On the firing line to lose state funding and hoping to target county or city dollars, the Chicago-based CeaseFire crime prevention program knew it needed to figure out, however inexactly, how many guns it may have silenced.

To aid in that effort, CeaseFire partnered with the Harris School’s Center for Policy Practice on a project with four Harris School students who spent Winter Quarter aggregating and organizing quantitative and qualitative information. The project was designed to help the Illinois affiliate of a national program, which does outreach and intervention with high-risk people in a number of communities in Chicago and throughout Illinois, begin to put a bottom line on what it has accomplished in reducing gun violence.

CeaseFire concentrates on specific police beats with the highest numbers of shootings and killings, holding events, passing out written materials and directly contacting those who might soon shoot or be shot, said Charlie Ransford (MPP’04), an evaluation analyst with CeaseFire. “We’re actually hearing about potential conflicts and mediating those conflicts to prevent shootings from happening,” he says.

“By systematically identifying what is known and what isn’t, what information is there and what isn’t, the students will offer a product to CeaseFire that will be valuable to them going forward,” said Paula R. Worthington, faculty adviser for the practicum. These practica projects are facilitated by the Center for Policy Practice, which chooses one agency from a pool of applicants each term, she said.

CeaseFire, a program of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, provided the students with programmatic information, crime statistics, and survey information, Ransford said.

“We’re trying to produce a lot of information to educate policymakers as to the value of our program. We’re hoping that this project with students will be another element to it,” he said, adding, “It’s not something that is very easy to measure.”

Worthington said students were not expected to perform a full-fledged policy evaluation in a ten-week term. “It’s a great opportunity for the students to tackle a doable but challenging problem, with restricted time and resources,” she said.

Karolina Arias (MPP’05), a student who did a human rights internship in Brazil last summer, said the subject dovetailed nicely with her policy interests. “We’re looking at their data and [its] validity, assessing what would make their data better and what kinds of questions they should be asking,” she said.

Student Sara Press (MPP’06) said the group was attempting to hone in on a “dosage indicator,” in the public health sense of the term, to measure CeaseFire’s effects. “In Chicago, there has been a 25 percent decrease in homicides in the past year,” she said. “It’s possible that CeaseFire has been 10 percent of that impact, but we need to get the data to understand all the things that have occurred.”

Luis Araque (MPP’05), a third student who hoped to gain experience in handling data and helping manage a project, said the group was attempting to capture a statistical treatment group within police beats served by CeaseFire and a control group from elsewhere. “We’re trying to help them get prepared for future program evaluations,” he said.

Ed Finkel