What is it about?
Community violence intervention (CVI) programs are community-based solutions to violence that center local expertise and circumvent encounters with the criminal justice system. This study provides a first-of-its-kind evaluation of a CVI program in Chicago, showing that individuals who complete programming are significantly less likely than similar peers to get arrested for violent crimes.
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Why is it important?
Our findings show that individuals who complete CVI programming are significantly less likely than their peers to engage in assaults, robberies, and other gun-related violence. This is important because, in the midst of a nationwide rise in gun violence, CVI programs are able to reduce participants' involvement in violence without reliance on the over-crowded and racially unjust criminal legal system. These findings provide additional evidence to the growing body of work evaluating the effectiveness of CVI programs during a time of great interest in scaling community-based interventions.
Perspectives
Working closely with our CVI partners to design, implement, and report back on this evaluation has been a great honor. Researchers and individuals with lived experience of gun violence often have a fraught relationship, and I am so grateful for the trust and partnership we were able to develop for this work. CVI practitioners do vital work towards making their communities safer, and I am proud to elevate their efforts through this rigorous evaluation.
Marisa Ross
Northwestern University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evaluating the impact of a street outreach intervention on participant involvement in gun violence, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2300327120.
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