University Times

Pittsburgh’s anti-gang violence initiative has been taking shape recently, aided by Pitt faculty researchers who have been retained to gather and analyze gang-related data.

The Pittsburgh Initiative to Reduce Crime (PIRC) was launched in September 2008 by Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and City Council member Ricky Burgess, and guided by David Kennedy, professor and director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the City University of New York who has led a similar program in Boston.

To support PIRC, Ravenstahl has directed $160,000 in city funds and  council has directed $40,000 in council funds toward the costs of retaining Kennedy and Pitt’s School of Social Work.

John Wallace of social work is the principal investigator and Michael Yonas of Pitt’s School of Medicine is co-principal investigator of the initiative.

The researchers expect to conduct an incident review of homicides in the City of Pittsburgh, 2003-2008; analyze the networks of relationships between street-level groups involved in gun violence in the city; document the design and implementation process of PIRC; evaluate the impact of PIRC on gun-related violence and homicide in the city, and make recommendations on ways to address the problem of violence based on lessons learned from the implementation of PIRC.

Kennedy told city officials that he plans to bring in an experienced team from the University of Cincinnati to aid in the anti-gang effort.

Irving Spergel, George Herbert Jones Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, who discussed the “Spergel Model” for reducing gang-related violence in a lecture here last month, commented, “I heard the city was hiring David Kennedy, so it looks like you’re moving in the right direction.” Spergel added that Kennedy’s gang-intervention program, “Operation Ceasefire: The Boston Gun Project,” had been quite successful in lowering violent crime.

—Peter Hart