Evidence-Based Programs from Office of Criminal Justice Clearinghouse

A problem-oriented policing program that aims to eliminate overt drug markets and the problems associated with them through a deterrence-based, pulling-levers framework. The program is rated Effective. The Intervention had a statistically significant impact on reducing violent incidents in the target areas. Click here to learn more. 

This focused deterrence strategy in New Orleans, Louisiana, aims to reduce gang violence and homicide. The program is rated Effective. There were statistically significant reductions found in overall homicide, firearm-related homicide, gang member-involved homicide, and firearm assault from the pretest to the posttest period. Further, New Orleans showed significantly decreased homicide rates after the program was implemented, compared with 14 cities with similar violent crime rates. Click here to learn more. 

The program focused on small clusters of high-crime addresses, rather than entire patrol beats or neighborhoods. These were known as “hot spots” of crime, and were identified based on the frequency of calls for service to the area. Officers from the Minneapolis Police Department provided intensive patrol services to the high-crime areas of Minneapolis. The program focused on increasing police presence in “hot spots” of crime, rather than the specific activities conducted by officers during patrols. The idea was that since the highest amounts of crime were concentrated in selected geographic regions, increasing police presence specifically in these areas would produce substantial reductions in crime. The program used a proactive policing strategy to prevent crimes from occurring, as opposed to a reactive strategy that makes arrests after a crime has already been committed. The implementation of the strategy depended on the cooperation of the entire police force. Click here to learn more.

In 2012, the homicide rate in Oakland, Calif. was almost seven times that of the national homicide rate (Braga et al. 2018). As a result, the City of Oakland engaged the California Partnership for Safe Communities (CPSC) to help design an intervention (the Ceasefire intervention) that could help reduce serious gun violence. The Ceasefire intervention uses focused-deterrence group violence reduction strategies (GVRS) to reduce or control gun violence. Problem analysis research showed that gang members were involved in nearly two thirds of gun homicides in Oakland between 2012 and 2013 (Braga et al. 2019); therefore, the Ceasefire GVRS intervention focused on gun violence related to gang members in the city. Click here to learn more.

This is a collaborative law enforcement effort to collect, manage, and analyze crime gun evidence to identify serial shooters, disrupt criminal activity, and prevent future gun violence. The program is rated Promising. Posttest gun crime cases saw statistically significant increases in the likelihood of arrest, but no statistically significant difference in the likelihood of being charged or convicted, compared with cases in the pretest period. Click here to learn more.

The Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS) was created to expedite the highly labor-intensive and time-consuming task of matching ballistics information in police investigations. In addition to matching evidence from an ongoing or current investigation, IBIS can be used to link ballistic information to prior investigations and to guns used in crimes—that is, firearms that have been used in the commission of multiple crimes but that may not have been recovered in the investigation. Click here to learn more. 

A program that attempts to reduce homicides and non-fatal shootings through a multidisciplinary and multiagency homicide review process. The program is rated Effective. There was a statistically significant, 52 percent, decrease, in the monthly count of homicides in the intervention districts. The MHRC provides a unique forum for addressing violence in Milwaukee, Wis. The program is based on the involvement of law enforcement professionals, criminal justice professionals, and community service providers who meet regularly to exchange information regarding the city’s homicides and other violent crimes to identify methods of prevention from both public health and criminal justice perspectives. The MHRC makes recommendations based on trends identified through the case review process. These recommendations range from micro-level strategies and tactics to macrolevel policy change. Many of the recommendations made to date have been implemented. Click here to learn more.