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Results for homicides (milwaukee, u.s.)

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Author: Azrael, Deborah

Title: Developing the Capacity to Understand and Prevent Homicide: An Evaluation of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission

Summary: The Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission (MHRC) was established in May 2004 to address the city’s persistent lethal violence problem. The MHRC is a multi-tiered intervention with four levels, each of which involves participation by a different set of agencies and stakeholders. A key assumption underlying the four levels of MHRC review, and driving its decision to include stakeholders outside of the traditional criminal justice arena, was that the development and implementation of homicide prevention strategies is a complex and multi-faceted process that can be strengthened by input and buy-in from stakeholders throughout the community. The goal of the MHRC was to foster and support innovative homicide prevention and intervention strategies using the emerging tool of strategic problem analysis. In February 2005, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded the Harvard School of Public Health to evaluate the MHRC. The evaluation, which utilized a randomized matched pair design, consisted of three principal components: 1) a formative evaluation, 2) a process evaluation, and 3) an impact evaluation. More specifically, through semi-structured interviews and analysis of homicide data collected as part of the project, the evaluation examined whether homicide reviews provide additional insights into the nature of homicide problems relative to traditional methods; whether these insights lead to the development of new strategic responses to homicide problems; whether law enforcement agencies, social service providers, and the community feel that sharing information improves their ability to work together; and whether these responses seem to have short-term homicide reduction impacts. The NIJ-sponsored evaluation closely examined MHRC work from January 2005 through December 2007. During this time period, the MHRC conducted thirty criminal justice reviews, fifteen community service provider reviews and two community reviews, covering cases from January 2005 through November 2007. Overall, the homicide review process revealed that homicides in the City’s intervention districts were largely clustered in very specific places, such as in and around taverns, and among active offenders who were very well known to the criminal justice system. Homicides were often the outcome of an ongoing dispute between individuals and/or groups (usually gangs) and involved respect, status, and retribution as motives. The MHRC process yielded a comprehensive set of actionable policy and program development recommendations. These recommendations were ratified by and the implementation was continuously monitored by the MHRC Working and Executive Committees. In general, the MHRC recommendations better positioned criminal justice, social service, and community-based organizations to address high-risk places and high-risk people central to recurring homicide problems. MHRC participants credited the implementation of the recommendations with improving both criminal justice and community provider capacity to prevent violence. A key to this increased capacity was the improved communication, information sharing and cooperation both within and between criminal justice agencies, community service providers and community members. The impact evaluation used statistical models to analyze a time series of monthly counts of homicides in the control and treatment districts (January 1999 – December 2006). The impact evaluation revealed that the implementation of the MHRC iv interventions was associated with a statistically significant 52% decrease in the monthly count of homicide in the treatment districts. The control districts experienced a non-significant 9.2% decrease in homicide, controlling for the other covariates. While these analyses can’t be used to specify the exact effect of the MHRC interventions, the empirical evidence suggests that the MHRC interventions were associated with a noteworthy decrease in homicide. As such, the MHRC homicide review process seems to add considerable value to understanding the nature of urban homicide problems, crafting appropriate interventions to address underlying risks associated with homicides, implementing innovative strategies to address these risks, and assessing the impacts of these strategies.

Details: Unpublished report to the U.S. Department of Justice, 2013. 95p.

Source: Internet Resource: Accessed February 22, 2013 at: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/240814.pdf

Year: 2013

Country: United States

URL: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/240814.pdf

Shelf Number: 127695

Keywords:
Crime Prevention
Gun Violence
Homicide Prevention
Homicides (Milwaukee, U.S.)
Violence
Violent Crime