For the sixth straight year, Baltimore has surpassed 300 homicides, most of them shooting deaths. For a city of 600,000 people, that’s an “off-the-charts level of violence,” says Jeremy Biddle, a senior advisor on gun violence prevention in the Baltimore Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.
In an effort to quell the city’s rampant gun violence, the Center on Crime and Criminal Resilience (CCR) at Northeastern has partnered with the City of Baltimore on a crime prevention program that will strive to reduce gang violence.
The Group Violence Reduction Strategy project is rooted in a set of strategies broadly referred to as “focused deterrence,” a crime prevention system designed to stop violence through social services, community-based actions, and very narrowly-targeted law enforcement. The team plans to pursue this blend of different strategie, says Anthony Braga, Elmer V. H. and Eileen M. Brooks distinguished professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern, who is leading the project along with Ben Struhl, the executive director of CCR.
