Community violence intervention: measuring risk & protective factors for gun use among program participants

Community Violence Intervention (CVI) involves recruiting likely gun violence offenders using street outreach and offering mentorship, social services and other supports to discourage future firearm violence. Grounded in public health, CVI interventions identify an individual’s risk factors and work to enhance protective and buffering factors that can help prevent a client from offending. This paper reviews evaluations of CVI interventions to understand how participants’ risk factors are defined and measured. We used keywords to identify 38 published evaluations of 32 different CVI interventions that recruited community members and used street-outreach as the primary mode of engagement. We then used the PRISMA scoping review methodology to identify categories of risk and protective factors to screen each published evaluation for whether and how they measured participants’ risk, protective and buffering factors at program onset. We found that 56% (18/32) of evaluations included some demographic information about participants and 44% (14/32) provided additional details about their educational or employment status. The criminal justice history was reported in 59% (19/32) and gang or group affiliation in 47% (15/32) of the evaluations we reviewed. The CVI participants’ history related to gun violence was documented in 53% (17/32). Far fewer evaluations documented potential assets, buffering or protective factors of CVI participants: only 16% (5/32) reported on whether any clients were receiving social services at intake and only 6% (2/32) documented any clients’ strengths or protective factors. We also found that no two programs captured the same information about gang, criminal justice, gun violence or social risk factors. Preliminary findings suggest that many CVI programs may not be capturing whether clients face known risk factors for future gun use, and that these programs rarely capture potential protective and buffering factors that might inform program service delivery and potentially enhance the likelihood that interventions will help prevent future gun use. This study aims to support the emerging field of CVI as it works to build evidence that these interventions successfully address the specific needs of urban young people and prevent them from engaging in firearm offending.