The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

Declines also occurred for total arrests and property arrests, but increased for total violencearrests and serious violence arrests.The differences for the below-average (third quartile) and least-frequent (fourth quartile)offenders were generally smaller. In five out of the nine kinds of offenses and arrests, there was adecline in both of these offender quartiles. There was an increase in violence offenses andserious violence offenses (all statistically non-significant) for the third and fourth quartileoffenders. In general, an increase in offenses, when it occurred, came from a small base of theleast offending (fourth quartile) group. There were no property arrests for the least frequent(fourth quartile) offenders at Time I or Time III (Table 10.5). A statistical regression effectgenerally appeared to characterize differences for many of these types and categories ofoffenders, yet there was a distinct and substantial reduction for self-reported total offenses for alltypes of program youth, which we will address more systematically, using police data andcomparison groups, in Chapter 11.Violent Offender Types. Our major concern in the Project was the reduction of violence,particularly the reduction of the level of violence for the frequent, or hardcore, offenders in theprogram. We originally expected that hardcore violent offender types in the program woulddecrease their levels of offending, while relatively less violent or less seriously-violent types ofoffenders would increase their levels of offending somewhat.Again, to test this regression effect, we divided our sample into quartiles and classifiedviolent offenders into four categories: those youth who committed the most, above-average,below-average, and the least number of violent offenses. Changes in mean frequency ofoffenses/arrests by the four kinds of violent offenders were compared across the range of minor-10.8