EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

C O M M U N I T Y - D R I V E N V I O L E N C ER E D U C T I O N P R O G R A M S

Community-based partnerships and crimeprevention

Wesley G. SkoganN o r t h w e s t e r n U n i v e r s i t y

In their article, Jeremy M. Wilson and Steven Chermak (2011, this issue) provide

an evaluation of a community-based youth violence prevention program, Pittsburgh’s

One Vision One Life (OVOL). Facing a record-setting rise in homicide, a localcoalition of organizations launched a street-work program that intervened to defuse

impending disputes and identified high-risk youth who could be connected with services.

Three clusters of neighborhoods were targeted by the program, whereas others served as

comparison groups in the evaluation.Why should this journal, and the research community, devote attention to OVOL and

programs like it? First, and foremost, in my view, it promises a nonenforcement alternative to

violence prevention. If we are going to maintain democracy in a world that is increasingly

governed through fear and punishment, it behooves us to err on the side of paying closeattention to approaches to peace and stability that rely on civil society rather than on

criminal justice institutions. Research on hot spot interventions and problem-oriented

criminal justice programs, to pick examples of the latter, is more than “promising.” We

know a great deal about why, and how, they work. However, the contrast between the vigorand the rigor of research in those fields and this one is striking. So too are the theoretical

perspectives from which they operate, with those on the civil society side worrying about

individual and collective norm change and harm reduction, not about fear and deterrence.

Second, we should pay attention because OVOL is representative of how services aredelivered in the United States. Community-based partnerships—coalitions among grassroots

organizations, nonprofit service providers, local government agencies, and funders—are to

a significant degree replacing the older model of creating public agencies and staffing them

Direct correspondence to Wesley G. Skogan, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University,2040 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208–4100 (e-mail: skogan@northwestern.edu).

DOI:10.1111/j.1745-9133.2011.00782.x C© 2011 American Society of Criminology 987Criminology & Public Policy � Volume 10 � Issue 4

Editor ia l Introduction Community-Driven Violence Reduction Programs

with public employees who provided services to community members. We are abandoning

permanent, professional, and often unionized civil servants (read them as “expensive”) for

more temporary, well-intentioned, task-oriented contractors who may be dumped whentax revenues falter. They hope to protect themselves from this fate by finding political

patrons, hiring local influentials to staff the program, and cultivating friends in the media.

With luck they will find themselves—as Andrew V. Papachristos in his policy essay (2011,

this issue) dubs it, “too big to fail.” This approach is now how we deliver child care,family support services, preventive physical and mental health care, affordable housing

and housing rehabilitation, recreation, adult education, employment counseling and job

training, and a myriad of services and activities for senior citizens. OVOL is just a case study

of programming in the criminological domain. Governance has become contract-letting,whereas in the public sector, even police numbers are at risk.

As Wilson and Chermak (2011) make clear, OVOL is not alone in the world of largely

nonenforcement, community-based, crime-prevention partnerships. While explaining the

program, and later decoding the findings of the evaluation, Wilson and Chermak detailthe relationship between Pittsburgh’s program and related projects in other cities, notably,

Baltimore, Chicago, and Boston. The apparent commonalities and contrasts among them

will provide the reader with a useful picture of this world of prevention services.

Of course, readers also will want to know whether all this can actually work. Mixedevidence is available regarding the effectiveness of this and similar programs, as well as a

mixed evaluation record. They are hard to implement, it is challenging to say exactly what

they do, and it is difficult to link whatever they did to measured outcomes.

As a reader of this article by Wilson and Chermak (2011) and of evaluations of similarprograms will quickly note, they are hard to implement and sustain. Our colleagues who

evaluate policing strategies lament the difficulties of funding, organizing, and keeping top

managers focused on crackdowns by their troops in a few targeted geographical areas. They

should take a peek into the world of community-based partnerships. There, programsdepend on the coordinated activities of multiple organizations with distinct agendas,

different budget cycles, highly varying degrees of professionalism, sometimes volunteer

staffing, and frequent financial crises. Of course, they also often have differing views on

how—and whether—they should be evaluated. They are beholden to different and oftencompeting politicians. The “grassroots” components of the partnerships often are as critical

and oppositional as they are interested in cooperating with criminal justice agencies, which

are not popular among their constituents. David M. Kennedy in his policy essay (2011, this

issue) is unwilling to give up the enforcement tools in his criminological tool bag, althoughhe is sensitive to the implications of pulling them out. However, many groups that actually

represent their community’s views may not be willing to take up the hammer.

It is hard to keep track of what program staff actually does, and the shifting population

they work with. OVOL and related programs are not situated in schools or other controlledsettings. Strikingly, reviews of successful programs (such as those summarized at the Center

988 Criminology & Public Policy

Skogan

for the Study and Prevention of Violence’s “Blueprints for Violence Prevention” website)

most often identify school-based or pre/postnatal initiatives. However, as one staff member

I interviewed as part of my CeaseFire-Chicago evaluation bluntly put it, “Gangsters aren’tin school.” Instead, they find fellowship as far from the constraints of adult supervision

as they can place themselves. OVOL and the others deal with potential offenders “in the

wild.” They run down clients, who may be of no fixed address, on the street. They work in

the night and in places where no institutional-review-board–governed principal investigatorwould be allowed to send his or her staff.

Also, it is difficult to link these activities plausibly to measured outcomes. Our policy

essay commentators on the article by Wilson and Chermak (2011) all lament the shortage

of randomized trials in this field, which is a familiar chant. Some, like CeaseFire-Chicago,are at least multisite, which yields some analytic leverage. All of the programs discussed here

ended up employing retrospective, data-analysis–intensive designs for detecting program

effects, and Megan Ferrier and Jens Ludwig’s (2011, this issue) policy essay is a reminder of

the fallibility of this approach. But they all came to their evaluations only after the programshad apparently proved their worth. Like program funders, research sponsors also want to

minimize the risk of betting scarce dollars on a program that will not pay off, so both groups

are adverse to getting in on the ground floor.

Strikingly, one persistent finding of the OVOL evaluation (it occurred in all targetneighborhoods areas and in some nearby spillover areas) is that it may have caused violent

crime to go up, not down. Wilson and Chermak (2011, this issue) and the policy essay

commentators mull over this point, as doubtless will the reader. Malcolm W. Klein (2011,

this issue) points to the pernicious role that the program’s rough-and-tumble staff may haveplayed in glorifying gangs. Other policy essayists point to Klein’s own research to infer that

OVOL may have fostered gang identification and cohesion, in a city where gangs were not

particularly well organized before. Kennedy (2011, this issue) observes that the hostility of

the street workers to the police may have further undermined the confidence of their clientsin the police, and it may have encouraged a “stop snitchin’” attitude. In short, this dialog

is a reminder that “first, do no harm” is a relevant injunction in the social service world as

well as in medicine.

Where should we go from here? First, the evidence on how, and even whether,community-based client service and street intervention programs work is sufficiently mixed

that we should continue to pursue what Ferrier and Ludwig (2011, this issue) describe as

“efficacy trials.” These evaluate small but carefully developed field tests of closely monitored

programs, looking directly inside the “black box” to see what activities actually take place,what is doable and what is not, and what seems to work. It is advisable to conduct several

of these, testing various program permutations, with big-bang “effectiveness trials” only

coming later. One message of research by Klein (2011, this issue) and our other policy

commentators is that what the interventions look like should vary in line with the nature ofthe gang problem in the community. The model for Pittsburgh might be different from that

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for Los Angeles or Chicago, with their large, cohesive, and professionally led gangs. Second,

clearly, the role of randomized experiments is important at the efficacy-testing stage. These

programs usually involve a client-service component, providing a natural home for findingwhat works in that domain. Third, community-based programs should seriously entertain

the possibility that they need a strong law enforcement arm to get the attention of the crime

groups and most chronic offenders at work in their target communities. Kennedy (2011,

this issue) describes a “mixed-mode” program strategy in Boston that followed these lines,facilitating coordination-at-a-distance between street workers and the police.

ReferencesFerrier, Megan and Jens Ludwig. 2011. Crime policy and informal social control.

Criminology & Public Policy. This issue.

Kennedy, David M. 2011. Whither street work? The place of outreach workers incommunity violence prevention. Criminology & Public Policy. This issue.

Klein, Malcolm W. 2011. Comprehensive gang and violence reduction programs:Reinventing the square wheel? Criminology & Public Policy. This issue.

Papachristos, Andrew V. 2011. Too big to fail: The science and politics of violenceprevention. Criminology & Public Policy. This issue.

Wilson, Jeremy M. and Steven Chermak. 2011. Community-driven violence reductionprograms: Examining Pittsburgh’s One Vision One Life. Criminology & Public Policy.This issue.

Wesley G. Skogan is a professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow in the Institute for

Policy Research at Northwestern University. Skogan has directed many major crime studies

on fear of crime, the impact of crime on communities, public participation in communitycrime prevention, victimization, and victim responses to crime. Since 1993 he has directed

an evaluation of Chicago’s experimental citywide community policing initiative. His newest

projects include an evaluation of the utilization and impact of information technology in

law enforcement, and an evaluation of CeaseFire, a Chicago crime prevention program.

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