June 2017  |  BBC  

Somewhere in Chicago's 11th district, a microphone has picked up the percussive sound of a bullet and sent a signal, via California, to the police station, which is where Kim Smith hears about it.

Ms Smith, a data analyst from the University of Chicago, works at one of the city's new Strategic Decision Support Centres, where data, technology, and old-fashioned police work are being combined in an effort to control a sudden surge in gun violence.

Tags: Chicago Group Violence Intervention

June 2017  |  News-Press  

Fort Myers police Chief Derrick Diggs implements new tactics to strengthen the relationship between community members and law enforcement. Through efforts to collaborate with consultants, the minority community, institutions, and his own police force, Diggs enacts a progressive reform to his department’s practices in order to focus more heavily on restorative justice, to build trust with the community, and to change the mindset of his police force.

Tags: National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice Group Violence Intervention

June 2017  |  The Washington Post  

One analysis of mass shootings from 2009 through 2016 concluded that at least 54 percent of mass shootings — or 85 out of 156 incidents — involved a current or former intimate partner or family member as a victim. Other research has found that those who abuse their domestic partners are also more likely to abuse children and animals, and that 68 percent of men in a sample of batterers exhibited other “problem behaviors,” such as fights, previous arrests or drunken driving.

Tags: Intimate Partner Violence Intervention

June 2017  |  CNN  

Analyzing 183 hours' worth of body camera footage from the Oakland Police Department (OPD), a team of Stanford researchers found that police officers tended to be "less respectful, less polite, less friendly, less formal and less impartial" towards black drivers during traffic stops as compared to whites. Responding to this report, OPD Deputy Chief Leronne Armstrong pointed out that the data used was from 2014. Since that time, the entire department has undergone a series of trainings related to procedural justice. 

Tags: Oakland National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice

June 2017  |  The Crime Report  

Former Dallas Police Chief David Brown, on how society should address crime and violence: "You have to find a way to peel back the layers, and find root causes, and mitigate the root causes where they occur, whether that’s mental illness, drug addiction, job training, opportunities in the community, or economic development. You have to find those root causes to have a really clean sense of what would make us safer, what impacts these communities. We criminalize poverty, we criminalize mental illness, we criminalize drug addiction, and those are treatable things that we can resolve with policy. Handcuffs are not the solution."

Tags: Dallas

May 2017  |  The New York Times  

"Along with a growing number of hospital-based violence intervention programs, the new [trauma recovery] centers acknowledge the link between violence and public health, as well as the insidious ripple effects that untreated trauma can have on public safety. The likelihood of becoming a victim of violent crime — and a repeat victim — increases exponentially for low-income people of color underage 30, the very population least likely to seek help."

Tags: Support and Outreach