2025 · Study · English

Effects of the Communities that Care (CTC) Prevention System on Youth Violence Outcomes in Two Violence-Impacted Denver Communities

Kingston, B. E., Mattson, S. A., Little, J. S., Steeger, C. M., Sigel, E. J., Carrillo, U. L., Bechhoefer, D., Argamaso, S., & D'Inverno, A.

Kingston, B. E., Mattson, S. A., Little, J. S., Steeger, C. M., Sigel, E. J., Carrillo, U. L., Bechhoefer, D., Argamaso, S., & D'Inverno, A. (2025). Effects of the Communities that Care (CTC) Prevention System on Youth Violence Outcomes in Two Violence-Impacted Denver Communities. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 51(1), 281–308. doi.org/10.1007/s12103-025-09811-0

Summary

Quasi-experimental evaluation of Communities That Care as a youth-violence prevention strategy in two high-burden, marginalised neighbourhoods of Denver, Colorado. The primary outcome was the official annual rate of arrests for violent offences among 10- to 24-year-olds, tracked for five years before (2012–2016) and five years after the start of the intervention (2017–2021) and analysed with interrupted time series and difference-in-differences models against synthetic control areas. In Community B arrest rates fell early in the intervention period and stayed significantly below the synthetic control during the intervention years; in Community A neither method detected an effect. The authors therefore report a reduction in violent-offence arrests in one of the two sites and call for research into why the same mobilisation process worked in one neighbourhood and not the other. For European readers it is one of the few CTC evaluations in an urban setting that uses police-recorded rather than self-reported violence.