Johns Hopkins faculty member Daniel Webster has seen
Baltimore at its brutal worst. The
associate director for research at the Bloomberg School of
Public Health's Center for the Prevention
of Youth Violence, Webster regularly observes neighborhoods
where guns are used to settle disputes
and homicides occur monthly.
An optimist, Webster envisions a day when inner-city
gun violence is significantly more rare. He
sees hope in a new city-run program that he has spent the
past several years examining.
Last week, the Baltimore City Health Department
released an independent evaluation of Safe
Streets — a violence prevention program — by
Webster and colleagues at the Center for the Prevention
of Youth Violence. The Johns Hopkins team found many
positive signs.
In 2007, Safe Streets was implemented by the Health
Department and the Living Classrooms
Foundation in two high-crime neighborhoods in East
Baltimore, McElderry Park and Ellwood Park, and
by the Health Department and Communities to Improve Lives
in Southwest Baltimore's Union Square.
Safe Streets is modeled after the successful program
CeaseFire Chicago, which was developed
by Gary Slutkin, a professor at the University of Illinois'
School of Public Health. In designing
Ceasefire, Slutkin used some of the same methods he had
applied during his time in Africa working on
AIDS prevention.
The program has five core components: the use of
surveillance data to identify communities
with high rates of youth gun violence, development of a
community coalition (clergy, engaged
residents, city agencies, etc.), a visible campaign of
nontolerance to gun violence, direct outreach to
high-risk youth, and conflict intervention and
mediation.
In sum, Webster said that Safe Streets is about
changing behavior.
"This is a concerted effort to change the norms of
what is acceptable," said Webster, an
associate professor in the school's Health and Public
Policy Division and also co-director of the Center
for Gun Policy and Research. "Those involved with the
program try to bring the community together in
a variety of public forums such as cookouts, concerts and
community fairs: venues where they can get
out the message. And, if there is a fatal shooting, the
community will march together at the site of
the event to make it known to all that this is not OK and
will not be tolerated."
He said the key component is outreach. The program's
leadership recruits outreach workers,
such as former gang members, who can gain the trust of the
high-risk population and offer
alternatives to violence.
"I think it's fair to say that the people the program
tries to reach fully recognize the dangers
of what they are doing, and that they would like a safer
life," he said. "I think Safe Streets offers
some alternatives and solutions so that they can figure out
how to relate to people — and not die in the
process."
Webster and his colleagues Jon Vernick and Jennifer
Mendel conducted the interim evaluation
through on-street surveys, analysis of crime trends over a
six-year period and interviews with key
players.
The team sought to estimate the program's effects on
attitudes supportive of using guns to
settle disputes among the target group (males ages 18 to
24) and to gauge the impact on homicides
and nonfatal shootings in the three neighborhoods.
In McElderry Park, an extensive outreach effort was
put into action. Program staff conducted
hundreds of monthly contacts with high-risk "clients" and
engaged in 53 mediations of potentially
lethal disputes during its initial 15 months of
implementation. Despite crime trends that, if not
interrupted, would have predicted four homicides in
McElderry Park over the period of the
intervention, there was not a single one during the time
studied.
In addition to eliminating homicides in McElderry
Park, Safe Streets implementation was
associated with significant reductions in homicides of
victims under 30 years old in areas bordering
Ellwood Park.
Overall, the report found that young men in the
neighborhoods where Safe Streets was
implemented were much less likely to hold attitudes
supportive of using guns to resolve disputes than
were those in two neighborhoods that had not implemented
the program.
Webster said that the analysis did have several
limitations, including that it could not fully
adjust for other factors that can increase or decrease gun
violence, such as new police activities or
disputes involving rival gangs.
In his summary report to Joshua M. Sharfstein,
Baltimore's health commissioner, Webster said
that the overall compelling evidence validated the
continuation of the Safe Streets program and the
search for ways to increase its effectiveness.
The Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence will
continue to evaluate the program, which
was recently expanded to the Cherry Hill neighborhood,
throughout 2009.
Safe Streets is supported by city funding and
contributions from the Greater Baltimore
Committee; the Abell, Goldseker, Annie E. Casey, Crane
Family, Leidy and T. Rowe Price foundations;
the Krieger Fund; and private citizens of Baltimore.
Webster has been a core faculty member at the School
of Public Health since 1992. He has
published articles on firearm policy, youth gun acquisition
and carrying, the prevention of gun violence,
intimate partner violence and adolescent violence
prevention. He has studied the effects of a variety
of violence prevention interventions including state
firearm policies, community programs to change
social norms concerning violence, public education and
advocacy campaigns.
Recently, Webster has led an evaluation of Operation
Safe Kids, a youth violence prevention
program that provides community-based case management and
monitoring to juvenile offenders who
are at high risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of
violence. Through the program, Baltimore City
Health Department staff work closely with Department of
Juvenile Services case managers and other
state and city agencies to reduce youth violence in the
city by ensuring these young people have the
tools they need to become productive adults.
Each child is assigned a youth worker who becomes a
presence in his or her life and coordinates
a treatment service plan in order to meet each youth's
needs; a clinical coordinator helps to develop a
treatment plan that involves the family.
Webster evaluated the effects of the program last year
and will submit a final report this
spring.
"We found some encouraging things, notably that it
lowered the probability of violence," he said.
"But we need a little more data and time to be certain."
Webster views his role as someone who can lend
credibility to effective programs like Safe
Streets and Operation Safe Kids and then help spread the
word.
"When you can identify what works, that word spreads
throughout the country to other places
that have the need to implement these types of programs,"
he said. "We want to reduce gun violence,
period. Not just in Baltimore."
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