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Palm Beach County Youth Violence Reduction Project

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Reducing Youth Violence

Beginning in 2004, Palm Beach County, Florida, experienced a string of high profile crimes involving youth and guns, many of which resulted in homicides. This prompted the Palm Beach County Criminal Justice Commission to investigate the problem and work to identify tangible solutions through evidence-based research and the involvement of officials system-wide. The Palm Beach County Youth Violence Prevention Steering Committee was created and the commission enlisted the Florida State University Center for Criminology and Public Policy Research to be their research partner on the project in April 2005. The following organizational chart depicts the comprehensive nature of the project in terms of the involvement of all facets of the criminal justice system.

chart depicting the Palm Beach County Youth Reduction Project organiation

The initial phase of the project involved compiling data from a variety of sources, including arrests involving guns from 1996 to 2004 from all the police departments within Palm Beach County, Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) statistics, criminal history data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and detailed homicide victim information from the Palm Beach Medical Examiner’s Office. These data were then analyzed to develop a thorough understanding of the extent of the gun violence problem from a historical perspective, to determine what demographic groups were contributing most to the problem, and to identify hot spots of gun violence. The results from this analysis can be seen in the final report and presentations (July 2005 and September 2005).

Contact Information

Bill Bales, Ph.D., Project Co-Principle Investigator
Florida State University
College of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Center for Criminology and Public Policy Research
325 John Knox Rd, L-102
Tallahassee, FL 32303
Phone: 850-414-8355
Fax: 850-414-8357
E-mail: wbales@mailer.fsu.edu

Staff

Principal Investigator: Thomas G. Blomberg, Dean and Sheldon L. Messinger Professor of Criminology, FSU College of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Co-Principal Investigator: William D. Bales, Associate Professor, FSU College of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Graduate Research Assistant: Lucy Cushman, FSU College of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Related Links

Funding Sponsor

Palm Beach County Criminal Justice Commission