Advancing Interorganizational Crime and Violence Reduction Goals Through a Relational Change Intervention

• Date: 01 June 2022
• Author: Brenda J. Bond,Erika Gebo
• DOI: 10.1177/08874034211065996
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/08874034211065996

Criminal Justice Policy Review

2022, Vol. 33(5) 455 –479

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/08874034211065996

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Article

Advancing Interorganizational

Crime and Violence

Reduction Goals Through

a Relational Change

Intervention

Erika Gebo1 and Brenda J. Bond1

Abstract

Effective interorganizational collaboration is deemed essential to comprehensive

crime and violence initiatives but rarely is it empirically assessed. An 18-month

intervention to improve collaboration Comprehensive Gang Model (CGM) locations

was used in this study to examine the impact on increasing community capacity

to address gangs and violence and reducing gang and violence in the community.

Relational coordination theory grounded the collaboration intervention. Results

from the quasi-experimental design showed significant, increased collaboration and

reduction in violent crime in one intervention site. Other crime reduction efforts

were explored as counterfactuals. Matched comparison sites saw no change in the

ability to work together or violence reduction. Study implications are that relational

coordination interventions may facilitate the goal of working better together, but

parallel evaluations for each of the five core CGM strategies are needed to understand

the independent effects of each strategy on gang and violence reduction goals.

Keywords

criminal justice policy, crime reduction, Comprehensive Gang Model,

interorganizational collaboration

Comprehensive crime and violence reduction approaches bring diverse entities together,

such as criminal justice agencies, social service providers, government units, school

personnel, and community stakeholders, to tackle problems of common interest.

1Suffolk University, Boston, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Erika Gebo, Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice, Suffolk University, 73 Tremont Street, Boston,

MA 02108, USA.

Email: egebo@suffolk.edu

1065996CJPXXX10.1177/08874034211065996Criminal Justice Policy ReviewGebo and Bond

research-article2022

456 Criminal Justice Policy Review 33(5)

Scholars have noted that comprehensive criminal justice initiatives are complex, dif-

ficult to evaluate, and when evaluated, success is not often demonstrated (Klein &

Maxson, 2006; Papachristos, 2011). Yet governments as well as public and private

funders are increasingly moving away from single-agency fixes and programs and

shifting toward collaborative approaches to tackle complex social issues (Skogan,

2011). Compounding funding realities is research showing that in communities most

affected by violence, residents are unlikely to support crime and violence reduction

initiatives unless problems are addressed holistically (Chaskin, 1999).

While comprehensive efforts to reduce crime and violence in communities align

with current funding structures and community interests, there must be an understand-

ing of how diverse entities best coordinate and collaborate to reach those shared goals.

Comprehensive initiative policy graphs, logic models, and evaluations of individual

components can help clarify processes and the mechanisms through which goals are

met (e.g., Gravel et al., 2013; Sampson et al., 2013), but interorganizational collabora-

tion is a strategy that undergirds all comprehensive initiatives and needs research

attention. To date, much of the focus of large-scale crime and violence reduction initia-

tives has been to evaluate specific components, like individual programs or solitary

program strategies (e.g., suppression), rather than to directly examine the interorgani-

zational aspects of collaborations themselves.

Coordinating activities among diverse stakeholders are often mandated through

policies and funding streams but doing so is complicated and does not necessarily

translate to impactful, sustainable relational connections among entities. Research

demonstrates that collaboration in interorganizational collaborations (ICs) is complex

and dynamic (Bryson et al., 2015). If collaboration among organizations is successful,

the result should be improvement in outputs and outcomes with the assumption that

the sum of the collaborative effort is greater than any one individual entity. Insufficient

research exists, however, on crime and violence reduction ICs and how to evaluate

their collaboration as a contribution toward shared goals. The Comprehensive Gang

Model (CGM) is an ideal crime and violence reduction IC through which to examine

the collaborative impact. The CGM is a multisectoral initiative that seeks to reduce

gangs and violence through five coordinated strategies. Organizational change and

development is explicitly identified as a core strategy for success, and IC is a critical

component of that strategy. This study pointedly evaluates the outcomes of a quasi-

experimental organizational change intervention focused on collaborative improve-

ment in a CGM initiative. We examine the effect of the intervention on increasing

community capacity for the gang, crime, and violence reduction as well as whether

increased capacity has any measurable effect on crime reduction.

ICs in Criminal Justice

Criminal justice ICs have been in existence since the widely known Chicago Area

Project and similar initiatives in Boston and New York (Marris & Rein, 1967; Miller,

1962; Shaw & McKay, 1942) addressing a range of issues such as community vio-

lence, drug abuse, and child maltreatment. Crime and violence reduction ICs have

proliferated in recent decades with the belief that these issues are too complex for any