How are cities spending ARPA funds to address violent crime?
Local Governments’ Use of ARPA Funds on Community Violence Interventions
Principal Investigators: Dr. Amanda Kass, Assistant Professor in the School of Public Service at DePaul University; Dr. Philip Rocco, Associate Professor of Political Science, Marquette University
The passage of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) delivered $350 billion in emergency aid to U.S. states, cities, counties, towns and villages––the largest one-time transfer of multipurpose aid in the last 50 years. What policy issues are they prioritizing in their use of ARPA funds? And what factors affect the decisions cities make?
This active project, supported by the Joyce Foundation, examines the barriers to and facilitators of cities’ use of federal dollars to advance community violence intervention (CVI) strategies.
The phrase “community violence intervention” refers to a specific type of approach to addressing community violence, which is interpersonal violence that occurs outside the home and, within the U.S. context, is often hyper-localized patterns of gun violence. CVI strategies aim to tackle community violence by engaging “individuals and groups to prevent and disrupt cycles of violence and retaliation, and establish relationships between individuals and community assets to deliver services that save lives, address trauma, provide opportunity, and improve the physical, social, and economic conditions that drive violence.”
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Using ARPA Dollars to Support Community Violence Interventions: Where Are We Now?
Over the last four years, the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA)’s State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) program has led to a prodigious number of investments by governments in novel solutions to longstanding social and economic problems. While many of those experiments will continue for years to come, SLFRF funding will not. December 31,
More about the project
The passage of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) delivered $350 billion in emergency aid to U.S. states, cities, counties, towns and villages–the largest one-time transfer of multipurpose aid in the last 50 years. While this aid allows public officials around the country to respond to a variety of health, economic, and infrastructural crises, the Biden administration has encouraged local governments to devote a portion of this funding to public-health interventions designed to reduce the rate of violence crime, especially given the worsening condition of gun violence during the COVID-19 pandemic in many cities. In June 2021, the President also announced the Community Violence Intervention Collaborative (CVIC), which aims at scaling “evidence-based community-led strategies to reduce gun violence and enhance public safety for children, families, and communities”, focusing on 15 communities in the United States.
Still, cities face a number of challenges when it comes to implementing initiatives to reduce violence and reform the criminal justice system. First, cities require high-quality information on the need for violence prevention reforms and the potential effects of evidence-based community-led strategies for reducing gun violence. Second, cities may face fiscal and organizational incentives to spend on pre-existing programs rather than invest in new initiatives. Third, especially in cities with weak fiscal and economic conditions, there may be greater competition among local stakeholders over programs and priorities related to violence prevention.
For this active research project (from 2022-2024), Dr. Kass and Dr. Rocco will investigate how 26 cities make investments in community-violence interventions, drawing on a combination of quantitative analyses of city budgets and interviews with key officials and stakeholders from communities directly impacted by violence to understand residents’ needs and the expectations concerning the use of federal aid for these matters. Based on their analyses, they aim to produce policy recommendations and lessons on how future federal aid can be deployed at the local level to address issues of gun violence prevention, justice reform and racial equity.
This website captures the research project in progress as the research team gathers and analyzes data. The blogs and data page will be updated regularly as the research team gains new insights and creates datasets. This site is meant to capture not just the research findings, but also the research process.
How are cities spending ARPA funds to address violent crime 