Highlights of 2011 - Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern ...

Urban Policy and Community Development
Study, they looked for trends in arrests to determine whether the
1996 welfare reform legislation enacted under the Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program affected the
criminal behavior of current and former recipients. They found
that, when available, employment seems to prevent criminal
behavior, lending some support to the work-first focus of TANF.
However, they found that the loss of income (whether from
work or welfare), coupled with human capital characteristics,
predicts criminal behavior among female welfare recipients. This
suggests that those with fewer personal resources competing
in the highly unstable lower-reaches of the labor market might
be more likely to turn to crime. It also indicates that for some
individuals, the current welfare system could actually increase
the odds of criminal behavior, rather than decreasing them.
Learning About Police Organizations
describes how urban renewal and self-segregation are reshaping French
in neighborhoods and institutions in France and the United States.
housing projects once stood dropped dramatically—a 60
percent drop in violent crime, 70 percent in gun crime, and 49
percent in property crime. Crime also decreased in the areas
where voucher residents resettled; however, not as much as
predicted had these voucher families stayed where they were.
The researchers cite possible reasons for this, including higher
victimization of relocated young men, disrupted social controls,
and displacement. Overall, the city experienced a crime decline
of 1 percent. While this might look like a tiny number, the takehome
point, Skogan said, is that crime on Chicago Housing
Authority property has never played a huge role in citywide
crime rates. Nowhere in the city is crime as high or as dangerous
now as it was when the public housing projects were standing.
Welfare Reform and Criminal Behavior
In an article in Poverty & Public Policy, IPR social policy professor
Dan Lewis and co-author Lindsay Monte of the U.S. Census
Bureau examine the links between gender, welfare receipt,
financial hardship, and crime. Using data from the Illinois Families
To improve police policies and practices, researchers and
practitioners must work toward a shared understanding of
when and how particular data and research efforts can be used.
With support from the National Institute of Justice, a team of
police executives and leading police researchers that includes
Skogan is developing a new, more productive and efficient way
to learn about policing in the United States. This initiative, called
the National Police Research Platform, is being implemented
in selected jurisdictions around the country. Skogan and his
team have conducted 108 surveys involving more than 12,000
police employees and developed Internet-based procedures
for police surveying, as well as negotiated the cooperation of
many police chiefs in the project. The platform hopes to better
enable law enforcement executives and supervisors to collect
valid, useful data on their own organizations to determine the
best organizational practices, and allow other organizations
to compare their information to benchmarks for agencies of
similar size and type.
Project CeaseFire
Despite 15 years of declining crime, Chicago continues to
be one of the nation’s leading cities for homicide. Project
CeaseFire, a community-based initiative of the Chicago Project
for Violence Prevention, aims to address this issue by reducing
gun and gun-related violence in targeted areas in Chicago and
the state. Skogan and his team recently completed a threeyear,
multisite evaluation of the program’s effectiveness, and he
is currently at work on a book about the study, which will be
published by Oxford University Press. In addition to fieldwork,
interviews, and surveys, the researchers also examined the
program’s impact on shootings and killings through a statistical
analysis of time series data, a network analysis of gang homicide,
and innovative use of computerized crime mapping techniques
that use geographic information systems (GIS). The project was
supported by the National Institute of Justice and the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation.
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