Gun crime incident reviews as a strategy for enhancing problem solving and information sharing

Abstract

Over the last several decades, police departments and other criminal justice agencies have seen a shift toward a proactive problem-solving response to crime problems. This problem solving orientation has often included an emphasis on expanded partnerships across criminal justice agencies as well as with a variety of community stakeholders, including researchers. This manuscript uses the issue of gun violence as a lens through which to examine the organizational and inter-organizational changes necessary to apply a data-driven, proactive, and strategic policing-led response to gun homicides and non-fatal shootings in four Midwestern sites. Each site adapted a unique data collection process and incident review. The data collection, incident reviews, and the varying models developed across the four cities, provide a reflection on corresponding organizational and inter-organizational changes that illuminate the movement toward this proactive, data-driven, problem solving model of criminal justice. Fulfilling the promise of the incident reviews, however, requires internal organizational and cross-agency inter-organizational collaboration to align people, systems, and resources with this proactive, problem-solving model. Additionally, effectively implementing these organizational and inter-organizational changes appears dependent on commitment and leadership, collaboration and partnerships, data quality and availability, and training and communication within and across organizational boundaries.