Insights from the Brooklyn Street PAR Team

• In Event: Innovations in Community-Engaged Research on Gun Violence and Activism: Understanding Black Youth Involvement in Violence

Abstract

Gun violence is a significant public health epidemic that is concentrated most chronically in low-income Black communities. With funding from the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research (NCGVR), panelists conducted a multi-city project studying the socio-structural factors of high-risk gun carrying among Black youth in Brooklyn, NY, Philadelphia, PA, and Wilmington, DE. Combining street participatory action research (Street PAR) and respondent-driven sampling (RDS) approaches, panelists will present methods and findings related to exposure to violent victimization, motivations for firearm involvement, perceptions of firearms, and gangs and social networks. In each city, researchers developed a representative sample of people ages 14 to 24 who are gun carriers or are at risk for gun violence (n=600). Specifically, this panel brings together professional and community experts to highlight: (1) innovative strategies in violence prevention among those actively involved in the streets and/or criminal justice system; (2) motivations for carrying guns as a protective mechanism; (3) methodological challenges in conducting research on street-identified Black populations; and (4) doing activism in low-income Black neighborhoods. Collectively, these panelists suggest that criminal justice policy efforts must account for the role of structural violence or systematic inequities on the concentration of gun violence in street-identified Black populations.

Authors

• Yasser Arafat Payne, University of Delaware

• Elise White, Center for Justice Innovation