The most recent wave of anti-violence funding comes in the form of close to $3 million that will go to 30 organizations to prevent and reduce crime in Indianapolis.
Recipients of the Violent Crime Reduction Grant Program work with the city’s community violence reduction team, connecting people at risk of perpetrating or becoming a victim of violence to resources.
Recipients include:
• Stop the Violence Indianapolis — $125,000
• Reach For Youth — $60,000
• Flanner House of Indianapolis — $100,000
• Indianapolis Ten Point Coalition — $60,000
• Boys & Girls Clubs of Indianapolis — $75,000
Find a full list of recipients here.
“These grant dollars empower those who know our neighborhoods best,” Mayor Joe Hogsett said in a statement. “We all have a role to play in violence reduction and equipping grassroots organizations with the tools they need to succeed ensures we address this crisis at all levels.”
The grant program is funded with public dollars allocated annually by the Indianapolis City-County Council. The Indianapolis Foundation, an affiliate of the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF), administers the program.
New to the program this year is funding specifically for organizations focused on domestic violence, youth mental health and early intervention to support youth. Among the recipients are the Domestic Violence Network ($105,500) and National Alliance for Mental Illness Indianapolis ($66,000)
Will this work?
There isn’t a broad consensus on how well initiatives such as the Violent Crime Reduction Grant Program work — because there isn’t a consensus on what “work” means.
On the whole, violent crime has trended downward. The notable exception is murders, which hit a new record in Indianapolis this year amid a national surge in other major cities. There were 241 murders as of Dec. 20, according to data from Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, compared to 206 at the same time in 2020.
Lauren Rodriguez, director of the Office of Public Health and Safety, said you can’t “count negatives,” meaning it’s impossible to say how many lives anti-violence programs have saved.
“It’s tragic and horrible,” Rodriguez said of the murder numbers, “but it could have been worse had we not been intervening this whole time.”
Organizations that get funding work on the peripheral of violent crime, focusing on issues such as employment, housing, education and recidivism.
In the 2019-20 grant cycle, when 54 organizations split $2.3 million, groups that focused on adult recidivism reported 5% of participants with a prior conviction were arrested for a new crime during the grant period, according to data from CICF. For youth-serving organizations, 17% of clients under court-ordered restrictions had a new case filed against them.
Is that good? Bad?
Immanuel Ivey, senior director of workforce development and entrepreneurship at Edna Martin Christian Center (EMCC), can only speak for the work at EMCC, focusing on reentry services, but he said it has worked. The organization worked with 25 people this year, Ivey said, and four recidivated.
EMCC has been a grant recipient more than once — including in this cycle — and Ivey knows of clients who were shot at or jumped at a bus stop.
“Once they step outside them doors, man, they’re back to reality,” he said.
Lena Hackett, president at Community Solutions, is well practiced at answering questions about if these types of programs are successful. Someone can go to six organizations, she said, and by the time they get to the sixth, it clicks. That doesn’t mean the first five were failures.
“You can’t just say it was the sixth one,” Hackett said. “It just happens to be the last.”
Measuring success, in other words, is more nuanced than a binary question — does this work? — lends itself to.
There hasn’t been an academic analysis of the Violent Crime Reduction Grant Program, but in 2019, researchers from IUPUI and Wayne State University published an analysis of the Community-Based Violence Reduction Partnership, which is separate from but similar to the grant program.
Their conclusion: The findings “suggest that programs like the CBVRP may be one important piece of a community-wide response helping to bring about change.” (Find the whole report at the bottom.)
It’s not a resounding endorsement, but Eric Grommon, associate professor in the O’Neil School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI and one of the researchers, said it’s fair to interpret the analysis as mildly optimistic, though he cautioned it’s about two years old at this point.
Grommon couldn’t say if it would be fair to apply the same analysis, even loosely, to the grant program specifically.
Grommon prefers to consider harm reduction when evaluating if a particular program is successful. Take the $2.9 million just announced in grants as an example. Is that money better off going to nonprofits or back into policing and other parts of the criminal justice system?
People might get upset with the numbers, Grommon said, but it seems better to him to get people services they may have missed out on otherwise.
More money on the way
Anti-violence funding is about to ramp up, thanks to federal pandemic relief funding. The city-county council approved a plan in September that includes about $150 million in violence reduction spending, including $45 million in additional grant funding over the next three years.
Information about grant funding in 2022 will be released early in the new year, OPHS Director Rodriguez said.
The anti-violence package also includes money to hire 50 additional peacemakers — people who work to interrupt violence before it starts — and 100 police officers.
Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853 or tylerf@indyrecorder.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.
