It’s a bit premature to be celebrating, but considering most homicides occur among individuals who know one another and have a history, targeted efforts by community members who know the players can have an impact.

“Baltimore’s flagship community violence intervention program, Safe Streets, has led to reductions in nonfatal shootings and homicides, according to a Johns Hopkins analysis of nearly 15 years of data.

In the neighborhoods served by the five Safe Streets sites that have been open four years or more, the analysis indicated there was an average of 22% fewer homicides than predicted. And across all sites, Safe Streets was associated with a 23% reduction in nonfatal shootings, researchers found.”

There have been a lot of people in this sub very critical of any approach to violence reduction that strays from dumping money into more police, so I’m curious how people feel now. Thoughts?

In case anyone is curious I found the original report. After browsing the report for a bit I'm... well I'm not skeptical but I'm not convinced either.

The 95% confidence intervals on the half of the results that have a p-value of < 0.05 are massive. Just as an example, the Average Effect of All Sites was between -0.34 and 0.00. So the study is 95% certain there was an effect of somewhere between -34% and 0%. There were also several observed places where homicides skyrocketed after the implementation of Safe Streets. Sandtown-Winchester's homicide rate went up by a staggering 44% as compared to the synthetic control (i.e., theoretically was caused by safe streets), Belair-Edison's doubled (+103%), Brooklyn's went up by 27%.

On the other hand, the observed non-fatal shooting rates don't match the homicide rates at all. Generally speaking, the rate of non-fatal shootings and the rate of fatal shootings move roughly in lockstep. That's not to say they can't move in different directions, or at different rates, but it is weird and surprising when that happens. This report shows that SW's homicide rate went up by 44% compared to the synthetic control, but their nonfatal shootings dropped by 53% compared to the expected value? Belair-Edison observed 21% fewer nonfatal shootings than was expected, compared to seeing 103% more fatal shootings than expected. On the flip side, Belvedere's nonfatal shootings were 459% (not a typo) higher than expected, but their homicide rate was 40% lower than expected.

This makes absolutely no sense, until you read a bit further and see that the p-value for the impact of Safe Streets on homicides is 0.381. There is a 38% chance that the observed impact on homicide rates is literally random chance.

I'm not saying this study is worthless, but it certainly looks like a case of "we spent a shit ton of money on this report we have to publish something".

While I think this is good news, I would still view this report skeptically for a few reasons:

1. I’ll just start off by saying the 22% reduction in homicides is not statistically significant according to the report.
2. Also there is no statistically significant impact in new sites. The authors mention “all sites” because the estimated impacts for the older sites are lower than the newer sites. So combining the data gets them a bigger impact value and they manage to still stay statistically significant. That seems wrong to me.
3. Research on the impact of SafeStreets in Baltimore is mixed. Other research by Hopkins has found some positive effects but two other studies on the program have found no impact. Similarly the literature nationwide is mixed. To the authors’ credit they note this in the report.
4. Estimating the impact of Safe Streets is hard because sites are not chosen randomly. The sites in the program are those with the most violence. It is likely that a reduction in violence can be attributed to regression to the mean rather than any given intervention.
5. The authors try to get around this by creating a synthetic control group. In other words, they take a bunch of areas around the city and weight their arrests, homicide stats, etc until they get a trend that is as close as possible to each Safe Streets site they are studying. This is a decent way to get around the problems in point two but the approach still has drawbacks the authors don’t give information on. For example, they give error bars for each synthetic control site and treatment site post intervention in the appendices. However they do not give data on how well the synthetic control matches the sites pre-treatment which would enable us to know how good a job they did creating controls. Similarly, we don’t have information on why the control matches pre-treatment trends. Do the control sites vary wildly but average out to a close approximation? Or do the control sites generally mirror the treatment site’s patterns closely?
6. The nonfatal shooting results are barely statistically significant. The confidence intervals stopping at -0.00 for two overall effects makes me wonder if there’s p-hacking going on there. I don’t live and die by a p-value of 0.05 but it’s a flag that maybe data was manipulated until it hit a certain threshold.
7. Putting the data together suggests a statistically significant effect on homicides in the first four years of Safe Streets but no impact/reversion in later years of program implementation (inferred because the impact becomes insignificant for the entire program duration). Again, these findings only apply to old sites. The authors find no statistically significant impacts in the new sites.

I want this program to succeed and I don’t think the above means the program is a failure. I just am very skeptical of the headline findings being reported here.

That's great news. Let's get more of these and further slow down the violence. Lack of anything better to do is the leading cause of teens and young adults of any culture or background to get into trouble. There is just a bigger lack of anything to do in the poorer areas.

Weird the one media outlet that usually reports on Safe Streets the most doesn't have a piece on this!

Can somebody to an ELI5 of why they seem to be working? I'm not being a skeptic. I genuinely want to understand.

Wow, they're claiming it reduced gun violence by over 20% and effectively prevented 1 of every 5 murders?

Displacement is not the same as a reduction. Homicides and shootings overall have not decreased in any sort of meaningful way in the city... just in the zones they're focusing on. This is the same reason I am not sold on the GVRS program that the city is touting as a success. Yeah, when you flood an area with resources that area is going to see a crime reduction. Meanwhile, other areas that aren't seeing those resources are seeing increases in crime.

Both programs have their merits, but neither are the cure all that the powers that be want them to be.

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When programs work, they should be funder and expanded. You want to reduce gun crime, here's a proven method that should not incite the pro-second amendment crowd.

I for one look forward to this actual good news never being covered by FOX45.

EDIT: Holy fucking shit! I had to go look. The current lead story on FOX45s website right now is a three sentence 'story' about allotting funds to the Blacks in Wax Museum, that has an break in the middle of those three sentences to show a graphic for another story that's just pictures of black peoples mugshots! This is the most race baiting thing I've ever seen a 'legitimate' news org do.

It literally has the copy "It is the nation’s first wax museum presenting the history of great Black Americans." that is followed by black people mugshots. Fucking wow!

Someone translate I had a stroke reading this title

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These programs work. As much as i think scott is kinda timid and needs to be more assertive & proactive, his crime approach is the right way to address the problem. If anyone's interested in an overview of these types of crime prevention programs, check out focused deterrence and operation ceasefire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ceasefire

Johns Hopkins evaluation also finds bears poop in the woods and the Pope is Catholic

As much as I wish this were true, the only thing that will convince me is the homicide rate going down. As the author directly says, more study is needed. All the collegiate studies in the world won't change the body count, or that certain locations are hardly ever open.

Of course Sinclair45 hasn't said anything about this though. Doesn't fit the narrative.

Yeah right. Been living here 30+ years. People are full of shit. Locals keep killing others all the time. What a joke. Only thing that will stop the criminals is giving them millions for “reparations” so they have motivation to stop shooting up their neighborhood with illegal guns. Will keep reading the news as the rats eat up their dead bodies.

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