How Have State and Local Governments Invested SLFRF Dollars in Community Violence Interventions, as of March 31, 2024?

By Amanda Kass and Phil Rocco

This blog post is a follow-up to our June 9, 2023 examination of how governments are using Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program (SLFRF) dollars to support community violence interventions. As a reminder, governments have until December 31, 2026 to spend their SLFRF dollars (although all the money must be obligated by the end of this calendar year).

As we have mentioned before, governments must report to the U.S. Treasury Department how they are spending SLFRF dollars. State governments, territories, and counties and cities with large populations (known as Tier 1 and 2 recipients) must report this information quarterly, while others (those in Tier 5) report annually only. The most recent data for all governments covers spending that has occurred between the start of the SLFRF program and March 31, 2024. This latest dataset (available on Treasury’s website) contains spending information for 26,532 governments. The table below lists the number of governments in each reporting tier.

Reporting Tier	# Governments Reporting Spending Information in the March 31, 2024 Dataset
1	392
2	1,592
5	24,548

After governments submit their reports to the Treasury Department, Treasury releases the data in an excel spreadsheet. That reporting data includes all projects supported by SLFRF dollars and includes details about the projects like descriptions, how much money has been spent on the project, and (when applicable) whether the project has a labor agreement.  We analyzed the most recently released dataset to determine how many projects governments have classified as CVI and among those projects how many are true CVI initiatives (read about our methodology here).

How Many Governments Have CVI Projects? How Many Projects Did Governments Label as CVI?

Governments must assign projects to one expenditure code, and there more than 100 codes. There is one specific code for CVI: “1.11-Community Violence Interventions.” We first looked at how many governments had any project assigned to that code. Of the 26,532 governments, just 359 (or 1.4%) had at least one project that the government labeled as CVI. In other words, only a small fraction of governments report using any SLFRF dollars on initiatives they perceive as community violence interventions. Of the 136,487 projects reported, 924 (0.68%) are coded as CVI. Governments report that they have spent $1 billion on those 924 projects. However, the projects coded as CVI include a wide range of activities, including salaries for violence interrupters, purchasing patrol vehicles, support for victims of domestic violence, and diversion programs.

But How Much Is Really CVI Spending?

As we have documented in earlier posts, recipient governments are responsible for assigning projects to the applicable expenditure code and have wide latitude in determining how to spend SLFRF dollars. To determine how much governments are actually spending on CVI initiatives, we performed a content analysis of the project names and descriptions for each of the 924 projects governments assigned to the CVI expenditure code (read more about our methodology here). We considered a project as falling under the umbrella of CVI-Community Violence Prevention (“CVI-CVP”) if the project involved community-driven strategies for tackling violence (particularly gun violence), targeted at-risk or high-risk populations, and did so as an alternative approach to traditional policing. These strategies could include, but were not limited to, group violence interventions, community-based violence interrupters, and hospital-based interruption programs. We also included projects that aimed to reduce violence through changes to the physical environment (e.g. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), treatments such as Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy ®(TF-CBT) and Multisystemic Therapy®, job training or summer youth job programs, and/or connecting youth to caring adults and activities such as mentoring and after-school programs.

Projects that did not meet our definition of CVI-CVP were classified into one of the following groups: law enforcement; support for criminal courts and individuals convicted of crimes; victim services; or other. Finally, we also took note of all instances in which the project description was too vague to classify. 

As the table below shows, among the projects that governments labeled as CVI, just 231 can be classified as CVI-CVP. The total amount spent on those 231 projects is $377.4 million.

Classification	# Projects	Total Expenditures ($ Millions; as of March 31, 2024)
Courts	23	$9.74
CVI-CVP	231	$377.40
Law Enforcement	354	$332.85
Other	127	$92.84
Unclear	34	$29.71
Victim Services	155	$162.04
Total	924	$1,004.59

There were 106 unique governments that have at least one project that meets our definition of CVI-CVP. Those 106 governments were allocated $55.07 billion in SLFRF aid––meaning that the amount of spending on CVI-CVP initiatives is about 1% of those governments’ total aid.

These findings, which are consistent with our analysis of prior data releases, suggest that the true amount of CVI spending is far less than governments are reporting.

Download the data