Here Are Some Community Oriented Solutions To Violence - Issue #43
Here Are Some Community Oriented Solutions To Violence - Issue #43
As I announced before, The Intersection Mag received a grant for from The National Association of Black Journalists. We are reporting four articles on Covid-19, education, and Black communities in Prince George's County.
Here is the first article from this series. I talked with Dr. Stephen B. Thomas, professor of health equity at Maryland University. I reached out to Dr. Thomas to talk about the new booster specifically designed to combat the Omicron variant BA.5. Thomas talked about the booster, but he had something else he wanted to talk about. In short, Thomas is upset that the lack of federal funding has stalled his efforts to get Black and Latino vaccinated using pop-up clinics.
Announcement
Tomorrow morning - The Intersection will be publishing a story about postpartum care for women in the Maryland/DC/ Virginia area. We look at this issue through Shiite Muslim birth doula Tamoyia Ragsdale-Hashim's eyes.
Solutions To Curbing Crime In The County
It has been no secret that Angela Alsobrooks and Mayor Muriel Bowser issued youth curfews, tools they believe will help curb crime. While Bowser quietly reinstated the policy, according to the Washington Post, Alsobrooks held a press conference, criticizing the courts as well as Prince George's County State's Attorney Aisha Braveboy. She then publicly defended herself against critics.
Professors and organizations across America, and some abroad, have shown that youth curfews don't actually help to curb crime. But what can be done to deal with the crime?
In 2020, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice released a study about effective solutions that will help to curb crime in local neighborhoods without using local police departments. Newark, New Jersey implemented these solutions. Chalkbeat reported the story. Here are researchers' recommendations:
Behavior responds to situational and environmental influences. In addition to changing behavior one person at a time, communities should create physical environments that reduce violence with cost-effective, place-based interventions that are structural, scalable, and sustainable.
Violence can be reduced by increasing pro-social bonds and anti-violence norms across communities, especially when the message comes from community-based programs staffed by familiar and credible messengers.
Violence prevention and reduction strategies must include a priority on young people, focusing on protective factors as well as risk factors.
Violence prevention must include a focus on alcohol distribution, drug decriminalization, and treatment.
Violence is more prevalent when residents face severe and chronic financial stress. Timely and targeted financial assistance can help to reduce rates of violence.
To maximize the benefits and reduce the potential harms of the formal justice system, communities should invest in strategies designed to increase the objectivity, neutrality, and transparency of the justice process.
Keeping firearms away from people inclined to use them for violence is challenging given widespread gun ownership in the United States, but it remains an essential part of any effort to reduce community violence.
Effective prevention should include short-term strategies with rapid returns, but ignoring long-term investments increases community risk.
To generate reliable evidence, funding entities should place a priority on research involving significant and sustained community engagement.
Assessing the strength of research evidence is a technical skill. Evaluations of violence reduction efforts should involve teams of experts from a variety of fields, and advanced degrees are not enough. Experts in evaluation methods, statistics, and causal inference are essential partners.
Prioritizing intervention strategies based simply on the results and methodological rigor of research published in academic journals is dangerously naive and harmful. Strategies to reduce violence should reflect an appropriate balance of evidentiary support with theoretical salience and practical viability.
Many strategies for reducing violence require direct contact with human subjects for interviews and surveys. Funding entities should continue to invest in these studies, but more effort should be made to design cost-effective evaluations using pre-existing, administrative data from varying sectors, including schools, hospitals, housing, taxes, employment records, commercial sales, business regulations, etc. Researchers and funders should collaborate in designing data analytic projects and natural experiments that test a wide array of policies and programs for their potential to reduce violence.