Gun Violence Prevention: A Multidisciplinary Approach

• In Event: Crime vs. Health Issues: The Overlap between Public Health and Crime

Abstract

Gun violence is one of the most pressing public health problems. Expecting the police alone to combat gun violence has been ineffective. A holistic approach to gun violence should be viewed as a public health crisis. The goal of this project is to reduce gun violence in New Haven by increasing community policing strategies and engaging the healthcare community in problem solving. Our goal is a three-pronged approach. 1: Improving police officer ability to respond to the community by training officers in trauma-informed policing practices. 2: Improve community efforts by training healthcare providers in gun violence prevention strategies and improve understanding of health care issues surrounding response to and reporting of gun violence. 3: Improve the ability of police to address gun crime through the development of a real-time crime center. The University of New Haven’s Center for Analytics will advise on the technical aspects in developing interactive dashboards based on the Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to visualize and interact with the data. This will improve our understanding of the correlation of gun violence to community health factors through data analysis

Authors

• Lorenzo M. Boyd, University of New Haven

• Karl Minges, University of New Haven

• Michele Vittorio, University of New Haven

• Aliyah Wright, University of New Haven

• Victoria Nielsen, University of New Haven