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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 10:12 pm
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Results for crime (washington, d.c.)
1 results foundAuthor: Jannetta, Jesse Title: The District of Columbia Mayor's Focused Improvement Area Initiative: Review of the Literature Relevant to Collaborative Crime Reduction Summary: In March 2010, the Executive Offce of the Mayor/Offce of the City Administrator asked the District of Columbia Crime Policy Institute (DCPI) to assess the Mayor's Focused Improvement Area Initiative. The Focused Improvement Area (FIA) Initiative, launched in November 2007, is a community-based initiative that aims to reduce criminal activity and increase the quality of life in at-risk communities by combining community policing with human and social services delivery. In an effort to make recommendations on how to strengthen the FIA Initiative, DCPI conducted an assessment based on: - Interviews with the Initiative's stakeholders-past and present-on the Initiative's mission and background, design, and actual implementation; - Reviews of programmatic materials and administrative records and field observations of the Initiative's processes and procedures; and - An exhaustive review of the theoretical and empirical literature on best and promising practices in crime reduction, prevention, and suppression strategies and effective comprehensive community initiatives. Based on the assessment, DCPI has produced three documents to help guide District stakeholders on a redesign of the FIA Initiative, including: - An examination of past challenges and successes; - A review of research literature relevant to collaborative crime reduction; and - A strategic plan to guide future efforts. This document summarizes the results of a literature review on multifaceted approaches to reducing crime and improving neighborhoods; in other words, of literature on efforts like the District's FIA Initiative. To that end, this literature review focused on efforts that were intended to produce community-level impacts, involved multiple approaches, and were carried out by partnerships spanning agency boundaries. The literature review focused further on two major categories of interventions: 1) those focused on reducing or preventing crime and, 2) those with broader goals of improving neighborhoods or resident well-being, sometimes called "Comprehensive Community Initiatives" (CCIs). Both types of interventions are place-based and intended to improve neighborhoods, but they usually involve different public agencies, funding sources, and community-based organizations with diverse missions. While the two sets of interventions share the broad goal of improving distressed neighborhoods, their specific goals usually do not overlap. Crime prevention/reduction efforts typically focus on reducing homicides, arrests, gang activity, or other public safety indicators. Activities to improve other measures of well-being such as school attendance or employment are typically subordinate to the crime prevention efforts and are not tracked as closely. Meanwhile, comprehensive community initiatives or other place-based efforts focused on employment, economic development, or housing may expect reduced crime as an indirect benefit, but do not generally target activities specifically towards crime reduction, and if they do, it is a subordinate activity. While many sections of this document focus on crime-reduction efforts, lessons from CCIs and other community initiatives are incorporated as relevant. For public safety interventions, this literature review is based on evaluations indicating that crime reduction /prevention efforts produced targeted outcomes in at least one location in which they were implemented. The review of the public safety literature sought to determine which aspects of existing violence or crime prevention programs were successful. Because the goals and activities of CCIs and other broad neighborhood improvement efforts focused on social services or physical revitalization are so varied, it is notoriously dfficult to structure evaluations and draw conclusions about what works in the field. Therefore, this review pulls from information on specific CCIs as well as state-of-the-field assessments to highlight what such initiatives can and cannot accomplish and what structures and actions are most effective. This literature review was not designed to rank intervention programs in general, since extant research thoroughly documents best and promising practices in public safety and prevention. However, this document does pull out and highlight lessons for policy and practice in the District, aligned with the study team's recommendations for moving forward in the strategic plan. The literature review is divided into two broad sections. The first covers programmatic elements of initiatives: the strategies, interventions, and activities that successful efforts have employed. The second section covers process and structural elements, with subsections devoted to interagency collaboration, community engagement, and sustainability. Evaluations consistently find that how a collaborative effort structures itself and carries out its work is as important to its success as what programs or activities it uses. This insight is reflected throughout this review, both in the elevation of structural elements as a subject for consideration in their own right, and in discussion of implementation practices in the tactical elements section. Several challenges encountered in summarizing the literature in this way should be noted. Research on collaborative crime- and violence-reduction initiatives varies considerably in attention paid to anything other than overall outcomes. The importance of partnership design elements is often slighted, and the contribution of specific elements of multi-pronged approaches may not be discussed. Even when specific elements are discussed, there may be little detail regarding what specific models were used. For example, an evaluation may state that an initiative provided case management without specifying what model was used, how large caseloads were, whether formal case plans were created, or any number of details that would be useful to a practitioner seeking to replicate the approach. As Roehl et al. write about the SACSI sites, - The list of prevention/intervention services provided through SACSI is long, and includes -- Summary descriptions and lists were common, since a variety of different programs implemented at different levels were involved in these comprehensive programs. Perhaps most importantly, it is difficult to discuss the various models and approaches discussed in this literature review due to the way that they evolved from or were informed by one another. For example, Irving Spergel's Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project gave rise to what is generally known as the "Spergel Model," which was replicated in multiple sites to varying degrees of success, and became the Offce of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP)'s Comprehensive Gang Model. In addition, some programs, such as Weed and Seed and Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN), tend to work in concert when present in the same communities because of the shared goals and objectives. Past research on collaborative efforts to reduce crime and improve communities contains a multitude of valuable lessons. The key lessons that are supported across several sources are summarized in table 1.1. For a quick summary of the crime prevention and reduction initiatives discussed frequently in this literature review, see summary tables 2.1 and 2.2. Detail on the initiatives and sources used for this review are included in the annotated bibliography. Details: Washington, DC: District of Columbia Crime Policy Institute, Urban Institute, 2010. 102p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 28, 2011 at: http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/412320-Improvement-Area-Initiative.pdf Year: 2010 Country: United States URL: http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/412320-Improvement-Area-Initiative.pdf Shelf Number: 121147 Keywords: Codmmunity Crime PreventionCommunitiesCrime (Washington, D.C.)Delinquency PreventionGangsNeighborhoods and Crime |