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, 2024 is the deadline for governments to obligate SLFRF funds, meaning that they must not only allocate dollars to specific purposes, but must also – before the year ends – have contractual commitments in place to spend the funds.

As the SLFRF performance period comes to an end, what can we say about how governments have allocated these funds to Community Violence Interventions? The Biden administration prioritized CVI to address gun violence, facilitating an 18-month collaboration with 17 jurisdictions to expand these programs. Cities like Austin, Texas, leveraged SLFRF aid to launch new CVI initiatives, while others, such as Chicago, utilized the funds to enhance and scale existing programs. There is much research to be done to understand how governments used SLFRF aid to bolster CVI efforts in diverse way. Our data have provided us with at least a preliminary understanding of how CVI programs have proliferated across governments over the last four years.

For this post, we compared CVI spending in the first quarter of (Q1) 2022 and Q1 2024. The datasets we use are available to the public from the Treasury Department and contain project-level spending information from governments’ Project & Expenditure Reports. We used these datasets because the Q1 reports are the only ones in which all governments report. The data we analyzed tells us three things.

First, CVI ideas diffused across the country between 2022 and 2024.*  Of 21,563 governments reporting data, just 32 had at least one project that meets our definition of CVI-CVP in 2022. By Q1 of 2024, that number had more than doubled to 84.

Similarly, the number of projects that met our definition of CVI-CVP increased over the period. In Q1 2022, governments reported 42 such projects.** Those projects continued in 2024 and 109 new projects were identified in the 2024 dataset.

Expenditures followed suit. In 2022, governments spent $4.65 million on projects that met our definition of CVI-CVP. In 2024, that increased to $161.44 million—a fivefold increase. We expect spending to increase in the coming years because most of the projects (n=84) were less than 50% complete and/or had yet to be started by the end of Q1 2024.

While the use of SLFRF aid for novel CVI investments highlights how governments have used the program for policy innovation it is still a small share of the total amount of federal aid available. Indeed, the 84 governments in our analysis received a total of $20.56 billion in SLFRF aid. As such their collective CVI-CVP spending is just 0.8% of available funds. As we have noted in past posts, governments have used the vast majority of their SLFRF allocations for revenue replacement.   

Nonetheless, our analysis shows the expansion of CVI-CVP in both scale and funding over the last four years. From a modest beginning in 2022, the number of projects and associated expenditures increased significantly by 2024, reflecting growing adoption of CVI strategies nationwide. While much of this progress is ongoing, the looming end of the SLFRF program underscores the urgency for governments to commit remaining funds. Continued research will be essential to evaluate the long-term impact of these investments and to inform future approaches to addressing violence through CVI.

Data Notes:

*For this analysis we included projects from governments that reported spending information in both the 2022 and 2024 datasets. We excluded projects from governments that only reported in one of the datasets.

** There were an additional 12 projects that met our definition of CVI-CVP in the Q1 2022 dataset; however, eight of those projects were subsequently cancelled and four were re-classified to a different expenditure code (meaning the recipient government no longer identified the project as CVI). We excluded these 12 projects from our analysis.

***The figures regarding Q1 2024 spending in this blog differ from figures in our October 2024 blog. The October 2024 blog examined all projects coded as CVI by all governments. In contrast, this post only looked at projects from governments that reporting spending information in both the Q1 2022 and Q1 2024 datasets.