Criminal Justice Interventions
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Policing and sentencing interventions have had recent broad bipartisan
support and are a major focus of current efforts to reduce firearms violence.
These policies generally do not affect the ability of law-abiding citizens to
keep guns for recreation or self-defense, and they have the potential to
reduce gun violence by deterring or incapacitating violent offenders. Descriptive
accounts suggest that some of these policies may have had dramatic
crime-reducing effects: homicide rates fell dramatically after the implementation
of Boston’s targeted policing program, Operation Ceasefire, and
Richmond’s sentencing enhancement program, Project Exile.
Despite these apparent associations between crime and policing policy,
however, the available research evidence on the effects of policing and
sentencing enhancements on firearm crime is limited and mixed. Some
sentencing enhancement policies appear to have modest crime-reducing
effects, while the effects of others appear to be negligible. The limited
evidence on Project Exile suggests that it has had almost no effect on
homicide. Several city-based quasi-random interventions provide favorable
evidence on the effectiveness of targeted place-based gun and crime suppression
patrols, but this evidence is both application-specific and difficult
to disentangle. Evidence on Operation Ceasefire, perhaps the most frequently
cited of all targeted policing efforts to reduce firearms violence, is
limited by the fact that it is a single case at a specific time and location.
Scientific support for the effectiveness of the Boston Gun Project and most
other similar types of targeted policing programs is still evolving.
The lack of research on these potentially important kinds of policies is
an important shortcoming in the body of knowledge on firearms injury
interventions. These programs are widely viewed as effective, but in fact
knowledge of whether and how they reduce crime is limited. Without a
stronger research base, policy makers considering adoption of similar programs
in other settings must make decisions without knowing the true
benefits and costs of these policing and sentencing interventions.
The committee recommends that a sustained, systematic research program
be conducted to assess the effect of targeted policing and sentencing
aimed at firearms offenders. Additional insights may be gained from using
observational data from different applications, especially if combined with
more thoughtful behavioral models of policing and crime. City-level studies
on the effect of sentencing enhancement policies need to engage more rigorous
methods, such as pooled time-series cross-sectional studies that allow
the detection of short-term impacts while controlling for variation in violence
levels across different areas as well as different times. Another important
means of assessing the impact of these types of targeted policing and
sentencing interventions would be to conduct randomized experiments to
disentangle the effects of the various levers, as well as to more generally
assess the effectiveness of these targeted policing programs.