Program Profile: Project Safe Neighborhoods (Chicago, Ill.)

This is a comprehensive antiviolence initiative that uses collaborative strategies to alter perceived costs and benefits of gun violence and is intended to reduce illegal gun offending. The program is rated Promising. Treatment areas experienced a statistically significant reduction in homicide and gun-related homicides, but no reduction in gang-related homicides. In addition, offender notification forums were associated with statistically significant reductions in recidivism rates.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

Program Goals

Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) in Chicago, Ill., is a nationwide federally funded initiative designed to bring federal, state, and local law enforcement together to promote “a comprehensive and strategic approach to reducing gun crime” (Papachristos, Meares, and Fagan 2007, p. 225). The initiative promotes several context-specific strategies that can be implemented in different cities. Chicago’s PSN program is based on three broad goals: 1) to reduce demand among people convicted of gun offenses, 2) to reduce supply by identifying and intervening in illegal gun markets, and 3) to prevent gun violence. The demand-and-supply reduction goals rely on a combination of efforts to increase the perceived costs of illegal gun use and to change the behavior of people with histories of gun violence. The prevention component is intended to alter their perceptions of the legitimacy of the law and the costs of punishment to deter potential gun-related offending.

Target Population

PSN is targeted mainly at individuals who are most likely to be involved in firearm violence—presumably, those with a history of gun offending. The initiative also concentrates on areas with a high likelihood of gun violence, such as neighborhoods with disproportionately high levels of gang activity and poverty.

Program Components

The majority of Chicago’s PSN strategies take place at the community level. These include community outreach and media campaigns, school-based programs, and various programs specifically geared toward people known for gun offenses. The most influential strategy applied at the community level is the use of offender notification meetings. PSN also implements multiagency case review and prosecutorial decisions, as well as law enforcement strategies to combat illegal gun offending.

• Offender notification forums. This component is intended to change normative perceptions of gun crime among the offending population. Each forum involves about 25 individuals who are selected to attend based on three criteria: 1) residence in the intervention communities, 2) at least one prior gun-related or violent offense, and 3) a 3- to 6-month prior release from prison. The goals of the hour-long forums are to deliver a message regarding the consequences of offending and to alter the generally negative opinions that they might have about law and law enforcement. Organizers communicate the message that attendees can choose to have a life that does not involve serious offending. The meetings are held at places such as parks, community colleges, or churches, as opposed to law enforcement venues. Meetings consist of three segments, each of which is designed to promote a specific aspect of the PSN initiative. In the first segment, law enforcement representatives discuss details of PSN efforts and highlight gun laws and sentences. The message from law enforcement emphasizes the legal consequences of engaging in violence or having a gun. Representatives discuss the various avenues they can take to arrest and prosecute people who commit gun offenses, should participants choose to reoffend. The second segment involves a presentation from an ex-offender in the community; this individual is usually an older former gang leader who is now a street intervention worker. During this segment, the ex-offender discusses his personal experiences with crime and his decision to reform his behavior. The third segment emphasizes available opportunities for ex-offenders, using speakers from various community programs, including temporary shelter, job training, behavior counseling, mentorship and union training, education and GED courses, and substance-misuse prevention and treatment assistance. During this segment, several local employers also present information on available employment opportunities in the community.
• Multiagency gun recoveries. This component involves having a unified law enforcement team specifically focused on increasing the rate of gun seizures. The team consists of agents from the Chicago Police Department; the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the Cook County (Ill.) State Attorney’s Office; the U.S. Attorney’s Office; and the City of Chicago’s Department of Drug and Gang House Enforcement. The goal of the team is to concentrate all available resources on gun crime in target areas, emphasizing supply-side firearm policing activities. The team has two main roles: 1) to investigate cases surrounding gun trafficking, use, and sales in target areas; and 2) to conduct gun seizures and serve warrants for pending firearm cases.
• Federal prosecutions. For this component, the PSN task force assigns local and federal prosecutors to meet biweekly, to review every gun case in Chicago. They then determine whether the cases should be prosecuted at the state or federal level. Prosecutions at the federal level are much more severe than those at the state level, so these cases are reserved for more serious offenses. The goal of the review process is to identify cases involving an individual with a previous history of gun violence, which fall within the target areas, and that have an accompanying severe or aggravating circumstance that qualifies the case for federal prosecution.
• Federal sentencing. This component is intended to increase severity of punishment for those convicted of gun offenses. It is based on the premise that federal prosecutions for gun offenses tend to result in lengthier sentences. While program activities do not directly affect sentencing practices, the severity of potential punishments for gun crime are communicated to the general public through PSN billboard and radio advertisements, and to the target populations during offender notification meetings.

Key Personnel

The Chicago PSN initiative elicits the participation of a multiagency task force of members from law enforcement and local community agencies, including representatives from the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, the Illinois Department of Corrections, the Cook County Department of Probation, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, the City of Chicago Corporation Counsel, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, and the Chicago Crime Commission.

Program Theory

The PSN Chicago strategy is based on the notion that deterrence and incapacitation can reduce crime. In addition to its roots in criminological theory, the Chicago PSN strategy is also rooted in norm-based psychological theories of behavioral economics.

Deterrence strategies stress the importance of calibrating the severity, certainty, and swiftness of a sanction for reducing offending. Deterrence is a key concept in the rational choice theory of criminology, which asserts that individuals weigh the costs and benefits of offending (Wallace et al. 2016). Deterrence strategies are based on the notion that any sanction that increases criminals’ perceived risks of committing an offense can deter them from carrying out the act. PSN techniques rely on a combination of efforts to increase perceived costs of illegal gun use for the purpose of promoting deterrence. Several components of PSN demonstrate principles of deterrence by increasing sanctions for gun offending, including relying more heavily on federal prosecutions and using offender notification forums to inform targeted populations about the sanctions for gun offending.

Incapacitation strategies are based on the notion that crime can be reduced by removing high-risk persons from society. PSN Chicago relies on this approach, as evidenced by the emphasis on people with histories of gun use, as well as the emphasis on increasing prosecutions for those who have committed gun offenses. Finally, the psychological norm-based approach relies on the idea that people comply with the law when they respect their governing authority and believe the law is legitimate. This approach is based on a belief in the fairness of legal norms and procedures to promote the underlying moral bases of law (Papachristos, Meares, and Fagan 2007). PSN Chicago applies this approach to alter perceived social norms and preferences within high-crime areas in Chicago. This is evidenced by the use of offender notification forums, which are intended to increase dissemination of deterrence and social norms messages, stress potential consequences of gun use, and offer nonviolent behavioral alternatives.

Study

Papachristos, Meares, and Fagan (2007) conducted an evaluation of Chicago’s Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) initiative in reducing gun-related offenses, applying a quasi-experimental design with a near-equivalent control group. Based on data on the concentration of homicide and gun violence, treatment and control districts were selected nonrandomly from the city’s 25 police districts. The units of analysis were 54 police beats, each approximately one square mile and with approximately 7,600 residents. Two adjacent police districts were selected as PSN Chicago treatment districts. The PSN group consisted of a cluster of 24 police beats on Chicago’s West Side and was selected based on the area’s disproportionately high levels of gun violence. Two other districts were used as near-equivalent control groups and were eligible if 1) they could roughly approximate the high homicide, gun violence, and social/demographic patterns of the PSN areas but 2) were geographically and socially separated from the treatment area to avoid contamination. A cluster of 30 police beats was selected to use as control beats.

Data was collected from the Chicago Police Department; the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF); and the Illinois Department of Corrections. The data spanned a 72-month period from January 1999 to December 2004 and were collapsed to 24 quarter-year periods for analysis. Offender notification meetings began in January 2003 and continued after the end of the data collection period in December 2004.

To assess PSN’s impact, the evaluators chose several measures of crime, including total homicide, gang homicide, gun homicide, and aggravated battery. Individual growth curve models using mixed effects regression were used to detect the influence of PSN on violence rates over time. The authors estimated propensity scores for each of the beats in the study and included those scores in the model to reduce potential threats presented by nonrandom group assignment. The use of offender notification meetings was the most viable component to isolate in assessing the impact of PSN, as the remaining components (multiagency gun recoveries, federal prosecutions, and federal sentencing) were applied throughout the entire city and could not be divided between treatment and comparison areas for analysis. The impact of multiagency gun recoveries was assessed using the average ATF gun seizure rate, which was measured and factored into an analysis of the strategy’s effects on total homicides and gun-related homicides. This technique was used to assess the impact of the supply-side strategies of PSN and was quantified as the number of ATF gun seizures per police beat per quarter.

• Total homicide rate. This measure was used to assess changes in lethal criminal violence. Homicide totals were computed from incident-level police records geocoded to the beat level by the address of the incident.
• Gun-related homicide rate. This measure was used to assess homicides that involved a firearm, to isolate the program’s impact on serious gun violence. Data was disaggregated by whether a firearm was used in the homicide.
• Gang-related homicide rate. This measure was used to assess homicides that were gang-related, to isolate the program’s impact on gang violence. Data was disaggregated by whether the homicide was gang-related.
• Aggravated assault/aggravated battery arrest rate. This measure was used to assess firearm-involved criminal violence, to isolate the program’s impact on nonfatal offending. This data was created from incident-level police records that were geocoded to the police beat.

Study

Wallace and colleagues (2016) conducted a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the impact of Chicago’s PSN offender notification forums on reducing individual-level recidivism among a population of persons returning from prison. The treatment group, consisting of eligible parolees in two Chicago police districts that were implementing PSN offender notification forums, was compared with eligible parolees in two comparison districts. The treatment and comparison groups were selected from the city’s 25 police districts based on the concentration of homicide and gun violence.

The study sample included individuals released from prison between 2001 and 2006 in Cook County, Ill., who had a felony weapons violation at any time in their criminal history and who lived in the PSN treatment and comparison districts. This included the entire population of individuals eligible to participate in the PSN offender notification forums, regardless of whether they attended. The study sample size comprised 4,420 individuals; of these, 238 (about 5 percent) attended a PSN forum. Most of the sample was Black (more than 93 percent), and the average age was 35 years. There were no statistically significant differences between the treatment and comparison groups in race, age, children, and marital status. However, the comparison group members had a statistically significant greater number of incarcerations and likelihood of belonging to a gang.

The primary outcome of interest was recidivism, which was defined as any reincarceration during the study years. The Illinois Department of Corrections provided individual-level recidivism data. Recidivism was coded as a binary variable: 0 for “not incarcerated” and 1 for “reincarcerated.” In separate analyses, recidivism was coded as 0 for “an individual who did not recidivate,” 1 for “an individual who was incarcerated for a new offense,” and 2 for “an individual who was incarcerated for a technical violation.” Data were examined using Cox proportional hazard models and competing-risks hazard models. The CrimeSolutions review concentrated on the comparison of participants in the treatment districts (the treatment group) with nonparticipants in the comparison districts (the comparison group).

Subgroup Analysis

Papachristos, Meares, and Fagan (2007) conducted an analysis of the impact of individual Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) strategies. The use of offender notification forums made the largest impact on the overall reduction in homicides. Additionally, the analysis indicated a small but statistically significant reduction in homicides due to gun seizures by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). There was also a modest but statistically significant decrease in total homicide associated with prosecutions. For gun-related homicides, the analysis of the impact of ATF seizures indicated that the logged gun-related homicide rate decreased by nearly 2 percent for every 10 guns recovered in a beat. Thus, the logged gun homicide rate decreased by about 18 percent for every 100 guns recovered. There were also statistically significant reductions in gun homicides associated with PSN prosecutions and offender notification forums. In addition, the percentage of offenders who attended the offender notification forums was associated with a statistically significant reduction in gang-related homicides. However, none of the isolated PSN components were found to have a statistically significant effect on the number of aggravated batteries.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

Meares, Tracey L., Andrew V. Papachristos, and Jeffrey Fagan. 2009. “Homicide and Gun Violence in Chicago: Evaluation and Summary of the Project Safe Neighborhoods Program.” Research Brief.

Meares, Tracey L., and Andrew V. Papachristos. 2009. “The Reentry of Violent Offenders in Chicago: Summary of the Project Safe Neighborhoods’ Offender Notification Forums.” Research Brief.

Following are CrimeSolutions-rated programs that are related to this practice:

Focused Deterrence Strategies

This practice (also referred to as “pulling-levers policing”) includes problem-oriented policing strategies that follow the core principles of deterrence theory. The strategies target specific criminal behavior committed by a small number of individuals who chronically commit offenses, such as youth gang members or those who repeatedly commit violent offenses, who are vulnerable to sanctions and punishment. The practice is rated Promising for reducing crime.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

Crime & Delinquency - Multiple crime/offense types

Reducing Gun Violence

Reducing gun violence is a persistent public policy concern for communities, policymakers and leaders. To reduce gun violence, several strategies have been deployed including public health approaches (e.g., training and safe gun storage); gun buy-back programs; gun laws; and law enforcement strategies. The practice is rated Promising for reducing violent gun offenses.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

Crime & Delinquency - Violent offenses

Why might a practice's outcome ratings differ from the ratings of specific programs encompassed by that practice?