What Does Success Look Like? Lessons from the Innovations in Community-Based Crime Reduction (CBCR) Program

Abstract

Using mixed methods, we examine how a cohort of twelve sites operationalized and adapted the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Innovations in Community-Based Crime Reduction (CBCR) grant program. CBCR is built around data, place-based strategies, neighborhood revitalization, and community partnerships. Community-based interventions are typically quite complex, embedding multiple mechanisms by which the intervention may succeed or fail. We examine fidelity to the program and its relationship to implementation success, as well as the achievements and challenges reported by the sites.

Keywords:

• Evaluation
• fidelity
• implementation success
• community crime prevention

Acknowledgement

We thank Rosanna Smart for her thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.bja.gov/programs/crppe/innovationssuite.html.

2 https://www.lisc.org/our-initiatives/safe-neighborhoods/cbcr/what-cbcr/cbcr-sites-fiscal-year/.

3 www.crimesolutions.gov.

4 These correlations results are virtually identical to those we found with a larger sample of sites, which provides greater confidence of their reliability. Please contact the authors for more information.

5 All accomplishments noted here were reported to us by the sites; we did not review or verify them through data.

6 In some cases, evaluative research is considered non-human subjects research and does not require IRB approval.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by Award No. 2016-BJ-BX-K069, granted by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.