Progress Illinois

The Chicago Justice Project's Tracy Siska has published the second installment of his five-part examination of the anti-violence program CeaseFire. In this post, he scrutinizes the federally-funded report by Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Studies which found that CeaseFire significantly reduced the number of shootings in six of seven Chicago neighborhoods.

Siska critiques both the report's methodology and the decision to make the results public without first being peer-reviewed:

This report made no attempts to control for the impact of external issues on the level of violence. The Chicago Police Department and Ceasefire are mutually claiming influence for the crime drops in the areas that Ceasefire worked in. Maybe they both had an impact, maybe just one did, or maybe the crime reduction, (if there is one), is due to a still undetermined extraneous variable that the academics, the police, and Ceasefire administrators have missed. Other agencies have been involved also, including the US Attorney’s Office and their Project Safe Neighborhood. [...]

This evaluation is loaded with assumptions that have not even been close to validated by this study or any other study. This is why researchers should not release research to the general public before the social science community gets a chance to assess its credibility.

Read the whole thing. Also, check out our previous posts on the CeaseFire debate here.