UC Experts Set to Help City Fight Rising Homicide Problem

A new project led by experts from UC’s Division of Criminal Justice will assist police, community members and social service providers in reducing homicides in Cincinnati.

Associate Professor Robin Engel and Professor John Eck – both from UC’s criminal justice faculty and the UC Policing Institute – are working with Dr. Victor Garcia, the director of Trauma Services at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and Professor David Kennedy from John Jay College of Criminal Justice to implement the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV).

The Cincinnati City Council unanimously approved the project Wednesday, following strong support from Mayor Mark Mallory and Councilman Cecil Thomas.

In the coming months, CIRV should begin to make a difference in the way Cincinnati approaches its problems of homicide and gun crime.

The approach will take many of the methods Kennedy, director of the Boston Gun Project while at Harvard University, first developed in producing the "Boston Miracle" – and that have since been successfully replicated in many other cities – and applying them in a way that makes sense in light of Cincinnati’s particular issues.

"When I first heard of the "Boston Miracle," I was dubious about its effectiveness," says Eck. "I became convinced that it did reduce killings, and could work in Cincinnati, after reviewing the evidence from its application in other cities. This is the only homicide reduction strategy that has been repeatedly tested and found to be repeatedly successful."

As a physician, Garcia is similarly optimistic about the project because of its track record of success that can be verified through a scientific, evidence-based approach.

"We have the answer to the question, ‘What works?’ " Garcia recently told City Council’s Law and Public Safety Committee. "Homicides can be addressed with a proven effective approach."

The first application of Kennedy’s theory saw a huge decrease in homicides in Boston after a particularly violent period in the early 1990s. The Boston Gun Project’s Operation Ceasefire, which has come to be more popularly known as the "Boston Miracle," saw homicides in that city fall from 150 in 1990 to just 31 in 1998.

A number of other cities have reported similar declines, including the Midwestern metropolises of Indianapolis and Minneapolis. When Kennedy’s approach was tried in Chicago – a city with a notoriously entrenched criminal problem that many thought would be unresponsive to an anti-homicide effort – the result was a rapid 37 percent reduction in homicides in some of the most violence-plagued neighborhoods in the city.

Kennedy’s approach focuses attention on the friction among small groups of chronic offenders. His research has shown that most urban violent crime is not the direct result of the drug trade or other street-level criminal enterprises, but instead results from feuds and vendettas among individual groups, often over respect. "These shootings are personal, not business," Kennedy said.

To intervene requires a coordinated approach across the board, which is where CIRV comes into the picture. The strategy is fundamentally very simple. CIRV will help assemble a partnership of community representatives, social service providers, and law enforcement agencies. The University of Cincinnati researchers will assist this partnership by identifying violent groups in the city, the dynamics driving street violence and other key facts. The partnership will then reach out directly to these groups and establish community standards against violence, offer a wide range of assistance and spell out the consequences to groups of continued violence.

"These street groups need to understand that who they are and what they’re doing is very well understood, that the community needs them to stop, that there are real alternatives, that the city would like to help them, but that they simply can’t continue being violent," Eck says. "As simple as that sounds, it turns out to work."

Making CIRV a credible project will require unprecedented cooperation among local, county and federal groups that operate in Cincinnati in law enforcement, corrections, human services, and community outreach. "The logic of what needs to happen is simple, but making it happen isn’t," Eck says. "A number of cities have made this approach work but haven’t been able to keep the partnership together and focused. We want to work on that in Cincinnati from the very beginning."

To that end, CIRV will have the services of two Procter & Gamble executives with expertise in business evaluation models. They will be help CIRV track coordination among the agencies.

Besides the two faculty leaders, UC’s criminal justice program will also provide graduate students who will analyze the characteristics of the homicide problem, assist in determining the network structure of the offender groups, and conduct the evaluation of the impact of CIRV on homicides. "We choose David Kennedy’s approach because of the evidence showing that it could work here, and we are using evidence to make sure it does work here," said Engel.

"This is a very complex project, but it has huge implications in terms of making a contribution to the welfare of the city," she says.