The District of Columbia Mayor's Focused Improvement Area Initiative: Review of the Literature Relevant to Collaborative
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The District of Columbia Mayor’s Focused Improvement Area Initiative: Review of the Literature Relevant to Collaborative Crime Reduction Jesse Jannetta Megan Denver Caterina Gouvis Roman Nicole Prchal Svajlenka Martha Ross Benjamin Orr Dec 2010 The District of Columbia Crime Policy Institute (DCPI) was established at the Urban Institute in collabora- tion with the Brookings Institution, through the jointly administered Partnership for Greater Washington Research with funding from the Justice Grants Administration in the Executive Office of the Mayor. DCPI is a nonpartisan, public policy research organization focused on crime and justice policy in Washington, DC. DCPI’s mission is to support improvements in the administration of justice policy through evidence-based research. An assessment of the Mayor’s Focused Improvement Areas (FIA) Initiative is one of DCPI’s three original research projects in FY2010. For more information on DCPI, see http://www.dccrimepolicy.org ©2011. The Urban Institute. All rights reserved. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the District of Columbia Crime Policy Institute, the Urban Institute, the Brookings Institution, their trustees, or their funders. This report was funded by the Justice Grants Administration, Executive Office of the District of Columbia Mayor under sub-grant 2009-JAGR-1114. Tables i Figures ii Acronyms iii 1 Introduction 1 2 Programmatic Elements 5 2.1 Crime and Violence Intervention . .5 2.1.1 Problem Analysis . .5 2.1.2 Targeting the Intervention . .8 2.1.3 Community Policing . .9 2.1.4 Suppression . 10 2.1.5 Focused Deterrence . 11 2.1.6 Reentry Programs . 12 2.1.7 Gang Interventions . 13 2.1.8 Criminal Justice—Human Services Collaborations . 14 2.1.9 Balancing and Sequencing Interventions . 15 2.2 Targeted Prevention . 15 2.2.1 Neighborhood Analysis and Identifying the Target Population . 15 2.2.2 Outreach . 16 2.2.3 Mentoring . 17 2.2.4 Counseling and Therapy . 18 2.2.5 Case Management . 19 2.2.6 Mental Health . 20 2.2.7 Substance Abuse . 20 2.2.8 Job Training/Placement . 21 2.2.9 School-Based Activities . 23 2.2.10 Family-Based Interventions . 24 2.2.11 Addressing Physical Disorder . 24 3 Process and Structural Elements 26 3.1 Interagency Collaboration . 26 3.1.1 Leadership . 27 3.1.2 Partnership Structure . 28 3.1.3 Barriers and Challenges to Interagency Collaboration . 29 3.2 Community Engagement . 29 3.2.1 Community Social Cohesion . 30 3.2.2 Community Participation and Input . 31 3.2.3 Community Mobilization . 32 3.2.4 Ownership: Comprehensive Community Initiatives . 33 3.3 Sustainability . 34 4 Conclusion 36 References 37 Annotated Bibliography 45 Tables 1.1 Key Lessons for Policy and Practice . .4 2.1 Prominent Violence Prevention Interventions . .7 2.2 Prominent Comprehensive Gang Interventions . 13 i Figures 3.1 Levels of Community Engagement . 30 ii Acronyms BBBSA Big Brothers Big Sisters of America BGCA Boys and Girls Clubs of America BRI Boston Reentry Initiative CAR Children at Risk CCI Comprehensive Community Initiative CGP Comprehensive Gang Program COPS Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services CPVP Chicago Project for Violence Prevention CTC Communities that Care DCPI District of Columbia Crime Policy Institute DMI Drug Market Intervention FFT Functional Family Therapy FIA Focused Improvement Areas GREAT Gang Resistance Education and Training GRP Gang Reduction Program MST Multi-Systemic Therapy NJI Neighborhood Jobs Initiative OJJDP Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention OJP Office of Justice Programs PSN Project Safe Neighborhoods SACSI Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative SARA Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment SRO School Resource Officer SVORI Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative iii 1 Introduction In March 2010, the Executive Office of the Mayor/Office 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 back- ground, design, and actual implementation; • Reviews of programmatic materials and administrative records and field observations of the Initia- tive’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;1 • A review of research literature relevant to collaborative crime reduction; and • A strategic plan to guide future efforts.2 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 1Fontaine, J. and J. Markman. 2010. “The Focused Improvement Area Initiative in Washington, DC: A Review of Past Practice.” Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. 2Liberman, A., Fontaine, J., Ross, M., Roman, C. G., and J. Roman. 2010. “Strategic Plan for Strengthening the Focused Improvement Area Initiative.” Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. 1 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. (Please see section 3.2 for a fuller discussion of the nature of CCIs.) 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 reduc- tion/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 neighbor- hood improvement efforts focused on social services or physical revitalization are so varied, it is notoriously difficult 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 ini- tiatives 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.3 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 initia- tives: 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