GUNSStudying Gun Violence Is Hard. But Intervention Programs Need Research to Survive.
Critics say there isn’t enough traditional academic evidence to justify government investment in community violence interruption. But the programs are varied and neighborhoods aren’t laboratories, complicating ordinary evaluation.
One morning last June, Alderman Michael Murphy walked into a public safety committee meeting in Milwaukee with a plan to challenge the city’s funding of community violence intervention.
The city’s Office of Violence Prevention, with a budget of about $5.6 million, mostly from grants and philanthropy, was due to receive another $11 million in city and state funding. Much of it the office would likely pass along to a constellation of about 20 community-based organizations. As in many cities, these grassroots groups — sometimes consisting only of a handful of people — send teams into neighborhoods to try to interrupt violent incidents, to offer resources like summer programming for young people at high risk of being involved in conflict, and to help children heal from trauma.
But Murphy was skeptical. Why wasn’t there a plan to do a randomized study of the programs, he asked, as is sometimes done with public health programs? And why were the programs being evaluated based on the services they provided, rather than whether violence fell in the neighborhood where those services were offered?
Fellow Alderman Mark Borkowski joined in. “We set a homicide record two years ago. We broke the record last year. And we are 30 homicides ahead of the record breaking this year,” he said. “And so I’m trying to find that sliver of hope that says we’re making an impact. I’m not seeing anything, in essence, positive, coming out of any of these programs.”
Alderman Scott Spiker argued that the office should recruit an academic to study the programs. Without independent evaluation, the money might be better spent, he said, on a county program to decrease reckless driving.
The government — at the state and federal levels — is about to invest billions of dollars in community-based violence intervention programs, which focus on strategies like mediation of potentially violent disputes and social support for likely perpetrators of violence. Critics like the Milwaukee aldermen, however, are pushing back, arguing that there is not enough rigorous scholarship to support the investment.
In fact, there is evidence from across the country for the efficacy of such interventions. But large-scale traditional academic study of this type of work is rare. The complicated nature of violence makes it uniquely challenging to pull apart and the expense of formal public health and sociological studies is immense. For smaller groups, which now must compete for the millions available, the burden is particularly high.
