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

Profile No. 1 (continued)
arsenal. CLC also provided legal assistance
with organizational development
issues such as drafting bylaws and articles
of incorporation.
❖ Capacity to address physical problems
and to provide communitybased
alternatives to incarceration.
Small-scale, physical improvements to
a neighborhood—for example, turning
a local dumping ground into a community
garden in the course of a weekend—are
enormously important to
communities in crisis. In addition to
adding to the area’s visible community
assets, these incremental neighborhood
improvements increase community
spirit and build support for future residential
action. Recovering addicts and
other nonviolent ex-offenders can become
important resources for this effort,
performing community service as members
of work crews that build communities
ravaged by the kinds of activities
in which they were once engaged.
❖ Other support services. Each CCP
site has developed additional programs
and services that are considered necessary
to the success of the initiative. For
example, four sites have worked with
the Alternative Sentencing Unit to
establish formal and informal systems
to support recovering addicts. Other
CCP sites have tried to secure additional
resources for youth and have
either established links with existing
agencies or developed afterschool and
summer programs of their own. Faith
organizations like the Union Methodist
Memorial Church also have been active
in some CCP areas, providing
meeting space, transportation, and
support services for recovering substance
abusers.
By the end of 1996, dramatic decreases in
crime were being reported in CCP areas. In
Boyd Booth, the pilot site, violent crimes
were reduced by more than 50 percent between
1993 and 1996. There also was evidence
of increased law enforcement activity: the
number of arrests doubled or tripled in many
core communities during that same period.
HotSpot Communities
In March 1997, in large part because of the
success of the CCP effort, the Governor of
Maryland launched the HotSpot Communities
(HSC) Initiative as the next generation
of community-based crime prevention. HSC
incorporated all the main features of CCP
and added several others. HSC sites had to
include the following core elements:
◆ Community mobilization.
◆ Community policing.
◆ Community probation (including intensive
supervision of adult and juvenile
probationers and parolees through Operation
Spotlight).
◆ Community maintenance (use of city code
enforcement, offender work crews, civil
legal remedies, and rapid response to
“broken windows”).
◆ Youth prevention (afterschool programs,
truancy and curfew enforcement, partnerships
with schools and law-enforcement
agencies).
◆ Local coordination of the Baltimore CCP/
HSC program by The Mayor’s Coordinating
Council on Criminal Justice.
In addition, HSC areas could adopt six enhancing
elements: community prosecution,
juvenile intervention, CPTED measures,
victim outreach and assistance, community
support for addiction recovery, or housing
and business revitalization.
22 Promising Strategies To Reduce Gun Violence