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August 1995

National Institute of Justice

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs


Violence by Young People:Why the Deadly Nexus?

Controlling Crime Before It Happens:Risk-Focused Prevention

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The Latest Criminal JusticeVideotape Series From NIJ:Research in Progress

Individual titles are available for only $19 in the United States and $24 in Canada and othercounties. To order from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, see the inside backcover for ways to contact NCJRS.

Institute: Intervening with High-Risk Youth: Prelimi-nary Findings from the Children-at-Risk Program.

NCJ 153271—Marvin Wolfgang, Ph.D., Direc-tor, Legal Studies and Criminology, University ofPennsylvania: Crime in a Birth Cohort: A Replicationin the People’s Republic of China.

NCJ 153730—Lawrence W. Sherman, Ph.D.,Chief Criminologist, Indianapolis Police Depart-ment, Professor of Criminology, University ofMaryland: Reducing Gun Violence: Community Polic-ing Against Gun Crime.

NCJ 153272—Cathy Spatz Widom, Ph.D., Pro-fessor, School of Criminal Justice, State Univer-sity of New York—Albany: The Cycle of ViolenceRevisited Six Years Later.

NCJ 153273—Wesley Skogan, Ph.D., Professor,Political Science and Urban Affairs, NorthwesternUniversity: Community Policing in Chicago: Fact orFiction?

NCJ 153850—Scott H. Decker, Ph.D., Professorand Chair, Department of Criminal Justice andCriminology, University of Missouri–St. Louis,and Susan Pennell, Director, Criminal JusticeResearch Unit, San Diego Association of Govern-ments: Monitoring the Illegal Firearms Market.

NCJ 152235—Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D., J. ErikJonsson University Professor of Urban Systemsand Operations Research, H. John Heinz IIISchool of Public Policy Management, CarnegieMellon University: Youth Violence, Guns, and IllicitDrug Markets.

NCJ 152236—Peter W. Greenwood, Ph.D.,Director, Criminal Justice Research Program,The RAND Corporation: Three Strikes, You’reOut: Benefits and Costs of California’s New Mandatory-Sentencing Law.

NCJ 152237—Christian Pfeiffer, Ph.D., Directorof the Kriminologisches ForschungsinstitutNiedersachsen: Sentencing Policy and Crime Ratesin Reunified Germany.

NCJ 152238—Arthur L. Kellerman, M.D.,M.P.H., Director of the Center for Injury Control,School of Public Health and Associate Professorin the Division of Emergency Medicine, Schoolof Medicine, Emory University: Understandingand Preventing Violence: A Public Health Perspective.

NCJ 152692—James Inciardi, Ph.D., Director,Drug and Alcohol Center, University of Dela-ware: A Corrections-Based Continuum of EffectiveDrug Abuse Treatment.

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Learn about the latest developments in criminal justice research fromprominent criminal justice experts.

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The first 11 tapes in the series are now available in VHS format:

August 1995 1

ContentsIssue No. 229

FEATUREViolence by Young People:

Why the Deadly Nexus?2

Research in ActionControlling Crime Before It Happens:

Risk-Focused Prevention10

Partnerships Against Violence: Reducing YouthViolence Through Information Sharing

19

The Anatomy of Fraud: Reportof a Nationwide Survey

28

Technology Transfer From Defense:Concealed Weapon Detection

35

The CALEA Standards: What Is theFit With Community Policing?

39

This issue of the National Institute ofJustice Journal highlights an issue ofgrave concern—youth violence. Anindepth analysis by noted criminologistAlfred Blumstein links the rise of gun-related homicide by juveniles to drugmarkets and the spread of guns intothe community. On a hopeful note, weinclude two discussions of responseskeyed to prevention. One applies thepublic health model to propose identify-ing factors that place children at riskfor violence and cultivating protectivefactors. Nationwide many communitiesare creating and others are looking forsimilar, promising approaches. NIJ hasdeveloped an information resource thatmakes it easy to find out what andwhere these are. We present the detailsof this resource, PAVNET, in this issue.

Given the immediacy of the gun vio-lence problem, prevention needs to beaccompanied by stronger enforcement.We discuss NIJ's partnering with themilitary to adapt technologies for de-tecting concealed weapons. We alsoinclude an analysis of whether the na-tional accreditation standards for polic-ing accommodate community policing.This question is particularly importantbecause of the opportunities that com-munity policing offers for prevention.

Much less visible than violent crimebut more extensive in number of vic-tims is fraud in its multiple forms.These crimes do not have the devastat-ing effects of violence but, as the analy-sis presented here makes clear, they aremuch more common than generallyassumed and can mean heavy financiallosses. The study challenges conven-tional wisdom about who is most proneto be victimized and what types offraud are most commonly attempted.

Jeremy TravisDirectorNational Institute of Justice

The National Institute of Justice Journal(previously known as NIJ Reports) is pub-lished by the National Institute of Justice,the research arm of the U.S. Department ofJustice, to announce the Institute’s policy-relevant research results and initiatives.The Attorney General has determined thatpublication of this periodical is necessary inthe transaction of the public business re-quired by law of the Department of Justice.

The National Institute of Justice/NCJRS—the National Criminal Justice Reference Ser-vice—is a centralized national clearinghouseof criminal justice information. Informationfrom the clearinghouse, including announce-ments of publication and information prod-

ucts, is contained in the bimonthly NationalInstitute of Justice Catalog. Registered usersof the National Institute of Justice/NCJRSreceive the National Institute of Justice Jour-nal and National Institute of Justice Catalogfree. To become a registered user, writeNational Institute of Justice/NCJRS UserServices, Box 6000, Rockville, MD 20850,or call 800–851–3420.

The National Institute of Justice is a compo-nent of the Office of Justice Programs, whichalso includes the Bureau of Justice Assist-ance, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office ofJuvenile Justice and Delinquency Preven-tion, and Office for Victims of Crime.

2 National Institute of Justice Journal

by Alfred Blumstein

espite evidence thataggregate rates of crimehave been leveling off oreven declining in the pasttwo decades,1 there contin-ues to be widespread con-cern about the issue on thepart of policymakers andthe public. Indeed, amongall issues, crime may be the

one perceived by Ameri-cans as most pressing.2

When aggregate crimedata are broken down bycertain demographic andother variables, however,the otherwise flat trendshows major distinctions,indicating that the concernis understandable. Al-though gender and raceaccount for much of thedifferences in crime rates,

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age is the variable whose effect hasbeen changing significantly in recentyears. And while many of the nationaltrends have remained strikingly flat,there has been some dramatic changein violent crime committed by youngpeople.

The rise in juvenilecrime

Data gathered from a variety ofsources indicate that after a period ofrelative stability in the rates of juve-nile crime, there was a major turningpoint in about 1985. Then, within thenext seven years, the rate of homicidescommitted by young people, the num-ber of homicides they committedwith guns, and the arrest rate of non-white juveniles for drug offenses alldoubled. The sudden upward surge inall three of these indicators, beginningwith the increased drug traffickingof the mid-1980’s, is the topic of thisarticle.

Particularly relevant to future crime,and to consideration of prevention andintervention strategies, is the size ofthe current teenage population. Theage cohort responsible for much ofthe recent youth violence is the small-est it has been in recent years. Bycontrast, the cohort of children ages5 to 15, who will be moving into thecrime-prone ages in the near future,is larger. This suggests that if currentage-specific rates do not decline, plan-ning needs to begin now to addressthe increase in crime likely to occuras this group grows older.

The age factor

That young people commit crime ata high rate is no revelation. Age isso fundamental to crime rates that itsrelationship to offending is usuallydesignated as the “age-crime curve.”This curve, which for individuals

typically peaks in the late teen years,highlights the tendency for crime tobe committed during an offender’syounger years and to decline as ageadvances.

For example, figures on rates ofrobbery and burglary, broken downby age, indicate that for both thesecrimes, the peak age of offending hasbeen about 17, after which there isa rapid decline as the offender getsolder. For burglary, the rate falls tohalf the peak by age 21, whereasthe falloff for robbery is somewhatslower, reaching half the peak rateby age 25. The age-specific patternsare about the same for the most re-cent year data are available (1992)as they were in 1985.

Young people and murder. The age-specific patterns for murder presentquite a different pattern; the trends forthis crime have changed appreciablyin the past decade. First, the peak ismuch flatter. For a fairly long pe-riod—1965 to 1985—the age at whichthe murder rate was highest remainedfairly stable, with a flat peak coveringages 18 to 24. In other words, duringthis 20-year period, people in this agegroup were the most likely to commitmurder, and it was in the age group ofthe mid-30’s that the rate dropped tohalf the peak. Then, in 1985, an abruptchange began to take place, with themurder rate moving to a sharp peak atage 18 instead of the more traditionalflat peak covering the entire 18-to-24age group. (See figure 1.)

The change over time in the age-specific murder rate is striking, espe-cially for the peak ages 18 to 24.(See figure 2.) Following an initialincrease from 1965 to 1970, the rateremained stable (and about the samefor all ages in this group) for about15 years—from 1970 through 1985.Among people at the older end of thisage spectrum—the 24-year-olds—

there has been no strong trend since1970. But beginning shortly around1985, murder by people under 24 in-creased, with the rate of increase in-versely related to age. For people age18, the increase was dramatic—itmore than doubled.

For people at all ages under age 18,the increase was equally dramatic—ittoo more than doubled. For 16-year-olds, for example, whose murder ratebefore 1985 was consistently abouthalf that of the 18-to-24 peak rate, theincrease between 1985 and 1992 was138 percent. By contrast, for agesolder than 24, there has been nogrowth, and even a decline for ages30 and above.

“Excess” murders committed byyoung people. The increase in murderby very young people after 1985 hasnot at all been matched by increasesamong the older groups (ages 24 andover). Among them murder rates haveeven declined. Thus, much of the gen-eral increase in the aggregate homi-cide rate (accounting for all ages) inthe late 1980’s is attributable to thespurt in the murder rate by youngpeople that began in 1985.

One can calculate the “excess” mur-ders attributable to the rise in murderby young people over and above theaverage rate that prevailed for each ofthe young ages in the period 1970–85.In other words, this figure representsthe number of murders that would nothave been committed had the youthmurder rate remained at its earlier,flat average. For the eight ages, 15through 22, in the 7 years of 1986through 1992, the number of “excess”murders is estimated to be 18,600.The number is a significant compo-nent of the overall number for thatperiod; it accounts for 12.1 percentof the annual average of about 22,000murders in those years.


Race

There are important race differencesin involvement in murder, both in therate itself and the change since 1985.Among African-American males ages14 to 17, murder rates have been aboutfour to five times higher than amongwhite males of the same age group,although for both groups the rates hadremained fairly stable from the mid-1970’s until the mid-1980’s. (See fig-ure 3.) Then, beginning about 1985,the rates rose for both groups, thoughthe growth rate was much fasteramong blacks. For white males in thisage group, their annual rate for murderwas 8.1 per 100,000 in the period1976 to 1987, after which it almostdoubled in the next four years (from7.6 in 1987 to 13.6 in 1991). In thosefour years, the arrest rate for murderby black males in this age group roseeven faster, more than doubling (from50.4 to 111.8 per 100,000).

Factors generating fear

Strangers. Persistent fear of crime isnot caused by reviewing the aggregaterate of homicide and noting the ab-sence of a trend. Rather, distinctiveincidents or changing patterns ofcrime stimulate the anxiety levels. Inparticular, because young people aregenerally perceived to be more reck-less than their elders, the growth inyouth homicide conveys a sense thattheir killing is random. This is con-firmed by the greater extent to whichhomicide by the young is committedagainst strangers. When victims seemto be selected at random, vulnerabilityis heightened: anyone can be a target.For example, the FBI’s SupplementaryHomicide Report for 1991 noted that28 percent of the homicides commit-ted by people under 25 were againststrangers, whereas only 18 percent ofthose committed by offenders age 25and above were against strangers.


Source: Age-Specific Arrest Rates and Race-Specific Arrest Rates for SelectedOffenses, 1965–1992, Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Federal Bureau ofInvestigation, Washington, D.C.: December 1993.

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Figure 2.Trends in Age-Specific Murder RateTrends for Individual Peak Ages

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Figure 1. Age-Specific Murder Rate: 1965–1992


August 1995 5

Guns. Also intensifying the fear ofcrime is the increasing involvementof guns in homicides committed byyoung people. This factor generatesfear because of the recognition thatyoung people are less likely to exercisethe restraint necessary to handle dan-gerous weapons, particularly rapid-fireassault weapons. Data on the use ofweapons in homicide reflect the samepatterns described above: after a periodof stability came an abrupt increase inthe mid-1980’s. Thus, from 1976 to1985, a very steady average (59 per-cent) of homicides committed by juve-niles involved a gun. Beginning in1985, there was steady growth in theuse of guns by juveniles in committingmurder, leading to a doubling in thenumber of juvenile murders committedwith guns, with no shift in the numberof non-gun homicides. (See figure 4.)

Juvenile violenceand the drug-crimeconnection

The public also has a vague sense ofa link between the growth in juvenileviolence and drugs. In part, this derivesfrom recognition that, especially in thepast decade, a major factor affectingmany aspects of criminal behavior hasbeen the illicit drug industry and itsconsequences. Beyond the offenses ofdrug sale or drug possession, the drug-crime link has been described as takingseveral forms:

✦ Pharmacologically/psychologicallydriven crime, induced by the propertiesof the drug. (The most widely recog-nized connection is between alcoholand the violence it induces.)

✦ Economic/compulsive crimes, com-mitted by drug users to support theirhabit.

✦ Systemic crime, which includes thecrimes committed as part of the regularmeans of doing business in the illicit

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* This rate is scaled up by a factor of 4 to put it on a scale comparable to that of blacks.

Source: The data were generated by Glenn Pierce and James Fox from the FBI'sSupplementary Homicide Reports, which are based on reports of individual homi-cides submitted by the Nation's police departments.

Figure 4.Number of Gun and Non-Gun HomicidesJuvenile Offenders (ages 10–17)

Source: The data were generated by Glenn Pierce and James Fox from the FBI'sSupplementary Homicide Reports, which are based on reports of individual homi-cides submitted by the Nation's police departments.

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willing to take risks that more matureadults would eschew. The plight ofmany urban black juveniles, many ofwhom see no other comparably satis-factory route to economic sustenance,makes them particularly vulnerable tothe lure of the profits of the drug in-dustry. The growth in the drug arrestrate of nonwhite juveniles is evidenceof this recruitment.

Guns as a means of self-protection.These juvenile recruits, like all par-ticipants in the illicit drug industry,are very likely to carry guns for self-protection, largely because in thatindustry guns are a major instrumentfor dispute resolution as well as self-defense. People involved in the drugindustry are likely to be carrying aconsiderable amount of valuable prod-uct—money or drugs—and are notlikely to be able to call on the policeif they are robbed.

The diffusion of guns. Since a con-siderable number of juveniles canbe involved in the drug industry incommunities where the drug marketis active, and since juveniles are tight-ly “networked,” at school or on thestreet, other juveniles are also likely toarm themselves. Again, the reason is amixture of self-protection and status-seeking. Thus begins an escalation: asmore guns appear in the community,the incentive for any single individualto arm himself increases, and so alocal “arms race” develops.

The violent outcome. The reckless-ness and bravado that often character-ize teenage behavior, combined withtheir lack of skill in settling disputesother than through physical force,transform what once would have beenfist fights with outcomes no more seri-ous than a bloody nose into shootingswith much more lethal consequencesbecause guns are present. This se-quence can be exacerbated by the so-cialization problems associated withextreme poverty, the high proportion


drug industry. (An example is the vio-lence used to resolve disputes betweencompeting traffickers.)3

There is a fourth, still broader connec-tion of drugs to crime: the communitydisorganization effect of the illicitdrug industry and its operations in thelarger community. This effect includesthe manner by which the norms andbehaviors of the industry, which canbecome a significant activity in somecommunities, influence the behaviorof people who themselves have nodirect connection to drug trafficking.The effect could, for example, includethe influence on others of the wide-spread possession of guns by drugsellers. When guns are so prevalent,people in the community might armthemselves, perhaps for self-defense,perhaps to settle disputes that havenothing to do with drugs, or perhapsjust to gain respect. In other words,once guns are used within the illicitdrug market, they become more preva-lent in the larger community, and usedfor purposes unrelated to buying andselling drugs. Hence, they add to com-munity disorganization well beyondwhat happens as a direct result of thedrug industry.

Juveniles and illicit drug marketing.Drug arrest rates, especially for non-whites, began to move upward in theearly 1980’s, and then accelerated ap-preciably after 1985 as the distributionof crack cocaine became widespread,particularly in inner-city areas. Amongnonwhite juveniles, drug arrest rateswere lower than those of whites in the1970’s, and were also fairly constant,until they began a very rapid accelera-tion until about 1985, doubling by1989. This pattern contrasted with thatof the 1960’s and 1970’s, when therate at which young whites were ar-rested for drug-related offenses fol-lowed the pattern of whites, but stayedsomewhat low. The arrest rate ofwhites then peaked in 1974 and thenbegan a steady decline. (See figure 5.)

The acceleration in drug arrests ofyoung nonwhites (primarily blacks)reflected a major recruitment of sellersto market crack, which required manymore street transactions. The racialdifferences in arrest rates indicate theextent to which drug enforcementhas focused on blacks more than onwhites. The black-white differenceis magnified also because black drugsellers tend much more often to oper-ate in the street, where they are vulner-able to arrest, whereas white sellersare much more likely to operate in-doors. The amenability of inner-citynonwhite juveniles to recruitment intothe illicit drug industry was undoubt-edly enhanced by their pessimism—orperhaps even hopelessness—as theyweighed the diminishing opportunitiesavailable to them in the legitimateeconomy.

A proposed hypothesis

This striking array of changes in juve-nile crime since 1985—a doubling ofthe homicide rate, a doubling of thenumber of homicides committed withguns, and a doubling of the arrest rateof nonwhites for drug offenses, allafter a period of relative stability inthese rates—cries out for an explana-tion that will link them all together.The explanation that seems most rea-sonable can be traced to the rapidgrowth of the crack markets in themid-1980’s. To service that growth,juveniles were recruited, they werearmed with the guns that are standardtools of the drug trade, and these gunsthen were diffused into the largercommunity of juveniles.

Recruitment. The process starts withthe illicit drug industry, which recruitsjuveniles partly because they workmore cheaply than adults, partly be-cause the sanctions they face are lesssevere than those imposed by the adultcriminal justice system, and partlybecause they tend to be daring and

August 1995 7

of single-parent households, educa-tional failures, and the pervasive senseof hopelessness about one’s economicsituation.

It does appear, however, that by thetime these young people move beyondtheir early twenties, they develop ameasure of prudence. It may be thatthe diffusion process is far slower be-cause adults are less tightly networkedand less prone to emulate each other’sbehavior. Even within the drug indus-try, they appear to act more cautiouslywhen they are armed, and to otherwisedisplay greater restraint. However,there is some concern that the restraintthat normally comes with age maynot materialize in this particular agegroup. It is possible that a cohort ef-fect may be occurring, with the possi-bility that the 18-year-olds currentlyresponsible for the higher homiciderates may continue their recklessnessas they get older. This possibilityneeds to be monitored and explored.

Evidence of the diffusion. The pos-sibility that guns are diffused fromdrug markets to the larger communitythrough juvenile recruits is furtherconfirmed by the pattern of white andnonwhite arrests for murder. Since1980, the murder arrest rates foradults, both white and nonwhite, havefollowed the same downward trend,and have shown no growth since 1985.(See figure 6.) By contrast, amongjuveniles the murder arrest rates forwhites and nonwhites have grownmarkedly between 1985 and 1992.The increase among nonwhite juve-niles was 123 percent (from 7.1 to15.8 per 100,000). Among white juve-niles the murder arrest rate also in-creased markedly, although by a lesseramount—80 percent (from 1.5 to 2.7per 100,000). (See figure 7.)

What is notable in these figures is thatthe murder rate rose among white aswell as nonwhite juveniles since 1985,at a time when the drug arrest rate for

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Source: Age-Specific Arrest Rates and Race-Specific Arrest Rates for SelectedOffenses, 1965–1992, Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Federal Bureau of In-vestigation, Washington, D.C.: December 1993.

Figure 6.Murder Arrest Rate - Adults

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Source: Age-Specific Arrest Rates and Race-Specific Arrest Rates for SelectedOffenses, 1965–1992, Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Federal Bureau of In-vestigation, Washington, D.C.: December 1993.

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nonwhites alone began to climb. Thus,the apparent absence of significantinvolvement of white juveniles in thedrug markets during this time (figure5) has not insulated them from thegrowth of their involvement in homi-cide, possibly through the suggestedprocess of the diffusion of guns fromdrug sellers into the larger community.

When the arrest trends of young non-whites for homicide and drug offensesare compared (figure 8), it is evidentthat both rates climbed together from1985 through 1989, suggesting therelationship between the two. Thedrug arrest rate declined somewhatafter 1989. There was a flattening out,but no corresponding decline in themurder arrest rate. In other words, thecontinued high rate of murder arrestsseems to demonstrate that once gunsare diffused into the community, theyare much more difficult to purge.

Reversing the trends

If the explanation outlined above is atall valid, it implies the need for solu-tions, some immediate and otherslonger range. One immediate approachwould involve aggressive steps to con-fiscate guns from juveniles carryingthem on the street. Laws permittingconfiscation of guns from juvenilesare almost universal, but they requiremore active and skillful enforcement.The need is particularly urgent incommunities where homicide rateshave risen dramatically, probably co-incident with the appearance of drugmarkets. James Q. Wilson has madesome concrete proposals for pursuingsuch efforts, including better devicesfor detecting guns from a distance.4

Also, in contrast to the intense pursuitof drug markets by law enforcementover the past 15 years, very little at-tention has been paid to the illegal gunmarkets through which guns are dis-tributed to juveniles. This issue clearly

Figure 7. Murder Arrest Rate - Juveniles



Figure 8.Nonwhite Juvenile Murder/Drug Arrest Rates



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August 1995 9

needs much greater attention. Morecomplex in its implications for policyare the links among the magnitude ofthe criminal drug market, the use ofguns in drug markets, and the juvenilehomicide rate—the subject of this dis-cussion. The presence of guns in drugmarkets results from the fact that thesemarkets are criminalized. This doesnot, of course, warrant an immediatecall for legalization of drugs. Anypolicy in the broad spectrum betweenfull prohibition and full legalizationinvolves carefully weighing the costsof criminalization (of which homicideis but one) against the probable conse-quences of greater use of dangerousdrugs. The complexity of this issueprohibits its discussion here. However,if the diffusion hypothesis is correct,the impact on juvenile homicide re-presents one component of the costof the current policy.

To the extent that efforts to diminishthe size of the illegal drug marketcould be pursued (through greater in-vestment in treatment, more effectiveprevention, or other health care initia-tives responsive to addicts’ needs),then although illegal markets wouldcontinue, the demand for drugs andthe volume of drugs sold in the mar-kets would diminish. A cost-benefitcomparison of current policies andpossible alternatives is needed but hasyet to be made. Perhaps concern aboutthe recent rise in the juvenile homiciderate might lend urgency to the issue.5

Notes

1. Criminal Victimization in theUnited States: 1973–92 Trends—ANational Crime Victimization SurveyReport, Washington, D.C.: U.S.

Department of Justice, Bureau ofJustice Statistics, July 1994:1. In theperiod 1973–92, the highest rate ofviolent victimization was 35.3 per1,000 persons, reported in 1981. Thatnumber fell until 1986, then started toclimb, reaching 32.1 in 1992 (pp. 1,9). National Crime Victim Survey datado reveal a 5.6 percent increase be-tween 1992 and 1993 in victimizationfor violent crime, principally becauseof a rise in attempted (as opposed tocompleted) assaults. “Crime Rate Es-sentially Unchanged Last Year,” pressrelease, U. S. Department of Justice,Bureau of Justice Statistics, October30, 1994. Homicide rates show a flattrend similar to that for violent victim-ization (homicide figures are not in-cluded in the victimization survey).The homicide rate per 100,000 peoplewas 9.5 in 1993, but the historical highoccurred in 1980, when the rate was10.2. Crime in the United States,1993: Uniform Crime Reports, Wash-ington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Jus-tice, Federal Bureau of Investigation,December 4, 1994:13, 283.

2. A New York Times/CBS nation-wide poll reported early in 1994indicated crime or violence as theleading issue (cited by 19 percentof respondents), followed by healthcare—the subject of considerablepublic discussion at the time—with15 percent. See Richard L. Berke,“Crime Joins Economic Issues asLeading Worry, Poll Says,” NewYork Times, January 23, 1994.

3. This taxonomy of the drug-crimeconnection was developed by PaulGoldstein in “The Drug/ViolenceNexus: A Tripartite ConceptualFramework,” Journal of Drug Issues15 (1985):493–506.

4. James Q. Wilson, “Just Take theGuns Away,” New York Times, March20, 1994. NIJ is now sponsoring re-search to aid in detecting concealedweapons. See page 35 of this Journal.

5. In my presidential address to theAmerican Society of Criminology inNovember 1992, I suggested propos-ing establishment of a PresidentialCommission to examine the costs andbenefits of our current zero-tolerancepolicy and to contrast that with vari-ous possible alternatives. Such anassessment would require major re-search support from the NationalAcademy of Sciences. (See AlfredBlumstein, “Making RationalityRelevant,” Criminology 30:1–16.)

Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D., is J. ErikJonsson University Professor of Ur-ban Systems and Operations Researchat Carnegie Mellon University’s H.John Heinz III School of Public Policyand Management.

The research reported in this article isbeing extended with the aid of an NIJgrant on juvenile violence and its rela-tionship to drug markets. Recently,Dr. Blumstein led a seminar about thisresearch at NIJ; a 60-minute video-tape of his presentation and responsesto audience questions is available for$19.00 ($24.00 outside the UnitedStates) from the National CriminalJustice Reference Service, PO Box6000, Rockville, MD 20849–6000;telephone 800–851–3420 or [email protected]. Ask for NCJ152235.


Research in Action

in the schools. They collected infor-mation, pictures, and even samplesof illicit drugs, took these materialsto the schools, and showed them tostudents; they talked about the be-havioral and health effects of drugsand warned of the risks associatedwith their use. Contrary to intentionand expectation, these drug informa-tion programs failed to reduce oreliminate drug use and, in someinstances, actually led to its in-crease.1 The real lesson learned inthe schools was that information,which is neutral, can be employedto the wrong end, producing moreharm than good. These early pre-vention workers had not envisioneddrug information in the context of acomprehensive prevention strategy.

Increasingly, the preventive ap-proach used in public health isbeing recognized as appropriatefor use as part of a criminal justicestrategy.2 It is instructive to reviewan example of how the model hasbeen applied to disease control.Seeking to prevent cardiovasculardisease, researchers in the field ofpublic health first identified riskfactors; that is, the factors whosepresence increased a person’schances of contracting the disease:tobacco use, high-fat diet, sedentarylifestyle, high levels of stress, andfamily history of heart disease.Equally important, they determinedthat certain protective factors (e.g.,aerobic exercise or relaxation tech-niques) helped prevent the develop-ment of heart problems.

Traditionally, the juvenilejustice system has em-ployed sanctions, treat-ment, and rehabilitation

to change problem behaviors afterthey have occurred. Advocates of aprevention-based approach to crimecontrol invite the scorn of criticswho believe prevention amounts tolittle more than “feel-good” activi-ties. Yet the practitioner—the proba-tion officer confronted daily withyoung people in trouble—is oftenaware of the need for effective pre-vention. As a probation officer inthe early 1970’s working with delin-quent teenagers, I found myself ask-ing, “Couldn’t we have preventedthese youngsters from getting to thispoint? Couldn’t we have intercededbefore they were criminally referredto the courts?”

Once they have experienced the re-inforcing properties of drugs and areconvinced of crime’s profitability,young people are difficult to turnaround. Once invested in the cultureof crime, they reject the virtues at-tributed to school and family, forreasons that are all too clear. Forthem, school is not a place of at-tachment and learning, but of alien-ation and failure; family is not asource of love and support, but ofunremitting conflict.

Dealing with these youths as a pro-bation officer, I saw my job assomething akin to operating an ex-pensive ambulance service at thebottom of a cliff. The probation

staff were the emergency teampatching up those who fell over theedge. Many of us who have workedin juvenile corrections have cometo realize that to keep young peoplefrom falling in the first place, a bar-rier is needed at the top of the cliff.In short, we believe that preventionis more effective and less costlythan treatment after the fact. DavidMitchell, chief judge of the juvenilecourt for Baltimore County, onceobserved, “It is of no value for thecourt to work miracles in rehabilita-tion if there are no opportunities forthe child in the community. Untilwe deal with the environment inwhich they live, whatever we doin the courts is irrelevant.”

Effective preventionbased on the publichealth model

In prevention, where action precedesthe commission of crime, it is wiseto heed the admonition that guidesphysicians: “Above all, do noharm.” Hard work and good inten-tions, by themselves, are not enoughto ensure that a program to preventviolence or substance abuse willsucceed, let alone that it will notmake things worse.

Early prevention efforts in the “Waron Drugs” serve to illustrate thispoint. Well-meaning people wereconcerned about substance abuseand decided to do something about itby introducing prevention programs

Controlling Crime Before It Happens:Risk-Focused Preventionby J. David Hawkins

Research in Action

August 1995 11

school environs have created mount-ing concern. Given the lethality offirearms, the increased likelihoodof conflict escalating into homicidewhen guns are present, and thestrong association between availabil-ity of firearms and homicide rates,a teenager having ready access tofirearms through family, friends, ora source on the street is at increasedrisk of violence.

✦ Community laws/norms favorableto crime. Community norms arecommunicated through laws, writtenpolicies, informal social practices,and adult expectations of youngpeople. Sometimes social practicessend conflicting messages: for ex-ample, schools and parents may pro-mote “just say no” themes whilealcohol and substance abuse are ac-ceptable practices in the community.Community attitudes also influencelaw enforcement. An example is theenforcement of laws that regulatefirearms sales. These laws have re-duced violent crime, but the effect issmall and diminishes as time passes.A number of studies suggest that thereasons are community norms thatinclude lack of proactive monitoringor enforcement, as well as the avail-ability of firearms from jurisdictionshaving no legal prohibitions on salesor illegal access. Other laws relatedto reductions in violent crime, espe-cially crime involving firearms, in-clude laws governing penalties forlicensing violations and for usinga firearm in the commission of acrime.

These public health researchers wereconcerned with halting the onset ofheart disease in order to avoid risky,invasive, and costly interventions,such as angioplasty or bypass sur-gery, after the disease had takenhold. Their goal was to reduce orcounter the identified risk factors forheart disease in the population atlarge; their strategy was to launch amassive public advocacy campaign,conducted in multiple venues (e.g.,the media, government, corpora-tions, schools), aimed at eliminationof “at risk” behaviors (and the atti-tudes supporting them). If risk couldnot be avoided altogether, the cam-paign could at least promote thosebehaviors and attitudes that reducerisk of heart disease. Proof thatthis two-pronged strategy has beeneffective is in the numbers: a 45-percent decrease in the incidenceof cardiovascular disease, due inlarge measure to risk-focused pre-vention.3 Application of the sameprevention principles to reducethe risks associated with problembehaviors in teenagers, includingviolence, can work as well.

Identifying riskfactors for violence

Using the public health model toreduce violence in America’s com-munities calls for first identifyingthe factors that put young peopleat risk for violence in order to re-duce or eliminate these factors andstrengthen the protective factors thatbuffer the effects of exposure to risk.

Over the past few years, longitudinalresearch (that is, studies that followyoungsters from the early years oftheir lives into adulthood) has identi-fied factors associated with neigh-borhoods and communities, thefamily, the schools, and peer groups,as well as factors residing in the in-dividual that increase the probabilityof violence during adolescence andyoung adulthood. These factors, pre-sented in exhibit 1, also have beenshown to increase the probability ofother health and behavior problems,including substance abuse, delin-quency, teen pregnancy, and drop-ping out of school. It is important tonote that only factors identified intwo or more of these longitudinalstudies to increase the probability ofthe checked health or behavior prob-lem have been included in the ex-hibit. Although future research mayreveal, for example, that alienationand rebelliousness place an indi-vidual at risk of violent behavior,consistent evidence does not yetexist to support this hypothesis.

In neighborhoods. Five risk factorsarising from the community envi-ronment are known to increase theprobability that a young person willengage in violence:

✦ Availability of guns. The UnitedStates has one of the highest rates ofcriminal violence in the world, andfirearms are implicated in a greatnumber of these crimes. In recentyears, reports of gun-toting youthsin inner-city schools and of violentincidents involving handguns in


Research in Action

Adolescent Problem Behaviors

Subs

tanc

e A

buse

Teen

Pre

gnan

cy

Scho

ol D

rop-

Out

Del

inqu

ency

Vio

lenc

e

Exhibit 1. Risk Factors and Their Association With Behavior Problems inAdolescents

Risk Factors

Community

Availability of Drugs ✓

Availability of Firearms ✓ ✓

Community Laws and Norms FavorableToward Drug Use, Firearms, and Crime ✓ ✓ ✓

Media Portrayals of Violence ✓

Transitions and Mobility ✓ ✓ ✓

Low Neighborhood Attachmentand Community Disorganization ✓ ✓ ✓

Extreme Economic Deprivation ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Family

Family History of the Problem Behavior ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Family Management Problems ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Family Conflict ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Favorable Parental Attitudes andInvolvement in the Problem Behavior ✓ ✓ ✓

School

Early and Persistent Antisocial Behavior ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Academic Failure Beginningin Elementary School ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Lack of Commitment to School ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Individual/Peer

Alienation and Rebelliousness ✓ ✓ ✓

Friends Who Engage in a Problem Behavior ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Favorable Attitudes Toward the ProblemBehavior ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Early Initiation of the Problem Behavior ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Constitutional Factors ✓ ✓ ✓

© 1993 Developmental Research and Programs, Inc.

✦ Media portrayals of violence.The highly charged public debateover whether portrayals of vio-lence in the media adversely af-fect children continues. Yetresearch over the past 3 decadesdemonstrates a clear correlationbetween depictions of violenceand the development of aggres-sive and violent behavior. Ex-posure to media violence alsoteaches violent problem-solvingstrategies and appears to alterchildren’s attitudes and sensitivityto violence.

✦ Low neighborhood attach-ment/community disorganization.Indifference to cleanliness andorderliness, high rates of vandal-ism, little surveillance of publicplaces by neighborhood residents,absence of parental involvementin schools, and low rates of voterparticipation are indicative of lowneighborhood attachment. Theless homogeneous a communityin terms of race, class, religion,or mix of industrial to residentialareas, the less connected its resi-dents may feel to the overall com-munity and the more difficult itis to establish clear communitygoals and identity. Higher ratesof drug problems, juvenile delin-quency, and violence occur insuch places.

✦ Extreme economic depriva-tion. Children who live in dete-riorating neighborhoods charac-terized by extreme poverty aremore likely to develop problems

Research in Action

August 1995 13

with delinquency, teen pregnancy,dropping out of school, and vio-lence. If such children also have be-havior and adjustment problemsearly in life, they are also morelikely to have problems with drugsas they mature. The rate of povertyis disproportionately higher for Afri-can American, Native American,or Hispanic children than for whitechildren; thus, children are differen-tially exposed to risk depending ontheir racial or cultural backgrounds.

In families. Obviously, the homeenvironment, family dynamics, andparental stability play a major role inshaping children. Three risk factorsfor violence are associated with thefamily constellation: poor familymanagement practices, including theabsence of clear expectations andstandards for children’s behavior,excessively severe or inconsistentpunishment, and parental failure tomonitor their children’s activities,whereabouts, or friends; family con-flict, either between parents or be-tween parents and children, whichenhances the risk for all of the prob-lem behaviors; and favorable paren-tal attitudes and involvement inviolent behavior, which increasesthe risk that children witnessingsuch displays will themselves be-come violent.

At school. Two indicators of riskfor violence are associated with achild’s experiences at school. Anti-social behavior of early onset (thatis, aggressiveness in grades K–3,sometimes combined with isolation

or withdrawal or sometimes com-bined with hyperactivity or atten-tion-deficit disorder) is morefrequently found in boys than girlsand places the child at increasedrisk for problems, including vio-lence, during adolescence. The riskfactor also includes persistent anti-social behavior first exhibited inadolescence, such as skippingschool, getting into fights, and mis-behaving in class. Young people ofboth genders who engage in thesebehaviors during early adolescenceare at increased risk for drug abuse,juvenile delinquency, violence,dropping out of school, and teenpregnancy. Academic failure, if itoccurs in the late elementary gradesand beyond, is a second school-re-lated risk factor that is likely to re-sult in violence and other problembehaviors. Specifically, it is the ex-perience of failure that appears toescalate the risk, rather than abilityper se.

In peer groups and within the in-dividual . If youngsters associatewith peers who engage in problembehaviors (for example, drug abuse,delinquency, violence, sexual activ-ity, or dropping out of school), theyare much more likely to do thesame. Further, the earlier in theirlives that young people becomeinvolved in these kinds of experi-ences—or take their first drink ofalcohol or smoke their first mari-juana cigarette—the greater is thelikelihood of prolonged, serious, andchronic involvement in health and

behavior problems. Even when ayoung person comes from a well-managed family and is not burdenedwith other risk factors, associatingwith friends who engage in problembehaviors greatly increases thechild’s risk. In addition, certain con-stitutional factors—those that mayhave a biological or physiologicalbasis—appear to increase a youngperson’s risk. Examples of constitu-tional factors include lack of im-pulse control, sensation seeking,and low harm avoidance.

Protective factors

It is well known that some young-sters, even though they are exposedto multiple risk factors, do not suc-cumb to violent, antisocial behavior.Research indicates that protectivefactors reduce the impact of negativerisk factors by providing positiveways for an individual to respond tothese risks. Three categories of pro-tective factors have been identified:4

✦ Individual characteristics: A re-silient temperament and positivesocial orientation.

✦ Bonding: Positive relationshipswith family members, teachers, orother adults.

✦ Healthy beliefs and clear stan-dards: Beliefs in children’s compe-tence to succeed in school and avoiddrugs and crime coupled with estab-lishing clear expectations and rulesgoverning their behavior.


Research in Action

behaviors, such as delinquency anddropping out of school, although itdoes not protect against substanceabuse. Such individual characteris-tics enhance the likelihood thatchildren will identify opportunitiesto make a personal contribution,develop the skills necessary to fol-low through successfully, and re-ceive recognition for their efforts.However, these individual protec-tive factors—resilient temperament,positive social orientation, gender,and intelligence—are innate andare extremely difficult to change.

Bonding. Several studies have re-vealed that children raised in envi-ronments in which they are exposedto multiple risk factors have never-theless become productive, contrib-uting members of the community. Ininterviews with these young people,they invariably note that someonetook an interest in them. Some adultin the community—whether a par-ent, an aunt, a grandmother, ateacher, a youth worker, a minister,a businessperson—established abond of affection and cared enoughto reach out. Research has shownthat the protective factor of bondingwith positive, prosocial family mem-bers, teachers, or other significantadults or peers can be strengthenedby preventive intervention.

Healthy beliefs and clear stan-dards. When the adults with whomyoung people bond have healthybeliefs and well-defined standardsof behavior, these serve as protec-tion against the onset of health and

The knowledge base that research-ers have built thus far allows them afair measure of confidence in mak-ing some generalizations about riskfactors:

✦ Risks exist in multiple domains.Since risk factors exist in all areas oflife, if a single risk factor is ad-dressed in a single area, problembehaviors may not be significantlyreduced. Communities should focuson reducing risks across severalareas.

✦ The more risk factors present, thegreater the risk. Although exposureto one risk does not condemn a childto problems later in life, researchshows that exposure to a greaternumber of risk factors increases ayoung person’s risk exponentially.Even if a community cannot elimi-nate all risk factors present, reduc-ing or eliminating even a few ofthem may significantly decreaserisk for young people living in thatcommunity.

✦ Common risk factors predict di-verse behavior problems. Problembehaviors are predicted by the pres-ence of common risk factors. This

means that when any individual riskfactor is reduced, it is likely to affecta number of different problems inthe community.

✦ Effects of risk factors show muchconsistency across races, cultures,and classes. While levels of risk mayvary in different racial, cultural, orsocioeconomic groups, the opera-tional mode of these risk factors doesnot appear to vary across groups.One implication for community pre-vention efforts is that the programsselected to target specific risk fac-tors should be adaptable to fitany of the various groups in thecommunity.

✦ Protective factors may buffer ex-posure to risk. Protective factors areconditions that buffer young peoplefrom the negative consequences ofexposure to risk by either reducingthe impact of the risk or changing theway a person responds to the risk.Knowledge of risk factors can helpcommunities know where to placetheir focus in order to reduce healthand behavior problems. However,communities must also know howto reduce risk.

Applying Knowledge of RiskFactors to Their Control

good-natured, enjoy social interac-tion, and elicit positive attentionfrom others. Gender is another fac-tor. Given equal exposure to risks,girls are less likely than boys to de-velop violent behavioral problemsin adolescence. Finally, intelligenceprotects against certain problem

Individual characteristics. Youthswho seem able to cope more suc-cessfully than others with risk fac-tors appear resilient: they are able tobounce back in the face of change oradversity; they experience less frus-tration in the face of obstacles anddo not give up easily. They are also

Research in Action

August 1995 15

behavior problems in those young-sters. Examples of healthy beliefsinclude believing it is best for chil-dren to be free of drugs and crimeand to do well in school. Examplesof well-defined standards includeclear, consistent family prohibitionsagainst drug and alcohol use, de-mands for good performance inschool, and disapproval of problembehaviors. When a young personbonds to those who hold healthy be-liefs and set clear standards, the twoprotective factors are reinforcing;they work in tandem by providinga model on which to base behaviorand the motivation to practice ap-proved behavior so that the bondis not jeopardized. Both bondingand healthy beliefs/clear standardsmediate the relationship between ayoung person and the social environ-ment, including community, family,schools, and peer groups; these pro-tective factors can be encouragedand strengthened.

The preconditions of bonding.Bonding may take place with acaregiver, a family member or othersignificant adult, or it may representan attachment to a social group. Forbonding to occur, however, threeconditions must be met. The first isthe opportunity for active involve-ment. People become bonded to afamily, a school class, or a commu-nity because they are given thechance to participate in the life ofthe group. In a classroom where theteacher calls on only the students inthe front who raise their hands, the

Photo by D

an Tom

pkins, NIJ

Being part of a baseball team could fulfill all conditions for successfulbonding: an opportunity for active involvement, developing skills neededto succeed, and reinforcement for skillful performance.

others are denied an opportunity foractive involvement; as a result theymay lose their commitment to edu-cation. The situation is similar in afamily where the 13- or 14-year-olduses the home as a hotel—essen-tially a place to sleep—but hasno responsibilities in the family.Youngsters need to be given thechance to contribute, in wayscommensurate with their level ofdevelopment, to life in the family,in the classroom, and in the widercommunity.

The opportunity to become involvedis not enough, however. A secondcondition of effective bonding ishaving the skills needed to succeedonce involvement gets underway.Young people need to be taught theskills without which they will beunable to pursue opportunities effec-tively. Examples of skills that havebeen shown to protect children in-clude good cognitive skills, such as

problem-solving and reading abili-ties, and good social skills, includ-ing communication, assertiveness,and the ability to ask for support.

The third condition of bonding is aconsistent system of recognition orreinforcement for skillful perfor-mance. Young people often receivelittle or no recognition for doing theright thing. The focus is on whatthey have done wrong; much lessfrequently are their accomplish-ments acknowledged. The effortsthey put forth, the challenges theyface, and the contributions theymake should be celebrated inpersonally and culturally acceptedways.

Thus, along with opportunitiesand access to skills, recognitionor appreciation provides an incen-tive for continued contributionand is a necessary condition forenabling young people to form


Research in Action

achieving the desired outcome.Thus, prevention interventions needto be geared to the appropriate de-velopmental stages of the child. Ifbehavior problems at age 4, 5, and6 are known to be associated withsubstance abuse and delinquencylater in life, this means all young-sters should be taught in the earlyelementary grades the skills theyneed to manage and control theirimpulses in order to get along withothers.

Allied to the principle of interven-tion at the appropriate stage is earlyintervention, necessary to preventbehavior problems from stabilizingand becoming entrenched. Ideally,prevention begins before the childis born to ensure that low-incomemothers and other adult caregivershave the skills they need to nurturechildren. These skills will equipthem to understand that a cryingbaby is not a bad baby who needs tobe spanked or disciplined. Prenatalcare, home visits to low-incomesingle mothers, and caregiver train-ing in nurturing skills can signifi-cantly reduce child abuse. Studiesshow that more than a fourfoldreduction in child abuse is achiev-able by home visitation before birthand during the first few months ofinfancy.5

Prevention programs need to reachthose who are at high risk by virtueof exposure to multiple risk factors.These multiple risks require multiplestrategies that also are sensitive to

Exhibit 2. Development of Protective Factors

▲

▲

Healthy Beliefs&

Clear Standards

Healthy Behaviors

▲

Bonding

▲

IndividualCharacteristics

▲

▲▲

▲

RecognitionOpportunities Skills

© 1993 Developmental Research and Programs, Inc.

community leaders should keep inmind some key principles. The firstis that prevention strategies shouldfocus on known risk factors. Oncecommunities identify the risk factorsthey need to address, the preventionprogram developed in responseshould be targeted to reducing thosefactors and to enhancing protectivefactors. Another guideline is thatintervention should be planned tocoincide with the point in a child’sdevelopment that is optimal for

close attachments to their communi-ties, schools, and families. Exhibit 2shows how protective factors aredeveloped and how they influenceone another.

Community guide-lines for preventiveintervention

In designing preventive interven-tions for the 1990’s and beyond,

● Attachment● Commitment

Research in Action

August 1995 17

the cultural diversity that character-izes many communities.

Commitment to risk-focused preven-tion programs arises only when thereis buy-in by the community; that is,when the programs are felt to be“owned and operated” by the com-munity. This sense of proprietorshipevolves when all the various stake-holders in the community—the keyleaders through the grassroots mem-bers—come together representingtheir diverse interests and developa strategy for how to implementrisk-focused prevention. The “Com-munities That Care” approach isone such strategy.

Implications forcriminal justice

The inclusion of prevention as acentral element of criminal justicepolicy and practice is emblematic ofa new emphasis reflecting the real-ization that enforcement alone is notenough to reduce youth violence.This realization reflects the recogni-tion that, in spite of geometricallyincreasing investments in enforce-ment, the courts, and corrections,violent crime, especially amongyoung people, has continued to riseover the past decade (discussed byAlfred Blumstein elsewhere in thisissue).

For criminal justice, the orientationto prevention means establishingpartnerships with other organiza-

The Communities That CareApproach.6

This model is aimed at achieving sig-nificant reductions in adolescent prob-lem behaviors by reducing risk factorsin ways that promote bonding. Theprocess recognizes that bonding with-out healthy beliefs and clear standardsis insufficient for a successful preven-tion effort.

The approach consists of a four-stepprocess:

✦ Key leaders of the community,the people who control many of theresources, are engaged to develop avision of common goals for the com-munity, to commit to a risk-focusedprevention strategy, and to decide whoshould sit on the community pre-vention task force or board.

✦ The board is created, its member-ship reflecting the diverse groups and

areas in the community, and the op-portunity for team-building is providedthrough a series of training events.

✦ The community conducts an as-sessment of the risk factors for adoles-cent problem behaviors, collects dataon existing efforts to address theserisks, and identifies prevention strate-gies.

✦ After training, the community cre-ates a risk-focused action plan andestablishes appropriate program evalu-ation methods.

The challenge is nothing less thanreinventing the community as a pro-tective environment. The means is bypromoting the development of com-munities that care enough to ensurethat all children are bonded securely tofamily, to school, and to community.

tions, groups, and agencies in thecommunity to identify and reducerisks for crime and violence and tostrengthen protective factors thatinhibit violence in the community.Community policing represents aclear example of this shift in crimi-nal justice from an exclusive focuson the “back end”—after the crimehas been committed. Integral to theintervention process is the involve-ment of the community and of socialservice and other agencies at the“front end”—working in tandemwith law enforcement to identifyproblems and design strategies tosolve them. In refining its role,

criminal justice is taking on amuch greater challenge than in thepast, but doing so holds the promiseof reducing crime in the long term.

Notes

1. Stuart, R.B., “Teaching FactsAbout Drugs: Pushing or Prevent-ing?” Journal of Educational Psy-chology 37 (1974): 98–201; andWeaver, S. C. and F. S. Tennant,“Effectiveness of Drug EducationPrograms for Secondary School Stu-dents,” American Journal of Psy-chiatry 130 (1973): 812–814.


Research in Action

2. See, for example, WilliamDeJong’s Preventing InterpersonalViolence Among Youth: An Intro-duction to School, Community, andMass Media Strategies, Issues andPractices, Washington, D.C.: U.S.Department of Justice, NationalInstitute of Justice, August 1994:12–15.

3. From a speech delivered at theNational Academy of Sciences inJanuary 1994, by Kenneth I. Shine,M.D., President of the NationalInstitute of Medicine.

4. See Hawkins, J. D., R. F.Catalano, and J. M. Miller, “Riskand Protective Factors for Alcoholand Other Drug Problems in Ado-lescence and Early Childhood: Im-plications for Substance AbusePrevention,” Psychological Bulletin112 (1992): 64–105; Werner, E. E.and R. S. Smith, Overcoming theOdds: High Risk Children FromBirth to Adulthood, New York:Cornell University Press, 1992;and Rutter, M., “Resilience in theFace of Adversity: Protective Fac-tors and Resistance to PsychiatricDisorder,” British Journal of Psy-chiatry 147 (1987): 598–611.

5. Olds, David L., C. R. Henderson,Jr., R. Chamberlin, and R.Tatelbaum, “Preventing ChildAbuse and Neglect: A RandomizedTrial of Nurse Home Visitation,”Pediatrics 78 (1986): 65–78.

6. For information about the Com-munities That Care comprehensivecommunity prevention planningapproach, contact DevelopmentalResearch and Programs, 130Nickerson Street, Suite 107, Seattle,WA 98109. Phone: (800) 736–2630;Fax: (206) 286–1462.

J. David Hawkins teaches socialwork at the University of Wash-ington in Seattle and directs theUniversity’s Social DevelopmentResearch Group. Dr. Hawkins wasco-developer of the “social develop-ment strategy,” supported by theU.S. Department of Justice, Officeof Juvenile Justice and DelinquencyPrevention (OJJDP), and adoptedby OJJDP as the basis for its com-prehensive strategy for serious, vio-lent, and chronic juvenile offenders.OJJDP continues to support the so-cial development model and the ap-plication of the Communities ThatCare approach. OJJDP has used

Dr. Hawkins’ work as the basis forits new, congressionally mandateddelinquency prevention programthat addresses the risk factors asso-ciated with delinquency and adoles-cent substance abuse. For more thana decade, Dr. Hawkins has led theSeattle Social Development Project,a longitudinal prevention study,based at the University of Washing-ton, that tests his risk reductionstrategy, using his theoretical workas the basis. This article is based ona presentation made by Dr. Hawkinsat the federally sponsored confer-ence, “Solving Youth Violence:Partnerships That Work,” held inWashington, D.C., August 15 to 17,1994. Dr. Hawkins’ publications forOJJDP include “Parent Trainingfor Delinquency Prevention,” withM. W. Fraser and M. O. Howard,Washington, D.C.: U.S. Departmentof Justice, Office of Juvenile Justiceand Delinquency Prevention, andNational Institute on Drug Abuse,1988. He also contributed to theGuide for Implementing the Com-prehensive Strategy for Serious,Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Of-fenders, ed. James C. Howell, U.S.Department of Justice, Office ofJuvenile Justice and DeliquencyPrevention, May 1995.

Research in Action

August 1995 19

Youth violence has grownto alarming proportions,1

but the good news is thestrong response to tack-

ling the problem. Communities largeand small are working hard at devis-ing innovative approaches, manyof them integrating components ofprevention, deterrence, rehabilita-tion, and control. At every level—municipal, county, State, andFederal—programs are making adifference in the lives of those theytouch. They help high-risk adoles-cents manage anger and control con-flict, ensure youngsters a safe placeto have fun after school, providesanctions other than prison foryouthful offenders, offer youngpeople job counseling and training,teach parenting skills to youngadults, and counsel teens in self-esteem and leadership skills.

Until now, finding out what theseprograms are and where they are hasbeen a daunting prospect, if onlybecause there are so many. The Part-nerships Against Violence Network(PAVNET) is changing all that.Conceived by the National Instituteof Justice and built with the techni-cal assistance of the U.S. Depart-ment of Agriculture’s NationalAgricultural Library, PAVNET isa service that provides informationabout youth anti-violence programsoperating throughout the countryand about the availability of tech-nical assistance and funding forsuch programs. The information

is available in print, on diskette, andthrough “PAVNET Online” via theInternet.

One of the most distinctive featuresof PAVNET is the partnership ofFederal Government agencies it rep-resents. Seven cabinet-level agen-cies have joined forces to integrateinformation to remove barriers com-munities face in locating resourcesto help them reduce violence.

The old way to accessinformation

Before PAVNET, community offi-cials who wanted to create a pro-gram to deal with youth substanceabuse, for example, would confronta laborious and time-consumingtask. In planning their program theywould probably want to first lookinto what other communities liketheir own were doing. Their strategymight be to pick and choose amongprogram components to select onesthat fit their needs. They might haveproceeded by contacting a neighbor-ing jurisdiction known to have aprogram on youth substance abuseor by looking into a high-visibilityproject set in a major urban area.Alternatively, they might have got-ten in touch with one or anotherFederal agency to find out aboutprograms to explore.

The search would require a consid-erable amount of time and other re-sources. It would mean looking

in many directions and in the worstcase end up as a hit-or-miss exer-cise. The principal reason has beenthe absence of a centralized reposi-tory of the information they need.Locally based programs are diffusednationwide and a multiplicity ofagencies and organizations, publicand private, sponsor them.

And the new

PAVNET greatly simplifies the taskof local government officials andothers who want to know and needto know about programs and otherresources to reduce youth violence.Literally hundreds of these programsare up and running all over the coun-try. PAVNET not only centralizesinformation about them but makesit accessible easily, rapidly, and toa worldwide audience.

Promising programs. UsingPAVNET to locate informationabout anti-drug programs for youngpeople, the hypothetical local gov-ernment officials turn to the sectionentitled “Promising Programs: Sub-stance Abuse” in the electronic orprinted versions. There they willfind three types of programs: thatemphasize prevention, enforcement,or treatment and rehabilitation.

In addition to substance abuse, otherprogram categories are family vio-lence, services to victims, commu-nity violence, and youth violenceprevention. Altogether, almost 600

Partnerships Against Violence:Reducing Youth Violence ThroughInformation Sharingby Joan Alpert and Judy Reardon


Research in Action

Each program listing of-fers a snapshot view or“abstract” of the project,plus information aboutthe specific populationtargeted, the type of set-ting, the startup date, thebudget, the fundingsource or sources and,perhaps most important,the name of someone tocontact and the ways toreach him or her byphone, fax, or e-mail.(See "Sample PAVNETListing"). Armed withthis information abouta program or programsthat interest them, thehypothetical officials,who may be based inOhio, can get in touchwith their counterpartsin whatever jurisdictiona listed program operates.

Technical assistance.Sometimes a communitymay want to locate anorganization with theexpertise to providetechnical assistance orother help in developinga program, operating it,or making it better.PAVNET contains thesetypes of listings as well—

more than 300. They present infor-mation on such resources as trainingmaterials, educational curriculums,information clearinghouses, andhotline numbers, as well as listings

Transitional Aftercare Group(TAG) Program

ContactJohn C. Smith, M.S.W.Health PromotionsMorehouse School of Medicine720 Westview Drive, S.W.Atlanta, GA 30310Tel: 404–752–1754Fax: 404–752–0094

Program TypeCommunity reintegration and rehabilitationthrough education and social services

Target PopulationRecently released juvenile offenders in theState of Georgia

SettingAftercare group program of juveniles makingthe transition from incarceration to thecommunity

Project Startup DateSeptember 1993

Information SourceNational Clearinghouse for Alcohol and DrugInformation (NCADI) PREVline electronic datasystem (U.S. Department of Health andHuman Services)

programs, developed by governmentagencies, private foundations, reli-gious and fraternal organizations,and citizens’ and community orga-nizations, are listed. Search tools

in the online version and multipleindexes appended to the hard-copyversion make it easy to pinpointspecific topics.

Sample PAVNETListing

Evaluation InformationThe Centers for Disease Control and Preven-tion (CDC) is sponsoring a 10-month processevaluation that will focus on the extent towhich the program sites are successful inimplementing proposed activities.

Annual Budget$100,000

Sources of FundingNational Center for Injury Preventionand Control, CDC, Division of ViolencePrevention

Program DescriptionThe Georgia Department of Children andFamily Services TAG program is designed toreduce recidivism among newly released ju-venile offenders. The program provides casemanagement; treatment services; and career,educational, and vocational training at threesites in Georgia. Case management includes aneeds assessment of each person, crisis inter-vention, treatment planning, referrals, andplacement. Treatment services include coun-seling, parenting classes, alcohol abuse edu-cation, drug abuse education, success sem-inars, and literacy education. Career, educa-tional, and vocational training includes basicskills and instruction related to receiving ahigh school diploma, career counseling, andjob placement. Partners include the More-house School of Medicine and the GeorgiaDepartment of Children and Youth Services.

Research in Action

August 1995 21

little ahead of the curve in providingthis information via the internationalinformation superstructure,” he said,“because Internet connectivity isnot yet universal or universallyavailable.” He added, however,that the growing use of the Internet(by one estimate it links 45,000networks and serves between 10and 25 million users2) seems proofpositive that the potential user basefor PAVNET Online will growaccordingly.

To help Internet users navigate theInformation Superhighway to reachPAVNET Online, a guide for onlineusers has been published.3 And foranyone with a personal computer butwithout Internet access, the disketteversion of PAVNET is available.4

The advent of more advanced tech-nology does not spell the abruptdemise of tools developed earlier.They will continue to coexist forsome time to come. PAVNET wascreated in this period of transition—between the time of universal acces-sibility to online information andreliance on printed documents. SoPAVNET has also been made avail-able in a two-volume, hard-copyformat.5

Cost savings and other benefits.Like any other electronic search andretrieval system, PAVNET Onlinecreates savings in time and otherresources. But such savings also ac-crue from use of the print version as

for organizations that can provideonsite assistance to local communi-ties. Examples are the Boston AreaEducators for Social Responsibility,which offers conflict resolutiontraining to teachers, administrators,and counselors working in elemen-tary, middle, and secondary schoolsand the Washington, D.C.-basedCenter for Community Change,which provides technical assistanceto disadvantaged urban and ruralcommunities that want to bringabout change. For each listing, theservices are described briefly anda contact person’s name, address,and phone number (plus fax numberand e-mail address, if available) areincluded.

Funding sources. In an era of bud-get constraints and cutbacks, fund-ing takes on added significance.PAVNET meets the need for infor-mation about financial supportthrough a section on public and pri-vate sources. These range from or-ganizations that support projects inspecifically named localities to thoselike the USDA Extension Service’sYouth at Risk initiative, whichoperate nationwide.

Quality of the information . In de-veloping PAVNET, quality controlwas and remains a major consider-ation. Paul Estaver, who directed theinitial drafting, editing, and input ofdata at NIJ, noted the importanceattached to this part of the process.“We went to great lengths to be sure

the information was accurate,” hesaid. All information for each entrywas verified before inclusion in thedata base.

Several criteria were established toconsider a program’s “eligibility”for PAVNET. Programs judgedto be “promising” are aimed atresolving a violence problem ormaking a community safer, haveclear and measurable goals, andhave been in operation for at least ayear. The targeted problem needs tobe significant in number of peopleaffected or has to meet another,similar standard. Perhaps most im-portant was the emphasis on evalua-tion. Whenever possible, evidencethat programs have achieved somesuccess in meeting their stated goalsis included in the description. This isdone to help PAVNET users deter-mine if the initiatives can be adoptedor adapted elsewhere.

PAVNET onlineand other formats

PAVNET is available in threeformats: in a printed, hard-copyversion; on diskettes (both inWordPerfect and ASCII); and viathe Internet. NIJ’s G. Martin Lively,who worked with John Kane ofthe Department of Agriculture tocoordinate the technical aspectsof PAVNET Online, noted thereis sound reasoning behind the offerof multiple formats. “We may be a


Research in Action

well. Whatever its format, PAVNETmeans “one-stop shopping” for theconsumer of information.

Obviously, PAVNET Online gener-ates the most benefits, for both “sup-pliers” and “customers.” On thesupplier end, a one-time, front-endinput of resources was needed forinitial data input, and resources areneeded on an ongoing basis for ad-ministration and management. Still,the savings and government effi-ciency accrue from eliminatingprinting and distribution costs.Inventory problems (even inventoryitself) can become a thing of thepast. Customers need no longer waitfor the mail to arrive, for they canview, download (transfer), print,and make multiple copies of any ofthese public-domain files when theywant them. Speed of informationretrieval, probably the greatest ad-vantage for users, can also result incost savings. At least for the present,many users get Internet access freeof charge through their sponsoringinstitution.

Internet accessibility also enablesthe supplier to update and manageinformation on a real-time basis.Paper documents can have a short“shelf life” when their contents be-come out-of-date. PAVNET Onlinedoes not require reprints. For theuser, the information will always beas current as real-time data entrypermits.

The genesis ofPAVNET

The initial steps in creatingPAVNET were taken by the Na-tional Institute of Justice, an agencyof the Justice Department. ButPAVNET’s reach is far beyond thedomain of criminal justice. It con-tains programs in education, health,job training and placement, counsel-ing, recreation, and many other ar-eas. The reason the net was cast sowide is the recognition that violencecannot be defeated through law en-forcement alone or even with all themultiple resources at the disposal ofthe criminal justice system. Violenceneeds to be approached from manyangles, and that calls for the involve-ment of many disciplines. To para-phrase the African proverb: it takesthe resources of the entire commu-nity to save a child.

The need for a multifaceted ap-proach was part of the thinkingbehind Project PACT (PullingAmerica’s Communities Together),the program PAVNET was initiallydesigned to support. Begun in thefall of 1993, PACT started as a con-sortium of Federal agencies thatserves as a catalyst to build coali-tions at every level—local, State,and Federal—to reduce violence.In the cities designated as PACTsites, the Federal Government takeson the role of facilitator and coordi-nator, helping communities as they

themselves define the specific vio-lence-related problem they want toaddress and as they shape their ownresponse. That mandate extends tohelping the sites ensure their anti-violence strategies are comprehen-sive; that is, inclusive of the fullspectrum of approaches, from pre-vention through control, representedby the several Federal agencies inProject PACT.

The PACT program itself makesno commitment to Federal funding.Rather, the emphasis is on techni-cal assistance, such as providinginformation. The response to thecall for better online informationabout Federal resources and guidesto promising anti-violence activitieswas the genesis of PAVNET.6 In thestartup stages of PAVNET, the sup-port of the Department of Justicerepresentative on the PACT team,Shay Bilchik (now Director of theOffice of Juvenile Justice and Delin-quency Prevention) was invaluable.

The team that developed PAVNETwas headed by Paul Cascarano, As-sistant Director of NIJ. Cascaranosummarized the objective he set forhimself and his team: “What wewanted to do,” he said, “was to builda mechanism that could pull togetherall the information about programsand strategies that show promiseof success, put it in one place, andmake it widely available.”

PAVNET means "one-stop shopping" for theconsumer of information.

Research in Action

August 1995 23

Building the data base

Federal interagency cooperation isthe linchpin of PAVNET. The num-ber of cabinet-level agencies thathave joined PAVNET is now seven,7

but there is no limit to membership.Units within each agency tappedinformation clearinghouses plusother sources to find promising pro-grams and other resources in theirrespective mission areas. Thus, forexample, the Department of Agricul-ture contributed a listing for ProjectCARES (Children at Risk ExtendedSchool), a school-based child careprogram for at-risk elementaryschool students and their families,which the agency co-sponsorsthrough its extension agent inOgden, Utah.

Among the entries from the U.S.Department of Labor is the Centerfor Employment Training, a jobtraining and placement program op-erating in several States for at-riskyouth, farmworkers, and others. Oneof the listings provided by the De-partment of Justice-operated Na-tional Criminal Justice ReferenceService is the Mediation and Resti-tution Services (MARS) program,which offers juvenile offenders theopportunity to repay the losses in-curred by the injured parties as analternative to prison.

The information in PAVNET comesfrom these and many other sources.But although there are severalsources, users of PAVNET accesswhat to all intents and purposes is a

single, comprehensive, seamlesslyconstructed data base.

Toward a distributed data base.Initial data input and processing, aswell as quality control (verificationof facts, for example), editorial sup-port, and production of the printedvolumes and the diskettes werehandled largely by NIJ, chieflythrough its information clearing-house, the National Criminal Jus-tice Reference Service. Placing thedata online was largely the work ofJohn Gladstone, a systems managerwith the U.S. Department of Agri-culture, under the direction of JohnKane, who coordinates the YouthDevelopment Information Center atthe National Agricultural Library.To update the data on a continuousbasis, plans are for each PAVNETmember agency to input its own dataas well as to manage it for the pur-poses of future quality control, add-ing and purging data, and makingother changes.

In this distributed data base struc-ture, a single point of entry wouldremain for the user, but input wouldhave several access points—as manyas there are participating agencies.To the user, PAVNET Online wouldretain the appearance of a central-ized repository, but that centraliza-tion would exist in virtual reality,through electronic linkages amongthe data bases. Data input and man-agement would be “distributed”among the PAVNET agencies,which are expected to increase.

Thanks to the Internet, resourcescan expand indefinitely.

The informationinfrastructure

Building the PAVNET Onlinestructures was in large part thework of the U.S. Department ofAgriculture’s Extension Service.USDA has played this central rolebecause it already had the necessaryhardware and software, used for thepast several years to publish YouthDevelopment Information Centerdocuments electronically via theInternet. This system was adoptedfor use by PAVNET Online.

The system is physically housed atUSDA and managed from its Na-tional Agricultural Library (NAL).On the NAL gopher, the data basewas uploaded on the Internet andtools were built to help users navi-gate the system. John Kane notedthe benefits of gopher technology:“We chose this software, which isbasically a menu-based way to re-trieve information,” he said, “be-cause for users who either telnet to8

or log directly onto the system overthe Internet, it increases the chancesthey’re going to find exactly whatthey want. Gopher technology al-lows you to get from where you areto practically anywhere else on theInternet without having to know inadvance where the information youwant is located.”

Federal interagency cooperation isthe linchpin of PAVNET.


Research in Action

to the Web, and we need to ac-commodate them,” he said. Todo so, a home page is being cre-ated for PAVNET on the Internet.(A home page is best explainedby way of analogy: it is to the

information resource what the coverof a magazine is to what is inside themagazine.)

Search tools. Built into PAVNETOnline are search tools that makelocating information about specifictopics a simple exercise. A usermight want to find informationabout programs operating in hisor her State or about programs incertain subject categories. For ex-ample, the search can be narrowedto information about programs inMaryland or those dealing with“conflict resolution.” The “searchengine” scans the full text of eachdata entry rapidly to match the wordor words the user wants to find.

Expanding resources. Gopher tech-nology also points PAVNET Onlineusers to Federal clearinghouse andprivate-sector data bases that in turnpoint to other resources for informa-tion about violence prevention infor-mation. For example, the gophermenu can be used to connect di-rectly with the National CriminalJustice Reference Service and withthe National Clearinghouse on Alco-hol and Drug Information. A “LatestAddition to PAVNET Online” sec-tion presents information about re-lated topics, such as conferenceannouncements, legislative initia-tives, and new features of PAVNET,among them how to obtain files viae-mail.

John Gladstone, who provides tech-nical support to PAVNET Online,

PAVNET Online Via theInternet: A How-ToA few keystrokes on the computerput a wealth of information aboutyouth anti-violence programs andother resources to reduce violenceliterally at the user’s fingertips.PAVNET Online is reached throughthe Internet, the vast system of com-puter networks and users that linksmillions of people around the world.

On-Ramps

Those with direct access to an Inter-net connection can reach PAVNETby gophering pavnet.esusda.gov andselecting “3” from the main menu.

For those who do not have this capac-ity, there are other ways of reachingPAVNET Online. A commercialInternet provider, such as AmericaOnline, is one way. Users who needhelp in reaching PAVNET can sendan e-mail to [email protected] to [email protected].

PAVNET Online files can be ob-tained through e-mail, by sending amessage to [email protected],and issuing one or more of the follow-ing commands:

send pavnet catalogsend pavnet-funding catalog

send pavnet-programs catalogsend pavnet-infosource catalog

Road Maps

Full details of the ways to accessPAVNET Online are presented in thePavnet Online User’s Guide, which isavailable in hard-copy format andonline. It not only helps users travelthe Information Superhighway toPAVNET Online, but also helps themnavigate the online menus (directo-ries of information) and use the searchcapabilities to find specific topics.

For online access to the Guide itself,select “About PAVNET Online” fromthe main PAVNET menu; then select“PAVNET Online User’s Guide” toview the text of the guide.

Online Dialog

A PAVNET mail group hosts discus-sions among people who are inter-ested in anti-violence issues.

Anyone who wishes to subscribe cando so by sending an e-mail [email protected] and insert-ing “subscribe pavnet-mg” in the bodyof the message.

Kane cited the new possibilitiesopened up with World Wide Webtechnology, which allows users toview documents in exactly the waythey were created in print. “Moreand more people are getting access

Research in Action

August 1995 25

noted what motivated the team inoffering these added services. “Wewant to be as timely as possible,and as comprehensive as possible,”he said, “and we also want tocreate pathways that link the usersas a group, beyond what they canachieve over the phone.”

One way to promote dialog amongusers is through listservs—electronicmail groups or information ex-changes that enable subscribers tosend messages on predeterminedtopics to everyone on the list andalso to receive messages. Within afew weeks after the recently createdPAVNET listserv was established,hundreds of subscribers, in policeagencies, correctional facilities,community programs, and institu-tions of higher education, locatedhere and abroad, had signed up.(See PAVNET Online Via theInternet for directions on how tosubscribe to the listserv—pavnet-mg.) The PAVNET listserv is de-signed to host online discussions,nationwide and internationally,on anti-violence issues and permitmore community involvement inbuilding PAVNET.

PAVNET II

PAVNET reflects what is happeningin the field all over the UnitedStates. But programs and practicesin the field are often established onthe basis of research or are modified

Jamie S. Gorelick, Deputy Attorney General, and Paul Cascarano, NIJAssistant Director, accept the “Hammer Award” from Vice President AlGore; the award acknowledges PAVNET’s contribution to makinggovernment more efficient and effective.

and replicated following evalua-tions. This link between practiceand research suggested the needfor a data base of information aboutongoing research in violence.

Like practice in the field, researchin violence is not confined to crimi-nal justice, but covers many disci-plines, such as health. The Nation-al Institutes of Health and theCenters for Disease Control andPrevention, for example, are amongthe agencies conducting researchinto one or more aspect of violence.PAVNET II has been proposed asa way to centralize informationabout research in violence beingconducted from many perspectives.The data base would extend toprojects under way in institutionsof higher education and private

research organizations that receivetheir support from a Federal or Stateagency, or private foundations.

Such a resource could have severaluses: it would help eliminate dupli-cate research projects and therebygenerate cost savings; it would fos-ter collaboration on related projects;and, by including projects under-taken by disciplines outside criminaljustice, would be another meansto promote a multidisciplinaryapproach to reducing violence.

NIJ has been exploring what itwould take to establish this database. Feasibility work now underway is targeted to finding out whatagencies sponsor such research,how to access the data for input,what restrictions might limit access,


Research in Action

and how to create structures forinputting and managing the datathrough a single point of entry.

Governmentreinvented

NIJ Director Jeremy Travis summa-rized the significance of PAVNET’ssimplifying systems, structures, andprocesses: “PAVNET is all aboutreinventing government. That meansmaking government more respon-sive.” So successful has the projectbeen in improving “customer ser-vice,” that it was formally recog-nized for its contribution to govern-ment reinvention.9 Two of its mostdistinctive features—Federal inter-agency cooperation and the coordi-nation of multiple online data

bases—led to its designation as amodel project in the governmentreinvention process. As a “reinven-tion laboratory,” PAVNET becomesa model for replication elsewhere inthe Federal Government.

Director Travis noted that althoughthe process of building PAVNEThas been innovative, the “product”is the central consideration for NIJ.“Reinventing government is onlythe means,” he said. “What has beenfirst and foremost in the minds ofthe PAVNET team is the end.” Thatend is breaking down barriers tocommunication, and linking com-munity to community. The “part-nership” in Partnerships AgainstViolence is not just the coalition ofFederal agencies, Travis noted, butthe coalitions nurtured at the grass

roots level with the help of thePAVNET project. And ultimately,he said, the end is repairing, improv-ing, and sustaining the quality oflife of our communities by doingsomething about the violence thatcontinues to claim the lives of somany of our young people.

Notes

1. See the article on youth violenceby Alfred Blumstein, elsewhere inthis issue.

2. Lambert, Steve, and Walt Howe,Internet Basics: Your Online Accessto the Global Electronic Superhigh-way, New York: Random House,1993.

How To Obtain the PAVNET GuidesFormats

✦ A two-volume Resource Guide. Volume 1, PromisingPrograms, contains indexes of programs by subject, title,funding sources, and geographic location. Volume 2, Infor-mation Sources, Funding, and Technical Assistance, con-tains a subject index to identify sources for direct help andinformation, plus a list of publications for additional sourcesof funding.

Costs, including postage and handling, are:

Volume 1, Promising Programs (NCJ 150044): U.S. $17,Canada $23, other countries $54.

Volume 2, Information Sources, Funding, and Technical As-sistance (NCJ 150045): U.S. $12, Canada $17, other countries$29.

Both volumes (NCJ 15422): U.S. $25, Canada $34, othercountries $83.

✦ The PAVNET Online User’s Guide helps users navigatethe PAVNET menus and use the search capabilities. (NCJ152057): Free.

✦ PAVNET on diskette. The PAVNET Resource Guide,Volumes 1 and 2, are also available on two 3.5" high-densitydiskettes in WordPerfect 5.1, and on two 3.5" high-densitydiskettes in ASCII. WordPerfect’s search capabilities and theASCII editor can be used to find the information. The “ReadMe” file presents instructions.

WordPerfect (DD 152402): U.S. $16, Canada and other coun-tries $21.

ASCII (DD 152403): U.S. $16, Canada and other countries$21.

To order any of these PAVNET items, write toNCJRS, Box 6000, Rockville, MD 20849–6000, call800–851–3420 or e-mail [email protected].

Research in Action

August 1995 27

3. PAVNET Online User’s Guide,Research in Action, Washington,D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice,National Institute of Justice, March1995.

4. The PAVNET files are availableon two 3.5" diskettes for use inDOS-based personal computers ineither WordPerfect 5.1 or ASCII,for $16.

5. Volume 1, Promising Programs;and volume 2, Information Sources,Funding, and Technical Assistance.Both volumes were published by theU.S. Department of Justice, NationalInstitute of Justice, in December1994. (The draft version was pub-lished in August 1994.)

6. Report to the President and theDomestic Policy Council from theInterdepartmental Working Group

on Violence, Washington, D.C.,January 1994.

7. Currently, in addition to the Of-fice of Justice Programs of the U.S.Department of Justice (Bureau ofJustice Assistance, Bureau of JusticeStatistics, National Institute ofJustice, Office for Victims of Crime,and Office of Juvenile Justice andDelinquency Prevention) and theU.S. Department of Agriculture,PAVNET membership consists ofthe U.S. Department of Education,the U.S. Department of Health andHuman Services, the U.S. Depart-ment of Housing and Urban Devel-opment, the U.S. Department ofLabor, and, to a limited extent, theU.S. Department of Defense.

8. Telnet is a way to use the Internetto connect to a computer that ishoused at a distant location.

9. On December 7, 1994, VicePresident Al Gore presented the“Hammer Award” to the team thatdeveloped PAVNET. The awardwas given as part of National Perfor-mance Review process of “reinvent-ing government.” (The name of theaward derives from the tool beingused symbolically to build an effi-cient and effective government. Thehammer presented in the award,which cost $6, recalls the hammerspurportedly purchased by the gov-ernment for $600 that once becamea symbol of government waste.)

Joan Alpert, who is with the Na-tional Criminal Justice ReferenceService, coordinated the drafting,editing, data input, and productionof PAVNET. Judy Reardon is awriter-editor with NCJRS.


Research in Action

collected in the major Federal Gov-ernment crime surveys. Partly as aresult, research on the topic has beenlimited.1 Two recent studies, whichfocused on telemarketing fraud andfraud in direct personal marketing,revealed these crimes to be fairlyextensive.2

Meeting the needfor comprehensive,accurate data

The need for systematic informationabout economic crimes, includingpersonal fraud, has been noted bycriminal justice professionals andresearchers.3 Finding out how muchdamage is being inflicted by per-sonal fraud is essential if the crimi-nal justice system is to provide anoptimal response.

Meeting the need for informationwas the thinking behind a nation-wide study of fraud conducted bythe National Institute of Justice. Theaims were to better grasp the extentto which this crime is committed,and to probe such issues as the kindsof fraud being perpetrated, the finan-cial and other losses suffered byvictims, the types of people mostfrequently victimized, and the ac-tions taken by people after theyhave been victimized. (See “Whatis Personal Criminal Fraud” for adefinition of fraud as used in thisstudy and “The Design of the FraudStudy” for a description of the studymethod.)

Challengingconventional wisdom

While it may come as no surprisethat a substantial proportion of theadult population is affected by fraud,or that fraud is more common thanmany crimes reported in the Na-tional Crime Victimization Survey,many of the other findings of thestudy were unanticipated. For onething, the researchers found thatwhen projected to the general popu-lation, monetary losses are ex-tremely high, running into thebillions. The widespread perceptionof the elderly and the poorly edu-cated as most vulnerable was re-vealed to have little basis in reality.Fraud was found to be no respecterof age, gender, race, or income. Inshort, many of the findings chal-lenged the conventional wisdom thathas surrounded these crimes in theabsence of accurate and comprehen-sive information.

How many victims?

Fraud claims many victims. Morethan half the respondents (58 per-cent) reported having experienced avictimization or an attempted vic-timization thus far in their lives.Those who had a fairly recent expe-rience with fraud (in the 12 monthsbefore the survey) constituted al-most one-third (31 percent) of the1,246 respondents. The attempt todefraud these people was successfulin nearly half of the instances cited.(See table 1, page 31.)

Millions of Americansare learning—some-times the hard way—to deal with one or

another of the following scenarios:

✦ When they answer the phone, thevoice at the other end tells them theyhave won a free vacation at an ex-otic locale, and the caller needs onlya credit card number to verify theiridentity.

✦ In retrieving their mail, they finda letter requesting a contribution to acharitable organization whose nameis similar to one that is well known.

✦ They answer the doorbell to findan official-looking and -soundingindividual who describes a roofproblem with their house, says itviolates the building code, needsimmediate attention, and offers hiscompany’s service to make therepair.

✦ They find a notice in the mailurging them to call a 900 numberthat will access information about acost-free plan for loan consolidation.

The scenarios are infinitely varied,but many have one aim: to defraud.The considerable media attentionbeing paid to these crimes suggestshow common they have become.Yet locating more systematic infor-mation—how frequently the crimesoccur, what types are most common,who is most prone to be victim-ized—is no easy task. One reason isthat data on these offenses are not

The Anatomy of Fraud:Report of a Nationwide Surveyby Richard Titus, Fred Heinzelmann, and John M. Boyle

Research in Action

August 1995 29

How much is lost?

Losses are frequent and theamounts lost can be high. Morethan 88 percent of the people“successfully” victimized (and13 percent of the sample as awhole) reported losing moneyor property. The amountsranged widely, from less than$25 to as much as $65,000.(See table 2, page 32.) Pro-jected to the country’s adultpopulation, the average loss($216) yields an estimatedannual figure of more than$40 billion.

Although typically the mon-etary loss is small, it can bequite large, tending to vary withthe type of fraud. Thus, autoand appliance repair scams,fraudulent prices (prices thatturn out to be higher than origi-nally quoted by the seller),900-number swindles, and fakewarranties tend to involve rela-tively large amounts (an aver-age of more than $250). Inauto/appliance repair and 900-number frauds, losses can runas high as $3,000 or more, as canlosses through fraudulent use ofbank or credit cards, impersonationsof legitimate brokers and financialplanners, and fake insurance andinvestment schemes.

Losses may not be just financial.In 20 percent of the cases in whichthe attempt succeeded, the victim

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experienced resultant credit or otherfinancial problems. Health or emo-tional problems were reported in14 percent of these cases, and lostworkdays in 13 percent. For morethan one in ten of these crimes,other members of the victim’shousehold suffered significantharm or loss.

Who is victimizedthe most?

The age factor. A common beliefof people who investigate fraud isthat certain groups, such as the eld-erly, are more vulnerable. This studyeffectively dispelled that notion.Age does matter, but as the study

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Research in Action

What Is Personal Criminal Fraud?A type of property crime, fraud is thedeliberate intent, targeted against indi-viduals, to deceive for the purpose ofillegal financial gain. The deception con-sists of the misrepresentation of facts,generally through promises of goods,services, or other benefits that do notexist or that the offender never intendedto provide.

Included in this definition are variousforms of telemarketing fraud, frauds in-volving consumer goods and services,deceptive financial advice, and scams ininsurance coverage and investment orbusiness dealings. Examples include of-fers of “free” prizes that containhidden costs, scams involving credit

✦ Has a stockbroker, a financial plan-ner, or someone like that ever given youfalse, deceptive, or deliberately mislead-ing information or advice in order toswindle you out of money or property?

✦ Has anyone ever pretended to be thepolice or a bank official in order to getyou to withdraw money from your bankand give it to them?

✦ Has anyone convinced or tried toconvince you to put money into a busi-ness venture such as a work-at-homeplan, a franchise, or a business opportu-nity that you found out was a fraud ora fake?

assistance or loan consolidation,unauthorized use of credit card or bankaccount numbers, charity scams, worth-less warranties, fraudulent health orbeauty products, and provision of un-necessary or useless goods and services,including repairs.

Asking about Fraud

The questions asked in the survey presentexamples of the multiple types of fraud.Some of the questions are as follows:

✦ Has anyone ever sold or tried to sellyou what they claimed was a lotteryticket, or a ticket of admission whichturned out to be fake?

slightly more likely to succeed thanan attempt against someone whodid not finish high school.

Education does not appear to con-fer the protection that might be ex-pected in a type of crime that callsfor a battle of wits (rather than aphysical confrontation) betweenvictim and assailant. This being thecase, for an individual to believethat more education means greaterability to deal with con artists couldprove a costly supposition.

The combined effects of youthand education. It may be that ageand education are working in tan-dem to make these fraud victimsmore vulnerable. Younger, better-educated people may have widerinterests and engage in a broaderrange of activities. For these reasons

Are the educated immune? Otherthan age, education is the only factoraffecting the frequency of victimiza-tion. Here again, the findings chal-lenge conventional wisdom, whichholds that educated people are lesslikely to be victims of this type ofcrime. What the survey found wasthat people at the extremes of theeducation spectrum (those without ahigh school diploma and those withgraduate degrees) are least likely tobe touched by fraud. It is those whohave some college or an undergradu-ate degree who appear to be themost vulnerable to fraud. Moreover,the level of education does not af-fect the outcome; that is, educationhas no relationship to whether thefraud, when attempted, actually suc-ceeds. In fact, an attempt to defraudsomeone with a graduate degree is

revealed, older people are less like-ly to be victimized than youngerpeople. In this respect, fraud vic-timization follows the pattern ofother crimes. Moreover, when theelderly are victimized, they areless apt than younger people tolose money or property.

A partial explanation for the per-ception of the elderly as more fre-quently victimized may stem fromtheir greater tendency to report fraudto the authorities. The reports bringthese people to investigators’ atten-tion. Another possibility is that olderpeople are being unfairly stereo-typed. The study findings suggestthat far from being the trusting andcompliant victims commonly por-trayed in much of the fraud litera-ture, the elderly clearly get smarteras they get older.

Research in Action

August 1995 31

they may be more likely to findthemselves in circumstances (suchas inclusion on telephone or mailinglists) that can result in fraudulentsolicitations. In addition, the typi-cally lower incomes of young peoplein general may make them more re-ceptive to promises of fabulous bar-gains and spectacular opportunities.Compared to their elders, they havenot had time to become sadder butwiser about such matters.

Is there a “typical” victim? Look-ing at the characteristics of peopleaffected by fraud attempts that suc-ceed, the researchers found no stan-dard profile. There is no “typical”fraud victim. Demographic variablessuch as education, income, age, race,and gender do not significantly in-fluence an individual’s likelihood ofsuccumbing to a fraud attempt. Noris the success of the attempt relatedto the region of the country wherea prospective victim lives; fraud isas likely to succeed in rural as inurban areas. In other words, noneof these factors is significant in pre-dicting whether attempted fraudwill succeed.

The most commonkinds of fraud

When it comes to identifyingthe types of fraud that are mostcommon, the findings once againdefy the stereotypes. Frauds oftencited by experts who investigatethese matters are the “pigeon drop,”

Table 1. Prevalence of Fraud

Number of PercentPeople

Attempts in Past Year

No Attempts Made in Past Year 859 69%

Attempts Made in Past Year 387 31

Total 1,246 100%

Outcome of Attempts

Not Successful 200 52%

Successful 187 48

Total 387 100%

Source: Titus, Richard M., Fred Heinzelmann, and John M. Boyle, “Victimiza-tion of Persons by Fraud,” Crime and Delinquency, 41:1 (January 1995):58.

impersonations of bank officials orofficial inspectors, and schemes in-volving counterfeit tickets (such aslottery and admission tickets) andfraudulent offers of credit repair. Infact, the survey revealed that appli-ance and auto repair scams, fraudu-lent prices, 900-number swindles,fake subscriptions, and fake warran-ties were not only attempted mostfrequently, but were also most likelyto succeed.

Some may argue that the types offraud found to be most common in-volve consumer transactions andcould be interpreted as being misun-derstandings between vendors andcustomers, or as instances of con-sumer dissatisfaction. However, thesurvey was specifically designed toorient the respondent from the outsetto report events that were criminaland fraudulent and that involved not

misunderstandings but deliberateintents to deceive. (See “The Designof the Fraud Study,” page 33.)

The findings also revealed that othertypes of fraud, though frequentlyattempted, are not often successful.These included offers of “free”prizes, credit card number scams,and fake charities.

Circumstancesaffecting the outcome

Knowledge and locational factors.The success or failure of an attemptto defraud also depends on the cir-cumstances surrounding the crime.One determining circumstance is therelationship of victim to offender.Frauds in which the prospectivevictim is acquainted with or hassome knowledge of the offender


Research in Action

Seeking help fromthe authorities

One of the most unsettling findingswas that only a small percentage ofincidents were reported to the au-thorities: just 15 percent overall. Ofthese, the majority (62 percent) werebrought to the attention of the policeor other law enforcement agency,while most of the remaining reportswere filed with consumer protectionagencies and the Better BusinessBureau. Moreover, when victimsreported the incidents to authorities,they tended to receive little in theway of a response.

The likelihood that a fraud willbe reported has no relationship towhether it succeeded or failed. Inother words, victims are no morelikely to report cases in which thecrime was carried out successfullythan those that were attempted butfailed.

What can be done tobetter combat fraud?

Public education could make a dif-ference in preventing fraud. Asnoted, attempts were less likely tosucceed in cases where victims hadheard of the particular fraud theyexperienced. Thus, informationabout the types of fraud prevalent ina certain area or at a certain time,and about the modus operandi ofcon artists operating in a certain areaor at a certain time could be useful

Table 2. Financial Losses from Fraud in Past 12 Months

Number of PercentPeople

Amount of Loss

No Loss* 22 11.8%$1 to $25 38 20.3$26 to $50 21 11.2$51 to $100 21 11.2$101 to $250 29 15.5$251 to $500 19 10.2$501 to $1,000 9 4.8$1,001 to $2,000 11 5.9$2,001 to $5,000 8 4.3$5,001 to $10,000 4 2.1$10,001 to $65,000 5 2.7

Total 187 100.0

* Loss was subsequently recovered by respondent, or respondent considered amount sominimal as to constitute no loss at all.

Source: Titus, Richard M., Fred Heinzelmann, and John M. Boyle, “Victimiza-tion of Persons by Fraud,” Crime and Delinquency, 41:1 (January 1995):58.

are more likely to succeed thanthose in which victim and offenderare strangers. This makes intuitivesense, since acquaintance mayinspire trust.

Success is also related to the way thecontact is first made. Frauds initiallyattempted through the mail or byphone are less likely to succeed thanthose made face to face, through athird person, through television, orin the print media. The location ofthe initial contact also affects suc-cess. Fraud tends to be less success-ful when the attempt is made in thevictim’s home than when contactis made at the offender’s home orplace of business, at the victim’s

work place, or in the victim’sneighborhood.

The victim’s knowledge of thecrime. Other circumstances affect-ing the outcome of attempted fraudhave to do with the way the victimrelates to the offense itself ratherthan to the offender. Thus, if thevictim knows nothing about thecrime being attempted, and if heor she takes no action to investi-gate the matter before proceedingto take the bait, the fraud is morelikely to succeed. Since this typeof circumstance involves knowl-edge, it is more amenable to modifi-cation and presents opportunitiesfor preventive intervention.

Research in Action

August 1995 33

in exposing the scams andforewarning prospective vic-tims. Since there is essentiallyno typical victim, the infor-mation net needs to be castwidely, highlighting the per-vasiveness of the threat andnoting the at-risk status of vir-tually all sectors of society.Young people and people withrelatively high levels of educa-tion need to know they are notimmune. Information aboutprevalent frauds needs to besupplemented by counselabout what prospective victimscan do to protect themselvesthrough detection and preven-tion. This information mightbe made available through800-numbers and by referrals toser-vice providers.

A “heads-up” for law enforce-ment. The revelation that compara-tively few incidents are reported tothe authorities—law enforcementand others—and that the responseis not what victims think it might beindicates another area of need andsuggests that fraud victims maymerit more attention than they arenow receiving.

Toward a betterunderstanding

The study was intended as an over-view of fraud, designed in part asan exploratory attempt to find out if

fraud victimization could be effec-tively measured. More indepth stud-ies are needed to explore the manyfacets of the issue. Future researchcould take a number of directions:

✦ Analyses of information avail-able from public and private organi-zations that deal with consumerprotection and the investigation andprosecution of fraud. Because re-porting rates are low and may notrepresent all fraud victims, otherkinds of research are also needed.

✦ Analysis of information from vic-tims, agencies to which the victimsreport the incidents, and court and

corrections records. This more com-prehensive approach could be basedon a representative sample of casesand would produce a more completepicture of how these crimes are per-petrated, investigated, prosecuted,and punished. It might also includedetailed profiles of the offenders andtheir modus operandi.

✦ Regularly conducted, nationwidesurveys of fraud victimization, simi-lar to the National Crime Victimiza-tion Survey, conducted annuallyby the U.S. Department of Justice,Bureau of Justice Statistics to obtaindata on FBI-designated “Part I”(serious) crimes.

The survey that formed the basis of thestudy used a random sample representa-tive of the adult population of the UnitedStates. A total of 1,246 respondents werecontacted by telephone in the survey,which was administered in 1991. Witha participation rate of 66 percent, min-imal weighting was required fornonparticipation.

Attempted as well as completed crimeswere examined, in what is believed to bethe first study of victimization by mul-tiple types of fraud. An initial series ofquestions was designed to orient respon-dents’ thinking to the criminal nature ofthese incidents. The respondents werethen presented with descriptions of 21types of fraud (plus a catch-all “anyother” category) and were asked if theyhad ever been victimized or if an attempthad ever been made to victimize them.

Recent victimization was studied in somedepth through questions that probed for

detailed information about incidents offraud or attempted fraud experienced inthe previous 12 months. The focus onrecent experience was meant to ensuregreater accuracy of recall. In these “inci-dent reports,” respondents were askedabout the characteristics of the crime andthe offender, the effects of the crime,whether the crime was reported, andwhat type of assistance, if any, wasreceived.

Demographic data—information aboutage, race, gender, education, and otherinformation—were obtained to enableresearchers to profile the victims.

The survey instrument (the questionnaire)was designed by National Institute ofJustice staff with input from fraud inves-tigators and was administered by thesurvey research firm of Schulman, Ronca,and Bucuvalas; NIJ staff researchersanalyzed the results.

The Design of the Fraud Study


Research in Action

Specific questions to explore.Several issues could not be exam-ined within the scope of the cur-rent study. These included:

✦ The reasons some people aremore likely than others to be tar-geted by con artists. (This is impor-tant to explore because there are nodemographic differences betweenpeople targeted by a fraud attemptand people who are not.)

✦ The strategies employed bypeople who are more adept thanothers in resisting attempts at fraud.

✦ The public information programsthat are most effective in educatingpeople about fraud and how to resistit.

✦ The ways that law enforcementand regulatory agencies can moreproactively detect and respond toemerging fraud schemes with lessreliance on reporting by victims.

✦ How the criminal justice systemcan develop and use more appropri-ate sanctions for deterring fraud.

Notes

1. For discussion of the limited re-search, see Kusic, Jane, White Col-lar Crime Prevention Handbook,Vienna, VA: White Collar Crime101, 1989; and Moore, Elizabeth,and Michael Mills, “The NeglectedVictims and Unexamined Costs ofWhite Collar Crime,” Crime andDelinquency 36 (1990): 408–18.

2. A Harris and Associates studyof telemarketing fraud found it hasbeen used against nearly one inthree Americans. A survey of tele-marketing and other direct personalmarketing frauds, conducted amongolder people by Princeton SurveyResearch Associates under thesponsorship of the American Asso-ciation of Retired Persons (AARP),revealed that three-fourths of therespondents said they had recentlybeen deceived or defrauded by suchschemes. Bass, Ron, and LoisHoeffler, Telephone-Based Fraud:A Survey of the American Public,New York: Louis Harris and As-sociates, Inc., 1992; and American

Association of Retired Persons, AReport on the 1993 Survey of OlderConsumer Behavior, Washington,D.C.: AARP, 1994.

3. Benson, Michael, Francis Cullen,and William Maakestad, Local Pros-ecutors and Corporate Crime, Re-search in Brief, Washington, D.C.:U.S. Department of Justice, NationalInstitute of Justice, 1993; Geis, Gil-bert, and Ezra Stotland, White Col-lar Crime: Theory and Research,Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980; andMoore and Mills, “Neglected Vic-tims and Unexamined Costs.”

Richard Titus, Ph.D., manages NIJ’svictims of crime program. FredHeinzelmann, Ph.D., is the formerdirector of NIJ’s crime preventionand enforcement division. John M.Boyle, Ph.D., is senior vice presi-dent of the survey research firm,Schulman, Ronca, and Bucuvalas,Inc. Dr. Titus may be reached atNIJ by fax at 202–307–6394, andby e-mail at [email protected].

Research in Action

August 1995 35

✦ Inexpensive night vision goggles.

✦ “Smart guns” that can only befired by an authorized user.

✦ Virtual reality training, simula-tion, and mission planning.

✦ Devices that can detect bombs,mines, and weapons.

Under the MOU, the systematictransfer of existing technologies intothe law enforcement and criminaljustice communities is permitted forthe first time. One result of the co-operative arrangement has been toenable DoD to use the regional cen-ters of the National Law Enforce-ment Technology Center (NLETC)to support its nonwar-related re-search and development work onproducing better tools for law en-forcement. (For more informationon NLETC, see box, “Law Enforce-ment’s ‘One-Stop Shop’ for NewTechnology Product Information.”)Another major consequence is anNIJ initiative to draw on DoD tech-nologies to develop ways to findconcealed weapons.

NIJ-sponsored research on a policedepartment experiment in KansasCity1 showed that crime rates wentdown in neighborhoods where po-lice seized illegal weapons. The ex-periment was based on adherenceto Fourth Amendment limitationson searching only those individualsfor whom there was reasonablesuspicion that they were carrying

concealed weapons. But what wouldhappen if technology would permitless intrusive searches?

Developing devicesto detect concealedweapons

In response to growing public con-cern over the illegal possession ofconcealed weapons on the streetsand in public buildings, NIJlaunched an initiative in March1995 to promote development oftechnology that would enhance thedetection and identification of weap-ons carried by unauthorized indi-viduals. NIJ Director Jeremy Travisdefined the goal of the project asfinding ways to lower the risk forlaw enforcement personnel in deal-ing with criminal suspects. For ex-ample, police officers could stop acar, order suspects out, and scanthem for concealed weapons withoutpolice officers’ having to leave thesafety of their car. Funding to designand field test prototype detectionsystems has been approved for threeseparate technologies, each employ-ing different physical principlesand each having situation-specificstrengths and weaknesses. NIJ ex-pects one or more of the detectorsto be in commercial productionwithin 3 years. These technologiesdraw on those used by DoD totrack Russian submarines andlocate buried nuclear waste.

Speaking to members of thedefense, intelligence, andindustrial communitiesin November 1993, U.S.

Attorney General Janet Reno con-trasted their victory in the Cold War,ending with the collapse of the So-viet Union, to the battle still beingwaged domestically against crime.She likened the new mission of heraudience—trying to keep the peacein distant areas where “the enemy”is hard to recognize, well-armed,and aggressive—to that of the lawenforcement community:

So let me welcome you to thekind of war our police fight ev-ery day. And let me challengeyou to turn your skills thatserved us so well in the ColdWar to helping us with the warwe’re now fighting daily in thestreets of our towns and citiesacross the Nation.

Shortly after this challenge was is-sued, the Department of Justice(DOJ) and the Department ofDefense (DoD) entered a 5-yearpartnership to formalize joint tech-nology sharing and developmentefforts for law enforcement andthose military operations unrelatedto war. The Memorandum of Under-standing (MOU) signed by bothagencies gives examples of tech-nologies that have both law enforce-ment and military applications:

✦ Less-than-lethal weapons that useblinding light/sticky foam.

Technology Transfer From Defense:Concealed Weapon Detection


Research in Action

Law Enforcement’s “One-Stop Shop” forNew Technology Product InformationThe law enforcement and criminal jus-tice communities now have access to acentralized information source—a“one-stop” shop—for state-of-the-arttechnology and product information.The National Law Enforcement Tech-nology Center (NLETC) expands onNIJ’s Technology Assessment Pro-gram Information Center (TAPIC),which has provided technology infor-mation for nearly two decades.NLETC’s data bases will initially in-clude: manufacturer and product iden-tification information, a user productdata exchange to link potential pur-chasers with product users, and tech-nical assistance to help agencies locateor borrow equipment or identify ex-perts in a particular field.

Special advisory panels and councils—with members from law enforcement,the courts, the military, academia, andcommunity and private industrygroups—will provide a “reality check”for technologies under considerationfor potential development by NIJ.

NLETC regionalcenters

Regional centers are integral toNLETC’s mission of providing di-verse and timely support to law en-forcement and criminal justicecommunities. Each of these centers,linked by a Technology InformationNetwork, will perform specializedservices:

fingerprinting, less-than-lethal tech-nologies for subduing suspects with-out injury, and improved technologyfor suspect-tracking and detection ofcontraband, concealed weapons, andillicit substances.

Accessing NLETC’sinformation network

Users of NLETC’s one-stop shop willbe able to access information about abroad range of products and technolo-gies applicable to their individual re-quirements. Information on how touse NLETC’s network is currentlyaccessible via:

✦ An 800 telephone number linkedto the National Center.

✦ Dial-up access to data bases andbulletin boards.

✦ Technology Beat newsletter.

✦ National and regional conferencesand national and local publications.

✦ Visitor centers that will showcasetechnology.

The NLETC center in Rockville,Maryland, houses a reading room anda visitors area that showcases new andemerging technologies. To learn moreabout NLETC, please call 800–248–2742 or write NLETC, Box 1160,Rockville, MD 20849.

✦ Charleston, South Carolina—cor-rections technologies and developmentof the electronic hub for NLETC’sTechnology Information Network.

✦ Denver, Colorado—interop-erability problems in law enforcement,including ways to facilitate commu-nication across jurisdictional linesusing existing equipment.

✦ El Segundo, California—investi-gative and surveillance technologysupport.

✦ Rome, New York—weaponry andweapons safety technologies.

✦ San Diego, California—develop-ment of technologies to control bor-der-related crime.

✦ Wheeling, West Virginia—tech-nology transfer from the Federal labo-ratories to industry for development/manufacture of useful law enforce-ment tools.

The Office of Law Enforcement Stan-dards (OLES) at the National Instituteof Standards and Technology—an-other component of NLETC—devel-ops voluntary national performancestandards for compliance testing toensure that individual items of equip-ment are suitable for use by criminaljustice agencies. OLES also producesuser guides that explain in nontechni-cal terms the capabilities of availableequipment. Technologies now underdevelopment include: improvedmethods for DNA identification and

Research in Action

August 1995 37

Much of the basic developmentwork has already been completedby Raytheon. In the NIJ project, thecompany will conduct an experi-ment that will test the system’s fea-sibility and provide performancedata on probabilities of detectionand false alarm rates. The experi-ment will establish that sufficientdiscriminating ability exists tomeet police “probable cause” re-quirements for a physical searchfor weapons. This technology hasthe potential for development ofportable and “standoff” weapondetection devices.

The system is expected to havea low probability of false alarms,will not require the current typeof configuration in which a personwalks through a portal equipped

Passive millimeter wave images.The Millitech Corporation’s recentdevelopment of passive imagingtechnology operating in the milli-meter wave portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum offers theopportunity for rapid and remotedetection at a distance of up to 12feet, without a direct physicalsearch, of metallic and nonmetallicweapons, plastic explosives, drugs,and other contraband concealed un-der multiple layers of clothing. Thispurely passive imaging techniquerelies solely on existing naturalemissions from objects, does notrequire manmade irradiation of theperson. Screening observations ofindividuals can be done remotelyand with discretion as required.Although passive millimeter waveimaging devices do literally seethrough clothing, the resulting im-age display does not reveal intimateanatomical details of the person.

The passive imaging approach tothe detection of concealed weaponsand other contraband hidden underpeople’s clothing works well atmillimeter wavelengths because ofa fortunate convergence of severalkey factors:

✦ Adequate resolution in a reason-able sensor size.

✦ The high transparency of virtu-ally all clothing.

✦ The extraordinarily high emissiv-ity (the power of a surface to emitheat by radiation) of human skin.

The project will include the develop-ment, fabrication, and evaluation ofa fixed-site camera (that could bemounted on a police cruiser) andmonitoring console and a proof-of-concept hand-held camera with avideo screen, connected by cable toa signal analyzer box. Designs willalso be developed for a totally por-table, battery-powered camera and astandoff camera system suitable foruse from a law enforcement vehicle.

Low-frequency electromagneticradiation. The Raytheon Companywill design and field test a concealedweapons detection device based onlow frequency electromagnetic ra-diation. When trained on a subjectand linked to a computer, the devicewill send a signal (e.g., a greenlight) indicating that the person isarmed.

The Contraband Detection System reveals two guns hidden under this man’ssweater; the weapon on top is stainless steel, while the one on the bottom isceramic.

Photo: C

ourtesy of Millitech C

orporation


Research in Action

with a magnetic sensor, and canbe operated in an unobtrusive man-ner. (Because the system could behoused in a small object like a briefcase, a person under surveillancewould not be aware of being mon-itored.) The concept is based onilluminating the subject with a low-intensity electromagnetic pulseknown as a Heaviside pulse andmeasuring the time decay of thereradiated energy from metal ob-jects carried by the person. The in-tensity and the time decay of thesecondary radiation can be charac-terized and the “signatures” identi-fied as a gun or nonthreateningmetal object. System applicationsrange from large gathering places,such as shopping malls, schools,meeting places, and airports, tosmall stores and banks.

Magnetic gradient measurements.The Idaho National EngineeringLaboratory concealed weapon detec-tion scheme will utilize a proven,existing technology used in mineralexploration, environmental charac-terization, military navigation, andsubmarine detection. The technol-ogy is based on passive samplingof the earth’s magnetic field. Localaberrations in the magnetic fieldproduced by ferromagnetic objectssuch as guns and knives will be de-tected and measured by extremelysensitive magnetometers. This is

needed in the law enforcementcommunity has been around forawhile, but until now it has notbeen available or fully suited tolaw enforcement and criminal jus-tice requirements. Through technol-ogy transfer, existing and usefultechnologies to help fight crime to-day can be quickly identified andadapted. David Boyd, who as headof NIJ’s Science and TechnologyDivision oversees these and otherprojects that assist law enforcement,noted why technology transfer is asimportant as technology develop-ment. “We exploit what’s alreadyout there—by taking productsstraight off the shelf or spendingsome time adapting them to policeuse—and we make gains in effi-ciency,” he said. “And while devel-oping new technologies for lawenforcement is critically important,equally important is the ability todeliver existing technologies intothe hands of the police right now.”

Note

1. Sherman, Lawrence W., andJames W. Shaw, The Kansas CityGun Experiment, Research in Brief,Washington, D.C.: U.S. Departmentof Justice, National Institute of Jus-tice, January 1995 (NCJ 150855).

a new application of an existingtechnology—magnetometer sensors,which are commercially available.

The proposed approach is to con-struct a scanner that can be a stand-alone unit, much like an airportscanner system, or directly incorpo-rated into doorways or hallways ofa building, but that is more reliablethan those currently in use. Datawill be collected simultaneouslyfrom all sensors in the system pro-viding a top to bottom magneticprofile of a person. Reasonable sus-picion will be dictated by the loca-tion and magnitude of magneticanomalies. The system will be usedto collect magnetic profiles of a va-riety of weapons in differing loca-tions and a number of nonweaponpersonal artifacts to establish anelectronic catalog of magnetic sig-natures. These signatures will laterbe used in analysis schemes thatwill determine the presence, loca-tion, and, potentially, the type ofweapon carried. This technologywill only detect ferromagnetic ma-terials, but few handguns are likelyto be excluded from detection.

Crime-fightingtools for today

As the weapon detection initiativeillustrates, much of the technology

Research in Action

August 1995 39

that the CALEA standards neithersupported nor contradicted commu-nity policing goals and policies.

Application to community polic-ing. For the most part, the CALEAstandards were silent or neutralabout community policing. Fewstandards pertained directly to thisenforcement approach, and thosethat did corroborated communitypolicing precepts. For example,there were almost no standardsrelated to the issue of communityinput. Only a few encouraged orrequired community input in areassuch as recruitment, crime preven-tion, and community relations, butno standards clearly discouraged orprohibited community input. Over-all, the accreditation standards sup-ported a limited form of communitypolicing, and very few of them ap-peared to seriously impede imple-mentation of the more far-reachingforms.

Application to problem-orientedpolicing. When the standards’ com-patibility with problem-solving orproblem-oriented policing was ex-amined, the researchers found themgenerally supportive of the analysisand collaboration called for in theseapproaches. One standard recom-mends analyzing vice and organizedcrime complaints to “evaluate boththe community problem and publicattitudes toward the problem.” Anumber of the standards encouragedor required collaboration with out-side agencies or officials, amongthem courts, prosecutors, fire depart-

ments, and social services (includingvictim-witness assistance).

None of the standards specificallyrefers to problem-oriented policing,nor do any require the full problem-solving process. Rather, they tend toencourage analysis and collaborationwithin a largely conventional andincident-based framework. And al-though the standards do not pro-scribe attention to fear of crime,disorder, and similar matters, theytend to focus on the more traditionalissues of crime and traffic.

Organization/management. Over-whelmingly, the standards requireformalization of organizational prac-tices. Usually, this takes the form ofrequirements for written directives.Typical standards begin with thephrase, “A written directive,” fol-lowed by such terms as “requires,”“establishes,” or “specifies.” By nomeans, however, do the standardsseem to advocate the centralized orhierarchical structures typical of tra-ditional law enforcement organiza-tions. The CALEA standards tend torequire specialization by task muchmore than the creation of specialunits, but many of the pro-task spe-cialization standards simply requirethat responsibility for some functionbe vested in an identifiable person orposition or that specialized trainingbe provided.

Managerial accountability is stressedin the standards more than opera-tional accountability. In other words,managers and supervisors more than

Accreditation confersrecognition that a levelof professional compe-tence has been attained

through conformance with measur-able standards. For law enforcementagencies, standards are defined bythe Commission on Accreditationfor Law Enforcement Agencies(CALEA). Although only about 2percent of the Nation’s 17,000 lawenforcement agencies have been ac-credited by CALEA, the programis important because it signifiesachievement on the part of the ac-credited departments and becauseit establishes uniform national stan-dards for policing.

CALEA standards cover many as-pects of law enforcement and tend topromote the adoption of formalizedpractices. By contrast, communitypolicing calls for a more open, infor-mal approach to law enforcementthan has been traditional. For thisreason, there is some belief thatCALEA standards are contradictoryto the principles of community po-licing. This thinking prompted astudy of the CALEA standards todetermine their compatibility withthe community policing approach.

Researchers looked at problem-policing and community policing,and also examined organization/management as key aspects of struc-ture and process thought to be af-fected by accreditation. Finally,researchers conducted an overallassessment of the CALEA stan-dards. The study findings indicated

The CALEA Standards: What Is theFit With Community Policing?by Gary W. Cordner and Gerald L. Williams


Research in Action

patrol officers and detectives arecovered in the accountability stan-dards. The accountability standardsthat do apply to the rank-and-filetend to emphasize administrativetasks rather than performance orservice to the public.

A number of the standards encour-age police departments to be moreconcerned about employees and cus-tomers and, perhaps surprisingly,given the accreditation program’semphasis on promulgation of writtendirectives, few standards directlyreduce or even provide guidelinesfor police officer discretion.

Overall assessment. By far, mostCALEA standards were deemed tohave little affinity with either the“professional” or community polic-ing models. The standards focusedmuch more on administrative mat-ters than on police operations. Evenstandards in sections entitled “Op-erations” often pertained more toadministration. Finally, the stan-dards were considered to be moreprocess- than outcome-oriented;that is, they emphasized methodsand procedures rather than goals,objectives, or products.

While the CALEA standards do notdirectly conflict with the principlesof community policing, they offerlittle more than modest support for aquite limited version of this enforce-ment approach. Thus, while the stan-dards encourage law enforcementagencies to gather and analyze dataand to collaborate with other public

and private agencies, they do notrequire systematic adoption of prob-lem-oriented policing. They viewpolice work and police administra-tion more in terms of incidents thanproblems, and they cite such currentconcerns as drugs, citizens’ fear,disorder, and community relationsin only a very few instances. In gen-eral, the standards encourage agen-cies to “work smarter, not harder,”but not necessarily to reconsidertheir basic assumptions about policework and their basic methods of pro-viding police service. Taken as awhole, they reflect more concernwith internal organizational issuesthan with substantive communityproblems.

For the most part, the standards tellpolice executives how to set up andrun their organizations. They do notspecify philosophy or strategy to anygreat extent and they leave mostquestions about day-to-day opera-tions and service delivery to eachagency’s discretion. Thus, agenciescommitted to community policingwill not find much in the accredita-tion standards that interfere withtheir strategic orientation. By thesame token, agencies that look tothe accreditation standards for stra-tegic guidance will not be directedto community policing to any greatextent.

Implications for the future . Itseems likely that police officialswho envision a fairly limited ver-sion of community policing willfind nothing in the accreditation

program’s administratively orientedstandards that interferes with theirmanagement of community policing.On the other hand, police officialswhose greatest concerns are withempowering their officers, encour-aging risk-taking, and removing or-ganizational barriers to employeecreativity may find the accreditationstandards more constraining to theimplementation of their versions ofcommunity policing.

Since the study was conducted, theCALEA standards have been re-vised, and a third edition was pub-lished in April 1994. The impetusfor the revision, which reduced thenumber of standards by more thanhalf (from 897 to 436), was to elimi-nate duplication. The change shouldmake it easier for police agencies toapply for accreditation and shouldtherefore generate more applica-tions. The researchers are analyzingthe revised standards and conductingcase studies of law enforcementagencies at 12 sites (all are CALEA-accredited), examining how commu-nity policing functions within theframework of the standards.

Gary W. Cordner, Ph.D., an NIJFellow, is a professor in the Collegeof Law Enforcement at Eastern Ken-tucky University. Gerald L. Will-iams, Ph.D., is Director of the BillBlackwood Law Enforcement Man-agement Institute of Texas, at SamHouston State University. Theirwork is being supported by NIJgrant #92–IJ–CX–K038.

This Journal and other NIJ documents can be viewed and downloaded from the NCJRSBulletin Board System (NCJRS*BBS). Please note also that if a document is out of print,you can still obtain a paper copy through interlibrary loan or by paying a minimal fee forxeroxing or for microfiche.

Contact: National Criminal Justice Reference Serviceby mail: P.O. Box 6000, Rockville, MD 20849–6000

by telephone: 800–851–3420by Internet e-mail: [email protected]

by modem to NCJRS Bulletin Board System: 301–738–8895by telnet to NCJRS*BBS: ncjrsbbs.aspensy.com

NCJRS Special Emphasis on

Youth Violence and GunsBecause our Nation faces an alarming increase in youth violence and use of firearms, theNational Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) has begun a special initiative to collectand disseminate information on this critical issue. NCJRS also welcomes publications, re-ports, training manuals, program descriptions, and other relevant materials from juvenilejustice agencies; social service agencies; law enforcement agencies; local, State, and Federalpolicymakers; public school officials; and community organizations to enhance the ability ofNCJRS to help you and others to address this important issue.

NCJRS resources include:

◆ Timely access to up-to-date information.

◆ Referrals to other sources.

◆ Office of Justice Programs agencies and Office of National Drug ControlPolicy publications. Several NIJ products are mentioned on the inside frontcover and in the articles in this issue; other relevant releases include:

Johnson, Claire, Barbara Webster, and Edward Connors, Prosecuting Gangs: ANational Assessment, NIJ Research in Brief, February 1995, NCJ 151785.

Kelley, Patricia, M.P.P., Mark H. Moore, Ph.D., and Jeffrey A. Roth, Violence inCornet City: A Problem-Solving Exercise, NIJ Issues and Practices, April 1995,NCJ 151399.

Roth, Jeffrey, Firearms and Violence, NIJ Research in Brief, February 1994, NCJ145533.

Sheley, Joseph F. and James D. Wright, Gun Acquisition and Possession in SelectedJuvenile Samples, NIJ Research in Brief (published jointly with the Office ofJuvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention), December 1993, NCJ 145326.

Sheley, Joseph F., Zina T. McGee, and James D. Wright, Weapon-Related Victimiza-tion in Selected Inner-City High School Samples, February 1995, NCJ 151526.(A two-page Update on this study is also available.)

Sherman, Lawrence W., James W. Shaw, and Dennis P. Rogan, The Kansas CityGun Experiment, NIJ Research in Brief, January 1995, NCJ 150855.

Violence Prevention in Middle Schools, NIJ Update, August 1995, FS 000094.

Solving Youth Violence: Partnerships That Work: National Conference Proceedings,NIJ Report, June 1995, NCJ 153211.

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs


Washington, D.C. 20531

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