By Edmund F. McGarrell Stephen Oliphant Alaina De Biasi Julie M. Krupa

Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) is a national program that seeks to reduce levels of gun and gang crime, and violent crime generally. The Eastern District of Michigan has participated in PSN since its outset in 2001. Although the Eastern District has included attention to violent crime in multiple communities, Detroit has been a primary target area throughout the years of PSN. PSN is a grant supported program by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice. This report summarizes the implementation and impact of the grant supported program that was funded in fiscal year 2018. During this period, the PSN team focused on Detroit Police Department’s 9th precinct, with targeted enforcement in specific hotspot areas. PSN Detroit relied upon a multi-agency team and followed a comprehensive strategy of targeted enforcement, intervention with at-risk individuals, and youth-focused prevention. The PSN initiative, like law enforcement operations nationally, was significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. This added to the complexity of the evaluation and makes some of our research findings tentative. With this qualification in mind, we find support for the positive impact of PSN. Specifically, following the implementation of PSN in the 9th precinct until the shutdowns associated with the impact of the pandemic in March 2020, the 9th precinct witnessed a decline from 13.6 shooting victimizations per month to 11.9 per month (-12.5%). During this same period, Detroit’s other precincts witnessed a total increase from 63.8 to 72.6 (+13.7%), or an average per precinct increase from 6.3 to 7.3 per month. When examining the specific hotspot areas, we observed a decline of 2.6 shooting victimizations per month in the hotspot zone when compared to a comparison area drawn from parts of the city that did not experience PSN.

These trends were interrupted by the onset of the pandemic, as well as the period of social unrest and protest following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The pandemic had a serious effect in Detroit with the Police Department experiencing significant personnel losses due to illness and quarantine, and the suspension of court operations. As was the case nationally, violent crime increased in Detroit and in the 9th precinct in 2020 and the first half of 2021. In the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, the 9th precinct again witnessed welcome declines in shooting victimizations. These declines were also observed citywide and were particularly noteworthy in the specific PSN target areas within the 9th precinct. The PSN team’s strategy of supporting a focused multi-agency enforcement team, while leveraging comprehensive intervention and place-based strategies appears to have enhanced public safety in Detroit.

Lansing: Michigan Justice Statistics Center, School of Criminal Justice. Michigan State University 2022. 30p.

By Nora Ruth Libertun de Duren

Landlocked in the center of South America, Bolivia experienced rapid urbanization only in recent decades. Its urban population became a majority in the 1990s, almost three decades later than the rest of Latin America’s southern cone. However, the country has made up for lost time since then with a very sharp transition from a rural to an urban society. The 2012 urbanization rate was 6.75 percent, more than four times the average for the rest of the region. Currently, one in three urban residents in Bolivia is a rural migrant who arrived in a city between 2006 and 2011 (Trohanis, Zaengerling, & Sanchez-Reaza, 2015). By 2025, three-quarters of Bolivia’s projected 14 million people will live in cities (UN-DESA, 2012). As in many developing countries, the majority of rural migrants in Bolivia settle in informal neighborhoods in peripheral areas of the country’s largest cities. It is estimated that 45 percent of Bolivia’s urban residents reside in an informal neighborhood (IDB, 2016). The housing units in these neighborhoods often resemble rural dwellings; they are usually self-built, and they are not connected to basic services such as water and sanitation. The neighborhoods frequently have unpaved, fuzzily demarcated, and unlighted roads of diverse widths. Accordingly, property boundaries among residents are blurry and may lead to conflicts among neighbors. Nevertheless, lack of formal titles does not preclude the existence of an active real estate market (Birch et al., 2016). Properties are traded and leased. There is an important income inequality within informal neighborhood residents; those who rent tend to be significantly poorer than those who own property (Talukdar, 2018). Typically, informal neighborhoods residents are more exposed to violence and insecurity, given that police and firemen do not often service these neighborhoods (Perlman, 2010). While there are no official crime statistics in Bolivia for these neighborhoods, residents report a high sense of insecurity (Gamboa, 2014); a phenomenon seen in informal neighborhoods in other countries, too (Parks, 2014). Also, while there are no formal statistics on violence against women, its main risk factors. -family history, early cohabitation, alcohol abuse, and low level of education- (Klugman et al., 2014)- are highly prevalent in informal neighborhoods (McIlwaine, 2013).

World Development Perspectives. Volume 19, September 2020, 100231

By Edmund F. McGarrell Stephen Oliphant Alaina De Biasi Julie M. Krupa

Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) is a national program that seeks to reduce levels of gun and gang crime, and violent crime generally. The Eastern District of Michigan has participated in PSN since its outset in 2001. Although the Eastern District has included attention to violent crime in multiple communities, Detroit has been a primary target area throughout the years of PSN. PSN is a grant supported program by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice. This report summarizes the implementation and impact of the grant supported program that was funded in fiscal year 2018. During this period, the PSN team focused on Detroit Police Department’s 9th precinct, with targeted enforcement in specific hotspot areas. PSN Detroit relied upon a multi-agency team and followed a comprehensive strategy of targeted enforcement, intervention with at-risk individuals, and youth-focused prevention. The PSN initiative, like law enforcement operations nationally, was significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. This added to the complexity of the evaluation and makes some of our research findings tentative. With this qualification in mind, we find support for the positive impact of PSN. Specifically, following the implementation of PSN in the 9th precinct until the shutdowns associated with the impact of the pandemic in March 2020, the 9th precinct witnessed a decline from 13.6 shooting victimizations per month to 11.9 per month (-12.5%). During this same period, Detroit’s other precincts witnessed a total increase from 63.8 to 72.6 (+13.7%), or an average per precinct increase from 6.3 to 7.3 per month. When examining the specific hotspot areas, we observed a decline of 2.6 shooting victimizations per month in the hotspot zone when compared to a comparison area drawn from parts of the city that did not experience PSN.

These trends were interrupted by the onset of the pandemic, as well as the period of social unrest and protest following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The pandemic had a serious effect in Detroit with the Police Department experiencing significant personnel losses due to illness and quarantine, and the suspension of court operations. As was the case nationally, violent crime increased in Detroit and in the 9th precinct in 2020 and the first half of 2021. In the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, the 9th precinct again witnessed welcome declines in shooting victimizations. These declines were also observed citywide and were particularly noteworthy in the specific PSN target areas within the 9th precinct. The PSN team’s strategy of supporting a focused multi-agency enforcement team, while leveraging comprehensive intervention and place-based strategies appears to have enhanced public safety in Detroit.

Lansing: Michigan Justice Statistics Center, School of Criminal Justice. Michigan State University 2022. 30p.