact of CaPA/BCJI on crime in particular, this analysis focused on two core points of evaluation. First, the evaluation focused on year-to-year changes in crime data that compares trends in Olneyville to both citywide crime trends and citywide trends absent Olneyville’s data (see Table 7.1). The findings detailed in Table 7.1 provide conflicting evidence about changes in crime trends both in the city of Providence as a whole and in Olneyville as well. Between 2014 and 2015, levels of aggravated assault increased citywide and in Olneyville, but decreased between the years of 2015 and 2016. Olneyville also experienced a considerable 67% jump in aggravated assaults between 2012 and 2013 (full-year preceding implementation of CaPA/BCJI). After the 2012–2013 spike in aggravated assaults, there was a 40% decrease between 2013 and 2014 reducing the overall number of aggravated assaults back to 2012 levels. Considering the data over time, Olneyville experienced a 37% decrease in the number of reported aggravated assaults if 2016 data are compared against the last full year of data before the implementation of CaPA/BCJI (2013). When 2016 data are compared against the mean averaged 2010–2013 data, there was still a 17% decrease in recorded aggravated assaults. These decreases stand out when compared to citywide

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Table 7.1  Crime trends 2010–2016a

2010 2011 Aggravated. Assault  Citywide w 647 Olneyville   % change  Citywide, no 605 Olneyville   % change  Olneyville 42   % change Robbery  Citywide w 455 Olneyville   % change  Citywide, no 430 Olneyville   % change  Olneyville 25   % change Weapon  Citywide w 312 Olneyville   % change  Citywide, no 301 Olneyville   % change  Olneyville 11   % change Burglary  Citywide w 2081 Olneyville   % change  Citywide, no 1973 Olneyville   % change  Olneyville 108   % change

2013–2016 Comparison

2010/2013 Avg - 2016 Comparison

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

649

589

609

490

588

580

0% 598

-9% 550

3% 544

−20% 20% 451 546

−1% 539

−5%

−7%

−1% 51 21%

−8% −1% 39 65 −24% 67%

−17% 21% 39 42 −40% 8%

−1% 41 −2%

−1%

−6%

−37%

−17%

480

408

309

344

5% 439

−15% 4% 364 391

12% 328

−19%

−22%

2% 41 64%

−17% 7% −27% −2% 44 35 25 30 7% −20% −29% 20%

18% 16 −47%

−16%

−19%

−54%

−56%

334

309

343

267

391

7% 309

−7% 298

11% 322

−22% 6% 248 274

14%

20%

14%

19%

19%

47%

−34%

−41%

−35%

−42%

−7%

−18%

426

308

−27% 0% 284 278

284

38% 366

3% −4% 8% 25 11 21 127% −56% 91%

−23% 10% 34% 19 10 25 −10% −47% 150%

2521

1976

1893

1724

1364

21% 2390

−22% −4% 1889 1802

−9% 1647

−21% −8% 1292 1165

21% 131 21%

−21% −5% 87 91 −34% 5%

−9% −22% −10% 77 72 85 −15% −6% 18%

1250

Crime data provided by the Providence Police Department’s Crime Analysis Unit

a

trends that both include and exclude the Olneyville data. The 2013–2016 aggravated assault comparisons for the City, for example, also decreased but by only 5%. Moreover, the comparison of the citywide (including Olneyville) mean averaged trends shows a decrease of 7%. The second point of comparison in the crime analysis is robbery. During 2014–2015, there was no change in overall levels of robbery

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across the entire city of Providence, but there was a 20% increase in levels of robbery within Olneyville. Citywide, there was a decrease of 19% in levels of robbery when comparing 2013–2016. Comparison of the same 2013–2016 time period in Olneyville revealed a substantially larger decrease in robbery of 54%. A comparison of the 2016 data to the 2010–2013 mean averaged also reveals a decrease of 56% in Olneyville compared to 22% for the city of Providence. The third point of comparison is weapon-involved offenses. As a whole, the city of Providence saw a 6% increase in weapons offenses between 2014 and 2015 and a 38% increase in offenses between 2015 and 2016. While overall weaponoffense levels in the city increase, the prevalence in Olneyville between 2014 and 2015 decreased by 47% over the same period. However, during 2015 to 2016, Olneyville saw a 150% increase in weapons-related incidents. It should be noted that levels in Olneyville are much less than the entire city of Providence, so small increases in crime levels can show a large percentage increase. In this case, Olneyville went from 10 weapon-related offenses in 2015 to 25 in 2016. As whole, the city of Providence saw a 14% increase in weapons offenses between 2013 and 2016 while Olneyville experienced a 19% increase during the same period. It should also be noted that the number of offenses greatly fluctuates between years in Olneyville. The final point of comparison in the year-to-year crime analysis is burglary. The use of burglary as a relatively serious form of property crime provides an important and substantive point of comparison to the personal crime discussed above. There were more burglaries each year citywide than all three of the other types of crime analyzed combined. Between 2014 and 2015, the entire city of Providence marked a 22% decrease in burglaries and an 8% decrease during 2015 to 2016. In Olneyville, burglaries decreased by 6% during 2014 to 2015 and increased by 18% during 2015–2016. Despite the increase in Olneyville between 2015 and 2016, there was an overall decrease of 7% between 2013 and 2016. The city of Providence as a whole saw a 34% decrease in burglaries between 2013 and 2016.

 rime Trends Part 2: Pre-Post Intervention (CaPA/BCJI) C Crime Changes To assess the impacts of the CaPA/BCJI initiative, average monthly crime counts were compared for aggravated assault, robbery, weapon offenses, and burglary for the 51 months between January 2010 to March 2014 preceding program implementation and the 34 months post-implementation (84 month comparison time in total). Once data were aggregated a comparison of means tests was performed to assess if changes pre-post CaPA/BCJI reached the level of statistical significance. For illustration purposes, Table 7.2 depicts changes in pre-post intervention average monthly crime counts, along with statistical features of the data. The data shows that before the implementation of CaPA/BCJI, Olneyville experienced approximately 4.02 recorded aggravated assaults per month which decreased

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Table 7.2  Mean comparisons for crime changes pre-post BCJI intervention

Citywide: Agg assault Olneyville: Agg assault Citywide: Burglary Olneyville: Burglary Citywide: Robbery Olneyville: Robbery Citywide: Weap offenses Olneyville: Weap offenses

Pre (n = 51) Mean Std. Dev. 46.65 10.22 4.02 2.39 163.67 35.01 8.43 3.83 33.14 7.79 2.94 2.04 25.12 7.05 1.43 1.49

Post (n = 33) Mean Std. Dev 44.06 8.98 3.45 2.33 115.42 33.29 6.70 2.86 24.97 5.19 2.00 1.46 25.36 7.66 1.48 1.42

Total (n = 84) Mean Std. Dev 45.63 9.78 3.80 2.37 144.71 41.56 7.75 3.56 29.93 7.94 2.57 1.88 25.21 7.25 1.45 1.45

Sig. 0.24 0.29 0.00 0.03 0.00 0.02 0.88 0.87

slightly to approximately 3.45 in the 33 months post-intervention. This decrease did not reach the level of statistical significance. The citywide crime data (excluding Olneyville) also demonstrated modest decreases average in  monthly aggravated assaults, but similar to Olneyville, the decrease did not reach statistical significance. Similarly, the changes in crime data for aggravated assault did not reach statistical significance, but the decreases in robbery levels were. The average monthly robberies, for example, decreased from 2.94 per month in Olneyville to approximately 1.46 (p