On June 2, Arnold Ventures issued a research agenda and an RFP focused on violence reduction, including gun violence, citing an increase in violent crimes and incidents over the past two years across U.S. cities “regardless of their size, geographic location, or political leanings.”

Jocelyn Fontaine is Arnold Ventures’ vice president of criminal justice research; she previously served a senior researcher in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she directed projects focused on corrections and reentry issues, gun violence, violence reduction programs, and police-community trust-building efforts. Anita Ravishankar is director of criminal justice research; she was a founding member of The Lab @ DC and the research and innovation team within the DC Metropolitan Police Department.

Philanthropy News Digest asked Fontaine and Ravishankar about the rise in gun violence, the priorities of the new research agenda and RFP, how violence reduction intersects with racial justice, and the role of philanthropy in driving solutions.

Philanthropy News Digest: Presumably the development of this research agenda and RFP on solutions for reducing violence was under way well before the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. What do you see as the main causes of the surge in violent crimes and incidents nationwide—many of which have targeted specific populations for their race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity, or other marginalized identities?

Anita Ravishankar: Gun violence has long been at unacceptably high levels in the United States. The nearly 30 percent nationwide increase in homicides in 2020, on the heels of massive social disruptions due to the pandemic, brought that reality into sharp relief. As we noted in our materials, the increase in violence was widespread, affecting communities regardless of their size, location, political leadership, or policy environment.

The research to date falls short of telling us what causes violence to emerge, to rise and fall. Explanations for the root causes of violence range widely, from the population age distribution, to employment rates, to the size of police forces, to even the legal status of abortion. In terms of causes for the most recent spike in violence, experts and scholars have advanced a variety of hypotheses, including the increase in firearm sales and guns available on the street, increases in incidents of domestic violence and interpersonal violence, the destabilizing effects of the pandemic and the resulting economic challenges that had a significant impact on marginalized and vulnerable populations, and the ongoing legitimacy crisis in policing and criminal justice that sharpened following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent widespread calls for racial justice in 2020.

But we do not have precise explanations, which is unsatisfying and hinders policy makers’ ability to address violence. So through this research agenda we are prioritizing studies that can help us understand both the immediate causes of violence—e.g., how do we understand what the particular problem of violence is in a given jurisdiction and respond in the near term—as well as the underlying or root causes of violence that require longer-term and more holistic strategies or solutions to address. Our work focuses on the people and places most at risk of involvement in violence, as perpetrators of violence and victims of violence, which has not changed much over time, and understanding what works to support police solutions.

PND: The research agenda comprises three pillars: address immediate crises of violence, identify and address the underlying causes of violence, and promote effective police investigations to solve violent crime. Did the most recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde shift or sharpen your priorities for the research agenda in any way?

AR: Arnold Ventures has been making substantial investments to understand the efficacy of different gun policies and different violence reduction strategies for several years. The notable increase in community violence over the past few years made clear the need to increase our research efforts to match the urgency of the moment in needing answers on effective solutions, spurring our research agenda and RFP. The events in Buffalo and Uvalde are absolutely heart-wrenching, leading so many of us to want our elected leaders to “do something, anything” to prevent these tragedies from happening. Those leaders will need to understand what policies and practices are effective, however, and building the evidence is a critical contribution to ensuring that decision makers do have high-quality information to navigate these challenges. Identifying evidence-based policy solutions has been and continues to be a key driver of our research investments, across all of our areas of work.

PND: The announcement notes that “[t]he distribution of these violent incidents remains predominantly concentrated in communities that have been subject to chronic underinvestment”—which would suggest that violence reduction is a racial and social justice issue. How do you see the intersectionality of those issues?

Jocelyn Fontaine: Homicide remains the #1 cause of death for young Black men, and the second leading cause of death for young Hispanic men. These statistics are sobering and unacceptable. We must develop effective tools and responses—including policies, interventions, and resources–to address the problem of high levels of violence effectively to save lives and reduce victimization and harm. Yes, violence reduction is an issue of racial equity. Several studies have found that the majority of crimes often occur in a small number of specific streets or blocks and those trends are largely stable over time. Further, Black and Brown people are significantly more likely than white people to be victims of serious violence and homicide. As violent crime is concentrated in economically disadvantaged Black and Brown neighborhoods, which have been historically underserved and marginalized and where residents have a relationship with the police and the justice system that has been defined through a history of marginalization, oppression, surveillance, coercion, and control, effective violence reduction strategies are absolutely consistent with efforts to advance racial equity.

Our research agenda and our RFP also underscore that safety is not just the simple absence of violent crime, as measured through official crime rates. Focusing on the absence of violent crime only is too narrow and an incomplete view of safety, that reinforces a system of crime control and justice responses that is too punitive in its orientation and fails to focus on what is key to sustained reductions in crime, community safety and well-being, and what can be done to prevent violence and crime. We would like to support efforts that take a more holistic, multidimensional approach to the work of violence reduction, focusing not only on reducing violent crime but also on building community safety and advancing community well-being.

Drawing on the expertise of researchers and practitioners—and our own work in this space—we think of community safety as freedom from personal victimization and government overreach and coercive control; secure and equitable access to stable housing and schools, food, mental and physical health resources, employment opportunities, and the presence of community spaces to facilitate and strengthen social ties and bonds; and the opportunity to cultivate community ownership and voice.

Beyond a normative value of this broader view of safety, a more holistic view of safety has important practical benefit in informing the goals and objectives of policies and programs as well as the metrics used to assess whether violence reduction or safety efforts are successful and saving and improving lives. As reflected in the outcomes of interest in our research agenda and RFP, we are not only interested in whether a given intervention reduces crime—as measured by crime rates—but we also want to actively measure the presence of positive indicators of safety and well-being, such as employment, housing, and health, for example. This shift in focus translates into a pursuit of interventions, policies, practices, and models that not only reduce crime, but also foster and sustain the conditions that prevent it in the long term.

PND: The RFP for the first research pillar aims to build an evidence base about how promising community-led programs work—with a focus on street research/violence, Hospital-based Violence Intervention Programs (HVIPs), therapeutic supports to families, youth cognitive behavioral therapy and summer employment, focused deterrence, and improving the physical environment. How soon do you envision that evidence base influencing funding in support of successful programs and making an impact on the ground?

JF: The opportunity to learn is tremendous. With the influx of federal resources spurring innovation around the country, we are deeply interested in building the evidence base, not only on the core question of whether an intervention “worked”: chiefly, did it produce measurable reductions in violence and advance community safety–but also understand the “how”: How was that intervention designed, implemented, staffed, and resourced and what types of intervention components are related to positive outcomes and measurable impact? Through support for formative and process evaluations in conjunction with impact evaluations, we are eager to systematically document how different jurisdictions are approaching the challenge of reducing violence and disseminate those lessons, both within our grantee network as well as to the broader field of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to inform effective solutions to violence and make an impact in communities across the country.

PND: After every mass shooting, there are calls for stricter gun control measures, yet such legislation almost never gets passed in the end. What do you see as the role of philanthropy in driving solutions to gun violence?

AR: Philanthropy can be a catalyst as well as a complementary partner. For example, in the absence of federal funding for gun policy research, a number of philanthropies, ourselves included, stepped in to start addressing this gap to support studies on key policy-relevant research questions. And now, as decision makers are seeking the best solutions to address violence in their communities, we hope to build on these calls and the calls for reform and evidence-base change, with support for evaluations that can help document the efforts taking place and assess what approaches are most effective, to build that evidence base for policy impact. In the particular case of this RFP, we know that the National Institute of Justice is also soliciting proposals for evaluation studies of violence reduction programs. We hope our funding efforts will complement and expand support for this violence reduction efforts and help to meet this moment to translate a learning opportunity into findings that can be used to save lives and inform the field’s violence reduction efforts for years to come.

—Kyoko Uchida

(Photo credit: Todd Spoth)