2024 · Study · English
The Impact of the Communities That Care Approach in Reducing Violence and Crime Within an Urban, High-Burden Community
Gorman-Smith, D., Garthe, R. C., Schoeny, M. E., Cosey-Gay, F. N., Harris, C., Brown, C. H., & Villamar, J. A.
Gorman-Smith, D., Garthe, R. C., Schoeny, M. E., Cosey-Gay, F. N., Harris, C., Brown, C. H., & Villamar, J. A. (2024). The Impact of the Communities That Care Approach in Reducing Violence and Crime Within an Urban, High-Burden Community. Prevention Science, 25(6), 863–877. doi.org/10.1007/s11121-024-01707-5
Summary
Evaluation of Communities That Care in a large, high-burden urban neighbourhood, a setting quite different from the small towns of the original trial. The Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention, one of the national Youth Violence Prevention Centers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was among the first to implement CTC as a data-driven, collective-impact approach in a big-city district. The study compares trends in aggravated assaults and robberies in the Bronzeville community with those in similar Chicago communities. Findings show reductions in these violent crimes in Bronzeville relative to the comparison communities. The design is a quasi-experimental comparison of area-level crime trends rather than a randomised trial, and the published abstract gives no effect sizes, so the strength of the effect should be read from the full paper. For European cities the study is relevant evidence that the CTC process can be applied in dense, disadvantaged urban settings.