Preventing Gun Violence in the United States
Danny Torres in conversation with Lori Toscano, Shaun Ali, and Kerwin Henderson
Lori Toscano:
What we felt like was the missing piece of the puzzle was how do we address what’s leading to violence in the first place? Once we have all of this information, we’re able to recognize how systems have negatively impacted individuals and communities, the historic inequities that we’ve seen over time with VPNF. When we’re able to identify those underlying factors, that’s when we can really get to this true systemic change.
Danny Torres:
Welcome to Leading Voices, a podcast brought to you by WestEd, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan research development and service agency. This podcast highlights WestEd’s leading voices, shaping innovations, and applying rigorous research in ways that help reduce opportunity gaps and build communities where all can thrive. I’m Danny Torres. I’ll be your host.
Today, we’re talking with experts from WestEd’s Justice & Prevention team who have developed the Violence Prevention Navigation Framework, also known as VPNF, a WestEd initiative that helps policymakers, leaders, and community members better understand the factors contributing to or preventing violence within their communities, while also promoting safe and equitable futures for children, youth, and adults.
Lori Toscano is the Director of Justice Technical Assistance at WestEd. She is a nationally recognized expert with over 20 years of experience in community-based violence prevention and intervention. Lori, it’s great to have you on the program.
Lori Toscano:
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Danny Torres:
Shaun Ali is a senior research technical assistance specialist with WestEd’s Justice & Prevention team. Currently, he and his team are working on a blueprint for local jurisdictions to prioritize, plan, and evaluate strategies to reduce violence, prevent future violence, and co-create a sustainable system that improves outcomes for communities. Shaun, it’s great to be talking with you today.
Shaun Ali:
Thank you, Danny. Likewise.
Danny Torres:
And Kerwin Henderson. He is also a Senior Justice Technical Assistance Specialist with the Justice & Prevention team. He specializes in technical assistance and violence prevention and reform of justice systems. He has over 10 years of experience addressing critical issues and implementing reforms across the criminal justice system. Kerwin, it’s great to have you on the podcast.
Kerwin Henderson:
Thanks, Danny. It’s great to be here.
Danny Torres:
Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that homicides in the United States have plummeted since the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationally, it looks as though we’re on track to see one of the lowest levels of violent crimes and homicides since the Obama administration. Despite welcome declines in the homicide rates across the United States, estimates indicate that more than 18,000 persons died by homicide in 2023. On June 26th, 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General declared gun violence, a public health crisis. Lori, what can you tell us about WestEd’s Violence Prevention Navigation Framework, also known as VPNF? What was the impetus for developing VPNF and how are you all responding to these trends?
Lori Toscano:
First, I would say it’s amazing that we’re seeing such significant reductions in gun violence throughout the country and I think a lot of that is due to the investments made at the federal level. There’s been more of a significant increase in the dollars committed, in the technical assistance provided, and in recognizing how that scope of work really plays a part in reducing gun violence.
What we felt was a missing piece of this work was really looking at the underlying factors that give rise to or mitigate gun violence in the first place. We really wanted to think about what we can develop on the primary prevention side of things that could result in systemic change within a specific jurisdiction and get to the factors that are playing a part before violence even occurs.
Danny Torres:
All right. Based on your experience and from research from others doing similar work, what are the underlying factors you all focus on that contribute to or prevent gun violence?
Kerwin Henderson:
For VPNF, obviously, if you think about how the federal government, the FBI collects crime, there’s a lot of different categories. There’s a lot of overlap with other types of violent crime, but for VPNF, it’s the drivers of fatal and non-fatal shootings. Within that category of violent crime, if you will, there’s seven different domains.
There’s demographic, social cohesion, public safety, health, education, economic factors, as well as neighborhood dynamics that we’ve basically created buckets to be able to look at holistically, all of these different things that are attributable across the local government, if you will, but then, to look at and drill down from there, to look at even additional factors.
We have 70 that have been identified by research, but the reality is if we go into a city or a county or a state and they have great data infrastructure, there could be more elements there that they may want to be evaluated as well.
Looking at those different factors and then analyzing them in a way that looks at things like transportation, things like education, things like access to healthcare, even something as like mundane, you would think in terms of access, the amount of time someone has to wait to see a therapist or see a psychiatrist or receive medication. Just different factors like that, you can analyze and attribute in some type of way back to gun violence and saying whether it has contributed or are protected against gun violence.
That’s the approach that we’ve taken with VPNF to really dig in and do a deep dive on some of these factors that for… I think historically have been analyzing in a vacuum, but looking at the issue holistically.
Lori Toscano:
I can give an example of that. To Kerwin’s point, if we’re thinking about neighborhood dynamics as a measure for quality of life, one of the sub-measures is parks and recreation access. What’s really interesting about what VPNF does is it doesn’t predetermine if a factor is a risk or a protective factor. In this case, if you have access to parks and recreation, it’s a protective factor. If you don’t, it’s a risk factor.
The way that the machine learning portion of the analysis works is it’s able to show us what level of impact that’s having on a specific area. Then, it’s able to tell us in this specific case, is it a risk factor or is it a protective factor?
Traditionally, folks think about gun violence prevention, probably in the realm of law enforcement solely. When we’re looking at the factors, we can see where they fall across the different agencies, community members, community leaders, who should be involved in those conversations, who should be helping us to dig in a little bit deeper to the point of… With parks and recreations access as the example 10 years ago, were there more?
And it’s showing up as a risk factor now because these parks were closed or abandoned or their equipment wasn’t updated or it’s not being taken care of properly. The only way we can dig in deeper is by having representatives from those areas, whether it’s the Department of Public Works, whether it’s the residents in that specific community. Those are the people that need to be at the table, so that we can dig in deeper and really get a clear understanding of how these factors are showing up.
Shaun Ali:
Danny, I wanted to provide an example from a real life experience in a project like this that VPNF would only bolster. Building off of what Lori talked about, I was working with a fairly large city on a youth violence prevention project. A few neighborhoods in particular, they were seeing high rates of violence from young people. They had all kinds of initiatives going on there trying to understand what really was driving it.
This is an example of talking to residents themselves and finding out what was going on. In this specific instance with this one family, there was a young man who, at a very young age, was just getting in fights and more on the victim side of it. Thankfully, was never seriously injured in a shooting or anything like that, but was just running into all kinds of issues and getting hurt.
As he got older, he was getting involved in violence himself and him and some of his friends were the ones inflicting violence on some of the younger members in their neighborhood. When the city and the state, there were all kinds of different efforts going on; when they started applying these different things, what the missing piece was, was simply talking to the young person and his mother.
It was a single parent household. What the mother ended up describing was that where they lived, it was a public housing neighborhood. This city was designed in the ’50s. What the city planning at the time did was put train tracks that separated the public housing neighborhood from the rest of the city. On their side of the train tracks, the only infrastructure there was a jail. There was no grocery store. There was no public transportation. There were certainly no parks or anything fun for kids to do.
What essentially we found out in just simply talking to the young man and his mother was that he had nothing to do and was just bored. The way his mother described it was because there was no infrastructure there, she had to travel about a mile. She had to walk a mile or a mile and a half to a bus stop on the other side of the train tracks, catch a bus, go into the city, and then get to her job. She did the same thing on the way home.
Being a single parent household, that basically kept her out of the house from seven in the morning until 6:00 p.m. or 7:00 p.m. at night. Particularly in the summer months, which is when we were talking to them, the young man was telling us that him and his friends just had absolutely nothing to do.
There had been a few convenience stores, little grocery stores that had popped up, but that had nothing to do with the residents themselves. It was outsiders coming in simply on a business opportunity. Then, they ended up leaving because they said that kids were stealing from there, or they had gotten robbed a few times and their customers basically stopped coming because of the threat of violence that existed at their store, so then the stores left, so then there was even less than there was before. What the smart cities and the smart local and state leaders do is simply hear from people, because you hear these very obvious things that affect people’s day-to-day life.
Really looking at what is driving this from a human perspective on a day-to-day level, nothing that… I mean, it is research. It’s qualitative research. What VPNF then provides is a quantitative look at existing data that shines the light on these specific domains that Kerwin and Lori mentioned. Then, the second part of our framework is a qualitative information gathering piece from the people closest to the communities, whether those are the agencies and the departments that Lori mentioned, or community residents themselves.
You really get a clear picture. You get pointed in the right direction, so you’re being smart. It’s data-driven, but then you’re also hearing from the people how these community and societal level issues are rearing their heads every day for individual people and families.
Danny Torres:
How do you all work with local and state leaders to improve their violence prevention efforts across systems?
Lori Toscano:
Specifically with the Violence Prevention Navigation Framework, this is giving state and local leaders and community leaders the data that they need to be data-driven and focus on true and meaningful change in this space specifically. I worked historically in local government and we would be tasked with doing a three-year plan, a five-year plan, a 10-year plan for how we were going to be addressing violence.
A lot of that included identifying promising practices or specific programs to implement. While that’s a piece of the puzzle and we’re seeing amazing evidence-based strategies being implemented throughout the country, what we felt like was the missing piece of the puzzle was how do we address what’s leading to violence in the first place? Once we have all of this information, we’re able to recognize how systems have negatively impacted individuals and communities, the historic inequities that we’ve seen overtime with VPNF.
When we’re able to identify those underlying factors, that’s when we can really get to this true systemic change. We’re giving folks the information that they need, so that they can be data-driven, and we’re making sure that all of the individuals that should be playing a role in the space are. What we’re trying to do with that is really think bigger, right? Think more broadly.
It’s not just a mayor’s office or city council members. This is, again, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Housing, the Department of Public Works, the Department of Health, the community faith leaders. This is making sure that everyone at the table has access to the same information and then can be a part of crafting the short, mid, and long-term solutions that will really get to these underlying issues.
Kerwin Henderson:
Yeah. Just to piggyback off that, I think for VPNF is that it helps local leaders move from a place of subjectivity about gun violence in their communities to a place of objectivity, having empirical data to be able to make decisions about how to allocate resources to address the problem, which is gun violence. I think local leaders across all of the domains, whether they’re the local county or state, everyone strives for having more data to make informed decisions.
Shaun Ali:
Just two other points, Danny, on a more macro level. What VPNF does is removes an unnecessary burden from the community to solve these community and societal level problems themselves. The onus is placed correctly back on government officials and state and local leaders who are able to provide the funding and the policy changes that Kerwin and Lori were mentioning.
The other point is that this would just be a start. The quantitative portion of VPNF really just points you in the right direction. The qualitative portion, as we mentioned, brings the people’s perspective to it. Then, with that, you’re able to start doing things, but it is just a start. This has to be continuous process.
Within VPNF, we can actually go back with 20 years worth of data and see how each of these factors has changed over time, which tells you that it’s only going to continue to change. It is not a simple snapshot of one time and everything you do going forward is based off that. It’s a continuous thing.
These factors are all dynamic in nature and has to be treated as that. These are very deep-seated, very human issues that have been caused by things beyond individual people’s control. Starting to change that takes a long time, and you have to be nimble and patient in your approach.
Danny Torres:
You’re working within the community across multiple sectors to make change. How do you all involve and partner with communities across sectors?
Kerwin Henderson:
VPNF is very much for the community. I think historically, the way that we have approached or tried to address gun violence is very much… It’s law enforcement response. Violence happens, law enforcement responds, allocation to law enforcement and things related to law enforcement to address the problem. Right? Gun violence. What ends up happening is that you only get sometimes not even any effect, but at best, moderate effect in terms of reducing gun violence.
With VPNF, again, it’s a holistic approach, right? It’s looking at the community, multiple sectors across the community and thinking about how different elements affects the community or how violence affects the community. Because violence, it doesn’t occur in a vacuum and it can’t be analyzed in a vacuum. It’s a response by the community when violence erupts that it needs to be analyzed, needs to be looked at. Then, also the prevention as well, which is where VPNF fits in, looking at those drivers that are outside of law enforcement to really create systemic, long-term meaningful, impactful change to really increase equity to address gun violence and really just create better futures for individuals.
Where I see VPNF is you have this cycle of gun violence that happens over and over again. Terminologists, researchers ask all the time, “Why is it happening? Why is it occurring?” Trying to figure out, “What are these drivers? What is driving this individual commit crimes?” But it’s really a much larger issue than that. Thinking in that way does a disservice to a lot of the systemic, historic issues that have occurred in a lot of communities that have been primarily victimized, if you will, by gun violence. Those issues have been ignored forever.
Lori Toscano:
The only thing I would add to that is it truly sheds a light on what’s been done to communities historically, and also provides an opportunity to remedy that. When we’re looking at these historic inequities, when we’re looking at communities that have been disproportionately impacted by violence, this data, this process provides individuals and local governments and leaders in this space with the tools to really make these changes, with the tools to partner with community in rebuilding in a way that’s going to promote and encourage the health of all of the communities that are in a specific locality, right?
Not just one neighborhood, not just this specific neighborhood, but identifying what should be done and could be done in every community where we’re able to look at what the specific factors are that are either mitigating or helping to give rise to violence. I don’t think that we’ve had all of that information historically. I think what folks have been doing in the field of violence prevention and intervention for so many years is amazing.
I feel like with this added addition, we could address what’s currently occurring, but now with this information, we can really get to the root of what’s been happening historically and make the kind of change that we really want to see occur.
Danny Torres:
Let’s talk about your data-driven approach and the innovations that VPNF provides. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you’re partnering with other organizations to collect data?
Shaun Ali:
Yeah, Danny. Thanks. We actually do have a partner on this effort. They’re an organization called Muflihun. Muflihun is actually a beautiful Arabic word that means those who cultivate success. Muflihun is really big in the prevention and countering of violent extremism. What they did was… They bring the technology aspect to this. When we were in conversations with them, we quickly realized that there are large data sets. Because of all of the great research done around gun violence and the prevention of it, we had all of this cross sector view of what drove violence in a community. It was identifying where those data sources exist and using their technology to pull it in and make sense of it and be able to put it into practice.
Kerwin Henderson:
What we have done in partnership with Muflihun is basically create a platform that takes all of the available data that’s out there at the local level, analyze it and put it into… I say this all the time. Be able to give leaders the option of clicking and pointing very quickly, being able to look and drill down into neighborhoods or whatever and look at certain things and then make decisions about those things.
It’s very much within, I think the realm of where local government, state government is moving in terms of becoming more data-informed and data-driven, but then also not forgetting that lens of equity as well, which is important. As much as machine learning and AI is very much helping to become more efficient and everything, there’s still this huge issue of equity, specifically when we’re talking about gun violence, but huge issue of equity that still needs to be front and center.
Danny Torres:
I’d like to switch gears a little bit here. Lori, I was just thinking about your team’s work on the Pennsylvania Peace Alliance project. Can you tell us how that work informed the VPNF approach and the work that you’re doing now?
Lori Toscano:
One of the projects that we’re currently working on outside of VPNF is the Pennsylvania Peace Alliance. That’s a project with Pennsylvania’s Commission on Crime and Delinquency, also known as PCCD. We’re providing technical assistance to all of their violence prevention and intervention grantees. It’s approximately 360 organizations and local agencies that are working to prevent violence or to intervene in violence.
I think what’s really cool about that project and how we’ve taken a lot of what we’ve learned from that in the creation of VPNF is, again, folks are still trying to figure out how to access data, what data they should be looking at to help them operationalize their day-to-day work. Thinking about violence intervention, when is violence occurring? What days? What times? In which specific places, so that folks can deploy their credible messengers in a way that makes sense. With VPNF, this is taking it a step further. I would say 20 steps, because it’s coming at it directly from the front end.
I think that a lot of the project, there’s all of these different kind of innovative spaces with machine learning, with data science, and then making sure that we’re including the voice of individuals that are impacted, whether those are community levels, individuals themselves who have been involved in violence, and then the agencies and organizations that have been working to improve quality of life over time for many, many years types of things. But it’s almost like innovating what their role is in this space, in this work.
I can think about talking with folks at the Department of Public Works or the Department of Transportation and people being like, “Wait, what do we have to do with violence prevention?” I think being in community violence intervention work, we’ve always set, “Oh, there’s a role for everyone to play,” but it was a little bit more anecdotal.
We want everyone to be at the table. We want to hear everyone’s voice. We want to make sure that people are playing their part in working to reduce violence. With VPNF, it’s like, “Oh, no. No. No. I can tell you the specific things that you, Department of Transportation that could do, that you, Department of Education could do.”
Then, when I think about that, we’re thinking about what it looks like to do things as a team. Right? Team might not be the right word kind of thing, but this is getting at all of the folks to the table at the same time, sharing the information, digging in deeper, having those difficult conversations, getting the feedback on, “What are the unique strategies that we could employ? How could we use these dollars?”
To the point that I made earlier, this is a time like no other in this space in terms of the dollars that are being allotted to gun violence prevention and intervention. If we could be thinking about beyond the federal dollars and the state dollars that are available, how do we think about our budgets in using dollars that are allotted to these agencies and organizations that have not traditionally been recognized as what they could do to prevent and intervene in violence as well? I think we can be even more out of the box in terms of how we use dollars, how we think about policy and practice, how we think about programming, how we define violence prevention.
Danny Torres:
Okay. Well, we’re coming to the end of our time together. Do you have any last thoughts you’d like to share? How can our listeners find you online to reach out and learn more?
Lori Toscano:
Yeah. I think that’s the biggest thing is this is new. This is novel. We’re looking for like-minded individuals that want to partner with us in this space, that want to test out VPNF and be a part of the co-creation of what direction we take this in. We want to make sure that the end result of VPNF and the VPNF process is actionable recommendations.
In order to do that, we have to have individuals who want to be a part of the process, who really want to play a hands-on role in this work. If there is a jurisdiction, if there’s an individual that’s like, “Oh, this would be amazing in my state, in my city, in my town, in my county,” we would love for them to contact us. For folks that are interested in potentially partnering with us, you can visit WestEd’s Justice & Prevention Research Center at jprc.wested.org, and you can go to the section on violence prevention. You’ll find VPNF there.
Danny Torres:
We’ll put a link to the website in our show notes as well.
Kerwin Henderson:
Yeah. Final thoughts. Data drives decision making. I can’t emphasize the importance of data, having additional data, using data. That’s what VPNF, as I mentioned earlier, is what it provides. I think the way to think about VPNF, and Shaun, Lori, and I have sat down and thought about it, but especially in the justice space, but even in the education space as well. The name of the game now is risk assessment, if you will.
Trying to figure out and create a baseline for everything. What we have is not necessarily a risk assessment, right? We’re not gauging risk, but we’re making an assessment of the community based on data-driven factors, identified factors through research to then increase decision making. I think thinking about VPNF in that way and thinking of it as these are additional data points that a locality will have to then make decisions, form decisions, equitable decisions, that’s the biggest takeaway. Data leading the charge and making the equitable systemic change.
Shaun Ali:
My final thought, Danny, would just be to remind everybody that this work is always about serving people. These are as human of issues as there could be, the solutions must also be very human as well. Governments have the responsibility of public administration. If they are serious about preventing violence, if they’re serious about serving people, then you have to be intentional in what you do. You have to be thorough. You have to be consistent, and you have to always put the needs of your community above all else.
Of course, these are very complex and oftentimes very tragic issues, very deep-seated issues, but if you have that sincerity and you have the consistency and you are always putting the people that you’re serving first, then you really can make a change.
Danny Torres:
Well, thank you, Lori, Shaun, and Kerwin for being on the program. Thank you to all our listeners for joining us today. You can find this and past episodes of the Leading Voices podcast online at www.wested.org/leadingvoicespodcast or on Apple Podcast, YouTube Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and Spotify.
This podcast is brought to you by WestEd, a national nonprofit, non-partisan research development and service agency. At WestEd, we believe that learning changes lives. Every day, we partner with schools and communities across the country to improve outcomes for youth and adults of all ages. Today’s episode focused on one really important facet of the work that we do at WestEd, and I encourage you to visit us at www.wested.org to learn more. Special thanks to Grace Westermann for her collaboration on this episode, and to Sanjay Pardanani, our audio producer.
Thank you for joining us. Until next time.