JC Member Spotlight: Andrew Papachristos

Community Violence Intervention—Moving Beyond “Does it Work?

Professor Andrew Papachristos

JC Member Andrew Papachristos is the John G. Searle Professor of Sociology and Director of Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research. He is also the Faculty Director of CORNERS: the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science. Papachristos is one of the world’s leading experts at applying network science to the study of crime, violence, policing, and urban neighborhoods.

Q: Tell us about the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) and your role there.

IPR was founded 55 years ago to take an interdisciplinary approach to solving some of the toughest problems in cities…safety, housing, education. It brought together the best people at Northwestern—sociologists, economists, psychologists, and organizers.

Since then, it has evolved beyond urban issues. I think about IPR as a research amplifier and ideas incubator, a space for collaboration and problem-solving. For example, I was able to collaborate with psychologists to determine that police violence in a community can lead to lower birth weight.

As Director I oversee initiatives, bring people together, and manage recruitment and retention.

Q. What is the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science (CORNERS) and what is your role there?

CORNERS is a center within the Institute of Policy Research that primarily focuses on using an engaged research approach to help answer some of the most pressing issues facing our cities and communities. Our main portfolio right now focuses on community violence intervention.

Our big goal is to move policy questions beyond “does it work?” (which is important), to understanding what the work is…what exactly are we talking about when we talk about community violence intervention?

We are partnering with civic agencies and non-profits to answer questions like: What does the violence interruption workforce look like? What work are they doing?

It turns out that their work goes well beyond violence intervention. Their daily interactions are so much more than mediating a dispute between two gangs. Outreach workers and organizations spend considerable time building community, organizing, handing out food, helping with homework, and legal issues. All of this is, in a very deep way, aimed at reducing violence and increasing public safety. But we often only focus on the violence interruption-style of work.

By trying to describe and analyze the community structures and processes being used, we learn more valuable lessons beyond simply determining if it is “working.” We also need to understand who is doing this work.

For example, we just had a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that evaluated Chicago’s gun violence program CRED. On its face, it looks like a set of mixed findings for these sorts of CVI programs.

Overall, we found the programs did not lower individual victimization, but it did have a significant decrease in arrests, and quite a large impact at that. People stopped carrying guns, but they still got shot. Traditional evaluations would stop there however, instead of saying this didn’t work, our team at CORNERS kept pushing—who got shot, why, where? We found that people went through the program, stopped carrying guns, and then, for example, got shot while waiting for a bus, even on their way to work or school.

That isn’t a program failure. It changed individual behavior but not the neighborhood. People changed what they could control. They couldn’t change what they couldn’t control, the roots of violence and disinvestment are so much larger than any single program.

We are also trying to bring data science to the front-line workers; to make tools available so they can respond better and faster and have more impact. For example, contact tracing for gun violence. Can we use this approach to direct the attention of non-police entities to respond to outbreaks of violence?

Q. How do we expand on the success of Community Violence Intervention (CVI) programs and ensure they remain funded?

We have seen the potential of CVI programs to build trust within a community, reduce gun violence, and provide a bridge to lifesaving services.

But we don’t know why it’s not having the impact we want—this raises issues of dosage, are you engaging the right people, are you engaging enough people, do you have any resources? Or maybe it’s an issue of scale?

We need to better understand what works and how to build the civilianized architecture needed to bolster public safety—we think of CVI as one part of a recipe for healthy cities.

To continue this work, we need to build a much broader violence prevention infrastructure (or architecture) within cities and states, but also in the federal government. Just as importantly, these sorts of offices need to be funded and staffed properly which will make it bureaucratic but stable.

The biggest threat to this effort is that the money used to stand this up came from the American Recovery Act, which is now gone. You can’t rely on philanthropy forever. If we believe it’s worth the investment, we need a mechanism tethered to stable budgets. We need to think about how to sustain these efforts despite funding shortfalls and political office changes. Ultimately, if we believe public safety is a public good, it requires public funding.

We also need to focus on innovation—this stuff changes so fast. Five years ago, we weren’t talking about ghost guns—no one thought you could 3D print a handgun at home. We must stay aware. We don’t know what is next.

Q. Many gun violence reduction efforts and policies singularly focus on changing individual behavior. How do we shift the narrative from an individual focus to a more holistic community approach?

There are researchers who believe that we need to double down on individual violence prevention, rather than focusing on the community. They feel if they simply provide CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy) to individuals, that we can fix the problem.

This is a classic example of what academics often call traditional ecology fallacy: making inferences about things (like communities or neighborhoods) based on data at a different level (individuals). If we think that violence is only the aggregation of individuals making bad choices, then that is what our policies are going to reflect.

With such a framework, the individual becomes your point of inference—and this is what we tend to do in this country—whether it’s immigration, gun violence, or school drop-out.

We need to look at both—the individual and the collective.

Information needs to get to people in ways that can have an impact. No policymaker is going to read a research paper. If we can change the narrative, we can shift the perception that will drive policy.

Q. What are you currently working on?

Right now, I am finishing up a paper about the future of street outreach work. It’s an old idea we keep coming back to. How do you value local expertise and leverage it for violence prevention? We are at a key turning point. Either we invest in and develop this field, or it goes away. I am excited about the possibilities.