Study: CeaseFire Model Can Stop Epidemic of Gun Violence, Replicated in Baltimore

[Tuesday Afternoon]

Last edited Fri Dec 7, 2012, 12:10 AM - Edit history (1)

New research released today reinforces the concept that gun violence can be reduced and prevented by taking a public health approach to the problem. Findings from a study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health show that shootings and killings in even America’s most violent communities can be reduced using the CeaseFire model—a model that employs disease control and behavior change strategies to reduce violence. CeaseFire employs ex-offenders who have unique credibility with community members and effectiveness in getting people to rethink the impulse to resolve disputes using guns.

Safe Streets Baltimore was launched by the Baltimore City Health Department in 2007 as a CeaseFire replication site, and research released today represents the first rigorous study of a replication of the CeaseFire model. In Baltimore, researchers found the Safe Streets program cut homicides by more than half in the Cherry Hill neighborhood. An earlier Department of Justice evaluation found 41 to 73 percent drops in shootings and killings in CeaseFire zones in Chicago.

NewPublicHealth spoke with CeaseFire founder, Gary Slutkin, about the CeaseFire model earlier this year. “If you release yourself from preconceived ideas about good and bad people and just look at what is actually happening, empirically you see that [violence] spreads like any other infectious disease,” said Slutkin. In another interview, Tio Hardiman, director for CeaseFire Illinois, commented on the CeaseFire approach, “You have to be able to detect conflicts before they arrive and before they escalate.”

more at link:
http://www.rwjf.org/en/blogs/new-public-health/2012/01/study-ceasefire-model-can-stop-epidemic-of-gun-violence-replicated-in-baltimore.html

[jody]

1. Sounds promising but the results should anger those who would ban firearms because no where in the

article is banning guns mentioned.

What is crystal clear is it is the person behind the firearm that causes crime, not the firearm.

[Starboard Tack]

3. Correct, the shooter causes the crime. The firearm causes the damage.

[Starboard Tack]

2. Good post TA

We need more people like this, looking for reasonable, positive and adult solutions.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

4. thanks for the comments and the Rec

[Eleanors38]

5. A similar approach is being planned in Austin.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

6. that is good to hear. keep us updated.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

7. Thanks for the Rec, rDigital. I hope this thread reaches the wider DU audience and that is the way.

Please consider Reccing. An OP has to have Ten Recs to make it to the Greatest Page now. That is not easy in our small group.
Thanks -all.

[pscot]

8. Epidemic of gun violence...tsk, tsk

Who could have imagined it.

[rDigital]

9. It's more of a social issue than a technical or legal issue. nt

[Tuesday Afternoon]

11. yes and we need to frame the argument in that term -- Social. n/t

[Tuesday Afternoon]

10. Where I used to work Two Cases of an Infectious Disease was considered an Epidemic.

This was in a Ninety Bed Facility. You do the math. Ratio.

[Remmah2]

12. If we were to treat gun violence/all violence as a public health problem.

We'd have public service messages concerning safe sex and safe gun ownership.

We'd have safe sex and safe gun ownership taught in schools.

Safe sex and safe gun ownership supplies would be available in the local pharmacy.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

14. you say that like it's a bad thing

[Simo 1939_1940]

13. Daniel Webster sounds perfectly reasonable in this video.

In an interview on PBS a while back ----- not so much.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

15. kicking to add more info:

Working 'The Corner'
Neighbors and officials plan one more effort to save the neighborhood around 12th and Chicon
By Jordan Smith, Fri., July 13, 2012

Lee Sherman was cleaning catfish in his backyard when he heard someone walking up the gravel path toward his neighbor's house. Sherman lives on New York Avenue, in Central East Austin, about a block south of the intersection of East 12th and Chicon streets, the city's most notorious corner for open-air drug dealing and the kind of crime – prostitution, burglary, assault – that a marketplace for addicts attracts. Sherman's neighbor's car had recently been broken into and his wife's gym bag full of clothes had been stolen. The neighbor asked Sherman if he'd keep an eye out – his wife was pregnant, her due date near, and the neighbor was vigilant about keeping her safe. Sherman agreed.

So on that Monday, Memorial Day 2011, Sherman looked up when he heard the footsteps next door; there was a woman walking toward the house. She was well-dressed and seemed to know where she was going. Sherman knew that his neighbor, a small-business owner, often worked from home and on occasion had employees drop by. The woman, he thought, was likely an employee. "The person was dressed pretty nicely and all, so I was like, whatever," Sher­man recalls. "But I was watching and she walked through his gate and starts walking toward his car, and I had known that someone had broken into his car." Seconds later, Sherman heard his neighbor yell: "'Hey! What are you doing in my yard?'" Moments later, the wife chimed in: "'Those are my shoes!'" Sherman recalls hearing. "'And that's my shirt!'" The woman walking toward his neighbor's house was the same woman who'd broken into the neighbor's car, Sherman realized. "And now she's back, in broad daylight ... wearing the shoes, wearing the shirt."

Sherman heard his neighbor and the woman arguing; the neighbor didn't want to let the woman leave until the cops could get there, and the woman was not interested in sticking around. Sherman picked up his phone and dialed 911. The woman saw him, Sherman says, and started to panic; she tried to push past the neighbor, but "he wouldn't let her go." The two fell to the ground, and the neighbor started to yell: "Lee, help me out! She's biting!" Sherman ran over to help pull the woman off his neighbor. When he did, he saw blood "running down" his neighbor's chest; the woman, later identified as 47-year-old Cas­san­dra Brooks, had bit him right through the nipple. When the police came, they found a crack pipe and assorted stolen items in Brooks' bag, Sherman recalls. "And they hauled her off to jail."

Roughly a month and a half later, Brooks was arrested again, just blocks to the north, for theft and possession of drug paraphernalia. Two months after that, she was picked up again, right at the corner of 12th and Chicon, for marijuana possession; less than a month later, she was popped once more, several blocks west of The Corner, for burglary. In all, between February 2007 and October 2011, Brooks was arrested 35 times, on 69 charges – including 11 cases of drug possession, six cases of theft, three cases of burglary of a vehicle, and two cases of prostitution – the vast majority of those arrests happening right around 12th and Chicon. Yet Brooks has been prosecuted just four times in the last five years, most recently for the October 2011 burglary, which netted her 12 months in jail, by far the longest sentence she received during that time period, according to court records. She has not been prosecuted for biting Sherman's neighbor.

more at link:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2012-07-13/working-the-corner/all/