City of New Haven BJA Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative

Through the PRESS Forward initiative, the City of New Haven will build on the early success of its PRESS initiative to create a responsive Violence Reduction Working Group, develop a CVI strategic plan, address gaps in New Haven’s current community violence intervention landscape, develop a coordinated data collection and sharing system, and ensure continual program development. The target population of our interventions are young adults ages 18–34 who are high risk due to their involvement in gun-related offenses, gang and group connections, and/or being a victim of violence as well as their immediate social networks.

PRESS Forward efforts will be focused on the nine New Haven neighborhoods where gun violence is concentrated: Newhallville, Dixwell, the Hill, West River, Fair Haven, Amity, Dwight, West Rock, and Edgewood. In 2022, these neighborhoods, home to 48 percent of the population and with a 33.4 percent poverty rate, accounted for 83 percent of shooting incidents and 72 percent of violent crimes. The violent crime rate in these neighborhoods (981 per 100,000 population) was on average 1.5 and 6.3 times the City and state rates, respectively.

PRESS Forward will focus on advancing racial equity by expanding access to services and opportunities for historically underserved and marginalized communities by directly engaging members of those communities in program design, partnering with researchers focused on systemic inequities, and focusing on neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty and historical disinvestment. The City of New Haven has secured letters of support or memoranda of understanding from 42 partners and has submitted a preliminary list of working group members. PRESS Forward’s action research partner, the University of New Haven, is submitting a distinct evaluation proposal to the NIJ under the CVIPI Research, Evaluation, and Associated TTA Support Program. The City and PRESS Forward’s focus neighborhoods have experienced high and increasing violence in recent years. In 2022, the gun incident rate in focus neighborhoods (162 per 100,000) was up 71 percent from 2018 and was 1.7 times the City rate.