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

personal charisma but relies on quality leadership
and management to build a productive team. This
team is the vision-setting, standard-setting core of
the partnership and combines talents to help the
partnership meet the challenges of structure,
strategy, growth, and innovation.
The comprehensive gun violence reduction programs
described in this section incorporate multiple
suppression and prevention strategies to address
risk factors that are associated with violent criminal
behavior, including aggressive behaviors at an early
age, conflicts with authority, gun possession and
carrying, gang membership, substance abuse, depression,
exposure to violence, poor parental supervision,
low academic achievement, truancy,
delinquent peers, drug trafficking, and unemployment.
Rather than targeting one or two risk factors
associated with gun violence, these collaboratives
recognize that their efforts are likely to be more
successful if they incorporate strategies that address
both the supply and demand side of the illegal firearm
market. They have therefore developed comprehensive,
multiple-component programs that
address the identified risk factors in multiple ways.
Such program strategies include targeted police
responses, surveillance of probationers, situational
crime prevention using problem-solving strategies,
parental supervision, peer mediation and conflict
resolution, school-based interventions, community
mobilization, legislation restricting youth access to
guns, and tough sentences for crimes involving firearms.
Because gang membership is associated with
violent behaviors, many of these comprehensive
programs also include intervention strategies to
reduce gang-related violence, including the development
of geographically coded information systems
to track gang violence, restricting gang members’
access to firearms, enhancing prosecution of gang
crimes, and punishing and monitoring offenders.
Lastly, the communities profiled here have incorporated
most of the productive capacity characteristics
in their collaborative structures. They have involved
community residents, law enforcement, and other
public and private agencies in developing a comprehensive
plan and have created a strong collaborative
structure to mobilize and sustain their gun violence
reduction strategies. While these programs may
vary in the degree to which the community is an
integral part of their collaboratives, each of them
has involved the community in assessing its gun
violence problems or in implementing effective violence
reduction strategies.
Notes
1. K. Kumpfer, H.O. Whiteside, A. Wandersman, and E.
Cardenas, Community Readiness for Drug Abuse Prevention:
Issues, Tips, and Tools, Bethesda, MD: National Institute on
Drug Abuse, 1997.
2. S. Greenbaum, “Kids and guns: From playgrounds to
battlegrounds,” Juvenile Justice 3(2):3–11, 1997.
3. D. Sheppard, “Developing community partnerships to
reduce juvenile gun violence,” paper presented at the 50th
Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology,
Washington, DC, 1998.
18 Promising Strategies To Reduce Gun Violence