Promising Strategies To Reduce Gun Violence - Office of Juvenile ...

◆ Are there unintended negative consequences of
the selected programs or strategies
◆ What adjustments need to be made
Communities should anticipate problems (barriers,
unintended consequences, unforeseen changes, need
for adjustments) and view them as opportunities for
collaborative resolution.
Evaluate the plan
Evaluation is a critical component of a comprehensive
gun violence reduction plan. It serves several
purposes:
◆ Increases the effectiveness of management and
administration of the plan.
◆ Documents that objectives have or have not been
met.
◆ Determines the overall efficacy of the plan and its
component programs and strategies.
Conducting an evaluation or a series of evaluations
helps to ensure accountability, establishes whether
the plan is making a difference, and provides important
feedback for improving the plan.
Revise the plan on the basis of
the evaluation
A well-designed evaluation yields vital information.
Evaluation results may suggest that changes should
be made in the selection or implementation of programs
and strategies, that additional training is
warranted, or that other stakeholders need to be
involved. Recommendations for improvement may
come from the original partnership of stakeholders
or from individual stakeholder groups. Assessments
by the stakeholder partnership and by individual
stakeholders will reveal which activities were most
and least effective, which materials worked best and
worst, and how barriers were overcome or proved
insurmountable. If a community administers a comprehensive
gun violence reduction plan for a substantial
period of time with little or no progress
toward identified objectives, an entirely new plan
may need to be implemented.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Anti-Violent
Crime Initiative (AVCI)—introduced in 1994—
serves as one valuable model of the strategic
planning process. To implement the AVCI, every
U.S. Attorney met with all pertinent Federal,
State, and local law enforcement agencies and
formed a new, or newly strengthened, violent
crime working group. These working groups
identified and prioritized the critical violent
crime problems that are susceptible to a
coordinated Federal/State/local approach.
They also developed short- and long-range
objectives and implemented programs and
strategies to address the relevant local crime
problems. More information is available from
your local U.S. Attorney’s office.
Section II: Solving the Problem of Gun Violence 13