One of the Pittsburgh area’s foremost anti-violence projects has had no impact on homicide rates and, in fact, gun crimes and aggravated assaults increased in neighborhoods where the group focused its efforts, says a RAND Corp. study reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. RAND found that the efforts of the group, One Vision One Life, might also shift crime and violence from neighborhoods where the group operates to those where it does not.
“In many respects, they made heroic efforts to intervene in the lives of people threatened by violence and in need of social support,” the report says. “Yet, our evaluation did not find an impact on the level of violence in these Pittsburgh neighborhoods.” The researchers partly blame “the lack of a systematic, coordinated strategy” between police and One Vision, whose work includes behind-the-scenes intervention in brewing street conflicts, programs for at-risk youth and more visible “rapid response” rallies, during which workers take to the streets in the wake of shootings to voice their message of nonviolence. The RAND report is available at this site: http://rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9532