NY Times: “When Liz and Louis Robinson’s eldest son, Louis Jr., began to court trouble on the streets of Baton Rouge, La., Ms. Robinson worried that one of the bullets flying through their neighborhood — and occasionally through their windows and walls — would eventually find him. So she gave him an ultimatum.
“I told him, ‘A military man is going to come,’” she remembered. “‘Either you go with him or you get out of my house.’” This was 2008, and Americans were stationed in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. But she figured those places were safer than Baton Rouge.
Louis Jr. took Option A, joining the Army the year after he graduated from high school.
After six years in the service, including one year in Iraq, Louis came home. He took a Coca-Cola warehouse job, became a father to three children and was performing as a rapper under the name Louis BadAzz.
Just shy of his 30th birthday, Louis Jr. was leaving a friend’s house when he was shot dead. He was one of 78 people killed in Baton Rouge in 2018….
As these programs proliferated, however, policymakers had one overriding question: Do they work?…
But money wasn’t flowing to studies of community-based programs like violence interruption. Those studies require taxing, time-consuming design, said Jeffrey A. Butts, a violence researcher and the director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He lays some fault on researchers who prefer the easier work of analyzing police data.
Much of the research that has been done on community prevention programs is not sufficiently rigorous, Dr. Butts argues. He has studied community interventions for decades and supports systemic responses to violence, but criticizes organizations that champion their success without sufficient data. “I see it becoming a faith-based movement,” Dr. Butts said. “There has to be really transparent professional research in order to stand up in public and say this works.” When it comes to community-based interventions, he added, “we are nowhere close to having that.””