Violence Prevention CohortCall #2

July 29, 2016

Attendees:Baltimore (Rachel Donegan – University of Maryland)Colorado Springs (Aubrey Day – YMCA of Pikes Peak/Live Well Colorado Springs)Denver (Maritza Valenzuela and Abby Isaacson – Denver Public Health)Liberty City (Deltavier Frye – Florida Department of Health)Seattle (Valerie Tran – Interim CDA) South Los Angeles (John Rivera and Jeanette Pena – National Health Foundation)Springfield (Sarah Page, Sarah Goddard – HAPHousing)

Staff:Courtney Bartlett – BUILD TA Coordinator (Duke/PPB)Janna West-Kowalski – PL (County Health Rankings and Roadmaps)Katie Miller – PL (Prevention Institute)Victoria Nichols (Prevention Institute)Jamecca Marshall (Prevention Institute)

Purpose: To convene sites who may address violence in their implementation plans, in order to: Learn from each other about what strategies they are implementing or considering for their

implementation plans, and Learn from subject matter experts about best practices from an upstream, community-level

perspective.

Resources: Baltimore News articles

o http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/wp/2016/06/16/2016/06/16/coming-of-age-in-a- city-coming-apart/

o https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/i-dont-know-if-people-understand-what-is- happening-in-baltimore/2016/06/15/0cc26436-31aa-11e6-95c0-2a6873031302_story.html

Site Round Robin: Sites shared one strategy related to violence prevention that they are thinking of proposing in their implementation plan:

Liberty City: Mental Health first aid training in community. Starting with teachers, elementary school, and day-care staff, they will conduct mental health awareness training.

Springfield: Physical activity strategies – walking groups around the neighborhood. Models (go trek) for walking clubs with police participation some of the time. Groups will report illegal activity and code enforcement issues to police or city.

Baltimore: neighborhood-based practices. They would like to connect work of schools to work in neighborhoods.

Denver: creating a city-wide strategic plan on violence prevention. On Aug 6 there’s an event with police and youth in southwest neighborhood of Denver. Have community participate in dialogue.

Colorado Springs: Leadership development (neighborhood-based leaders) to address violence and other barriers in the community.

South LA: Focusing on local parks to evaluate safety and expand physical activity programing for parks that are underutilized. It can prevent gang activity, and also enhance physical activity.

Seattle Project OverviewTell us about your community. Who lives there? What barriers to health and safety do they face?The Chinatown neighborhood is a quarter square mile with 3500 residents and 8000 employees. A majority of the population is Asian/Pacific Islander. Barriers to health: lack of public safety, poor environmental cleanliness, social isolation. Public safety has been a major issue for decades as a result of institutional racisms and historic disinvestment in this neighborhood. Currently, there is an unsolved murder of a neighborhood public safety activist who filled a gap for neighborhood police. His murder has exposed that the city has not been doing its best in protecting the neighborhood. Over the last year they’ve seen a spike in violence and crime. Increase in tent encampments is also causing fear and increased violence. Small businesses are struggling because of lack of safety in neighborhood.

How has your BUILD partnership been working in the community to address these barriers?They are looking at basic conditions for a healthy and safe community. Their health action plan is multifaceted, and focuses on a variety of determinants. It integrates three overarching approaches:

1. Increasing investment in public spaces and safety2. Stabilizing and enriching business communities3. Influencing policy around the built environment and public health.

The team developed and disseminated a public safety survey to ask community members their perception of neighborhood safety and in turn, inform policy on how they could do a better job protecting neighborhood residents. This is the first time they were intentional about asking community members about public safety as it relates to health and stress. They received 330 responses. About 50% of residents claimed to have witnessed violent or nonviolent crime in the neighborhood. 70% of respondents said lack of public safety causes them to feel stress and anxiety. Over 70% of respondents do not call 911 when they witness a violent or nonviolent crime. They don’t call because they don’t expect any follow-through by the police. This is in part due to cultural factors – in many countries where residents are from, police are corrupt. Related to advocacy and policy, the city and police department claim to be data driven, but they are using 911 data. Since residents aren’t calling 911, it appears as though the neighborhood has few problems, but they know that that is not the case from the survey results.

What role has your healthcare partner played in your work?Swedish Medical Center has been really supportive in the past year. As a major institution, they’ve been careful to listen and learn and not impose themselves on the neighborhood. They’ve been interested in helping with the advocacy piece and have committed to giving their voice for advocacy moving forward.

As a major system in the state, when they say that they believe this is important, that brings a lot of press. Swedish has been ready to give statements looking at the clinical side and what it means to them to have safety as a chronic stressor in the neighborhood.

Police engagement has been a necessary part of your process. Tell us a bit about how you’ve approached that relationship.The Interim Community Development Association (ICDA) has done a lot of coordinating with the Seattle police department. The police try to be engaged, but ICDA works hard to build the community voice and help police respond in a way that is appropriate and culturally responsive. If citizens call 911 they can be put on hold for 30+ min while they find a cultural representative who speaks the language. That’s not a good response time for a 911 call. Encampments are home for a lot of drug dealers and cause permanent residents a lot of fear. Addressing the issue of homeless encampments has been difficult and will require coordination with the police. ICDA is trying to be more coordinated among other non-profits who are also trying to work with police.

At the same time you were collecting and analyzing survey data, the mayor also convened a public safety task force. Talk about the participation of your organization, and how the information you collected was incorporated into this plan.One outcome stemming from the murder last July was the creation of a public safety task force, to recognize that community members could help the city better address public safety in neighborhoods. In Feb/March of 2016 a task force was convened with the goal of bringing together community leaders and city officials to talk about community/city-based strategies to address public safety in the neighborhood and not just policing. The Task Force planned to develop a public safety action plan. In January 2016, ICDA developed the public survey without connection to the task force. As they collected valuable data from survey, they were invited to share the findings with the task force to help them develop the recommendations to the mayor. This is exciting because they may be able to inform what strategies are adopted by the mayor. The mayor’s strategies are broad and wide-reaching, but the plan is just one piece and a lot needs to happen for successful implementation and sustainability. ICDA’s survey findings have been getting a lot of press and they were invited to share them with the Seattle City Council. This is a great policy opportunity to highlight deficiencies in the mayor’s action plan. They hope to convey that the work is not done and needs to continue.

How has the work you’ve accomplished in your planning year influenced what you are proposing in your implementation plan? Seattle has a number of strategies addressing multiple social determinants of health. 1) To address public safety they’re looking at parks activation. There are three parks in the

neighborhood (with the least amount of green space in Seattle) that they plan to target. They received a grant from the Seattle Parks and Rec Department that they will supplement with BUILD funding to work on this.

2) They also have a clean streets effort to revitalize the business district. Public safety prevents people from visiting the businesses there so they hope to improve and clean up the streets to make them more welcoming for everyone.

3) ICDA is working with the Preservation Development Authority to create a common platform for organizations in the neighborhood who are currently doing their own public safety data collection, to jointly collect data. They could then share this data with the police so the data adequately reflects the community. They will supplement the data collection effort with an educational component so community members know they should still call 911. With their ties to the city and the police, they are hoping to get their input to develop the tracker so they can easily integrate into the police practices as well.

Open Discussion/Q&A with PI Experts – Jamecca/Katie Tracking platform – how expensive is that and how hard is it to maintain it? Ultimately, the platform

for Seattle will be used by organizations, not individual community members. The orgs are trusted and can be the ones to relay the information. For the Tracking platform – people are using google spreadsheets or excel, but if they want it to be common, they’re thinking of partnering with Seattle University who have students who can work on this (finance or criminal justice program). They don’t know the cost yet, but want a more robust system than just google spreadsheets. They are hoping to think through this in the implementation phase, as well as sustainability and housing of the data. They are concerned about liability if people are disclosing litigious information. They need a plan for what to do if they have that information and someone hasn’t called 911 yet.

Springfield’s police department has invested in a crime analysis center – have people doing real-time analysis, and that is linked to specific policing initiatives in the neighborhood. They’re not having to track violent activities separately. However, in Springfield the sheriff’s department is receiving calls instead of people calling 911. People are still confused about who to call.

General Discussion Denver is wondering if there is a connection between Baltimore city dating matters work and data

funding? Dating matters is an IPB curriculum for middle schoolers and their parents. The only middle school in the footprint is one of the pilot schools for the city. They are also working with the Prevention Institute on city-wide youth violence prevention plan, and the target BUILD school is one of the pilot neighborhoods in that plan. Also, the Baltimore City Health Department is about to roll out a youth health and wellness strategy and youth violence prevention is a part of that. Denver wants to see how the BUILD work is fitting into the city-wide youth violence prevention plan.

BUILD should connect with National Network for Safe Neighborhoods. They have numerous strategies, and one of the frustrations is that you have to have the police dept joining to get your city connected to it, which is not always easy. It might help if BUILD made that connection and helped their police dept adopt some of those approaches.

It’s helpful when law enforcement from one community talk with another community and can make the case for involvement in a way that resonates with them.

Conclusion and next steps – Katie/Courtneyo Next call – October (date TBD).