Abstract
Cities across the country have increasingly turned toward community violence interventions (CVI) to address community safety without relying on criminal legal strategies. This article inspects beneath the veneer of present-day CVI approaches to examine how their work is dedicated as much to neighborhood social organization as it is to responding to gun violence. Underneath contemporary definitions of outreach workers as mediators of violence, earlier sociologists and criminologists conceived of these workers as frontline builders of community charged with mending breaks in the social fabric. Acknowledging this past is important because it re-centers criminology's contributions to the practice of street outreach and provides insights that help to comprehend the challenging present moment in American public safety. We offer directions for a reinvigorated social science of street outreach that re-centers community processes, structures, and institutions and, in so doing, might better inform contemporary practice and policy.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 431-458 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| Journal | Annual Review of Criminology |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 29 2025 |
Funding
Specifically, the GVRP integrated street outreach work within a larger comprehensive framework to bolster community institutional capacity to respond to gang problems through a mix of outreach, suppression, opportunities provision, and community mobilization services. In the spirit of the time, the GVRP did not challenge the primacy of law enforcement responsibility for gangs; on the contrary, the program espoused suppression as a crucial ingredient in gang control and included police and probation officers alongside street outreach workers in its working groups (). In fact, the program was administered and initially funded by the Chicago Police Department, with subsequent financial support provided by the Department of Justice. Spergel's expansive evaluation of GVRP's impact revealed significant reductions in arrests for serious violence among the approximately 200 gang-involved individuals served by the program when compared to similar untreated populations. Further analyses also showed self-reported decreases in individual-level violent offending but increases in overall gang-level violence for the two gangs that were the focus of the intervention. Although GVRP's findings in Chicago were mixed, the strategy was heralded as a programmatic model by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which provided funding and technical support for other municipalities seeking to replicate comprehensive approach. We would like to thank Michael Sierra-Ar\u00E9valo, Tony Cheng, Paul Carrillo, and the participants of the Duke Criminology Roundtable for comments on earlier drafts of this review. A special acknowledgment is due to Teny Gross, whose years of conversations and partnership have influenced this review in countless ways that surpass the recognition afforded by conventional academic citation.
Keywords
- community violence intervention
- street gangs
- street outreach work
- streetwork
- violence
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Law
