Driving toward peace in Philadelphia

Firearm violence causes nearly 60% of the deaths of young black men age 15-34 in Philadelphia. The city had 351 homicides in 2018 and 2019 is on track to be an even worse year. Our Mayor convened city leaders, including the health department, police department, and social service agencies, to plan and carry out violence reduction strategies. We propose to create a publicly available, real-time portal allowing city and community leaders to access data to assess the effectiveness of anti-violence efforts, allowing us to scale up those that are working, and to revise those that are not. The work will involve collaboration between city agencies and departments, hospital-based violence prevention programs, and community organizations.  We will share information about the portal with community organizations and policy makers on a regular basis and tweak the portal design as needed based on their input to ensure that it meets their needs.

351 Philadelphians died due to homicide in Philadelphia in 2018 and 1,376 were shot. But these numbers only begin to detail the impact of gun violence on our city. Thousands more city residents experienced the trauma of the loss of a friend or family member, and thousands of our children crouch in back bedrooms when shooting starts outside their homes or fear the walk to school because bullets fly on their streets and in their neighborhoods. We cannot begin to truly address our city’s high rates of poverty and chronic disease unless and until we can make our city safer. The city has a great deal of data on this violence. We know where those shootings occurred and a fair amount about the social connections between shooters. But until this point in time, we have had no way of combining these data sets with those on efforts to address the violence. We spend millions on antiviolence programs, but don’t know which ones are really making a difference and which may be less effective. With limited resources and rising levels of violence, it is critical that we create a transparent, data-driven approach to addressing gun violence in the city.

This solution works to improve the lives of people in Philadelphia’s lowest income neighborhoods, those most impacted by the city’s high rate of gun violence, as well as all residents of Philadelphia. Individuals who perpetrate and are victims of gun violence are a tiny fraction of the city’s residents, but their neighbors, family members, friends, and classmates constitute a much larger portion of the city. Philadelphia communities that experience the highest levels of gun violence are also those with the highest rates of poverty, population that did not graduate from high school, and unemployment.

Often the best people to try to prevent gun violence are those living in the communities that experience it. This means many of the most important gun violence prevention investments are in small, grass roots organizations. These small community groups likely do not have the resources to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts. Our public-facing violence prevention data dashboard would allow grassroots organizations to show the effectiveness of their efforts. This evidence of effectiveness will allow the city to duplicate and invest in similar programs and be a resource for grassroots organizations when they are applying for funding from the city and philanthropic organizations. 

We propose to hire a data analyst who will create a public-facing portal that combines data on firearm-related crime from the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center (the DVIC) with data on city initiatives, community antiviolence programs and health and human services data from the city’s CARES registry. The analyst will develop the portal using Tableau software and ArcGIS technology, including ESRI data visualization tools, using the health department’s opioids dashboard as a model. Specifically, the portal will allow public access to de-identified information about deaths, non-fatal shootings, geographic trends and hot spots, and an overlay of city initiatives including police Pinpoint initiative efforts, vacant lot greening and vacant building rehabilitation efforts, and potentially related trends (e.g. the opioid epidemic). We will solicit feedback from a wide array of stakeholders on both the initial design of the portal and its effectiveness to ensure that the final version meets the needs of all stakeholders. This process will also help us to ensure awareness of the portal and its potential uses among all of those for whom it is intended to be a resource. This portal will allow city leaders, community-based organizations, and Philadelphians concerned about gun violence to easily understand what is happening with gun violence in the city, what is being done to address it, which solutions are working, and which need tweaking. It will also provide a valuable tool to small community-based anti-violence programs to plan and target their efforts. This public portal will both enhance public trust in the city’s anti-violence work and add an important layer of accountability in which the performance of city-funded programs will be visible to community members and to policy makers. Academics will be able to use this data to test hypotheses about the drivers of gun violence and protective factors. And the portal will allow the city’s policy makers to make informed decisions about where to invest limited dollars to reduce firearm violence. Through an effective, transparent system of data provision, we believe this approach can help to reverse these trends and assist city and community leaders to build a city whose people can thrive and whose neighborhoods build physical and mental health. 

City government functions tend to exist in silos. People do not. Many people involved in violent acts have had interactions with a wide range of city departments and city-funded community programs. Yet we often do not know about or understand these interactions and how they may either contribute to or mitigate risk. Through the proposed collaboration between city departments and agencies, hospital-based and community-based programs, to create a transparent data portal, we propose to build the city's data capability to better understand these interactions and to make what we understand publicly available, while protecting confidentiality. This work will help us to understand risk and protective factors and identify strategies that are working well and need to be expanded as well as those that need to be rethought. Beyond the data analysis portion of the work though, by honing our data visualization and data communications skills, we can build a solution that can truly speak to a variety of audiences. We want to show rather than tell people what is happening through use of map layers that will allow them to see where violence is happening, where interventions are taking place, and how interventions are impacting violence in their neighborhoods and the city. We have undertaken similar projects in the past such as our Community Health Explorer and our Opioid Dashboard, but the addition of data from community programs and environmental interventions and the work to make the data truly speak to community members makes this effort unique.

The solution uses several forms of technology: ArcGIS and other ESRI data visualizations tools and Tableau, as well as data analysis software (R or similar). ArcGIS mapping allows for powerful visualizations of the geographic distribution of risk and protective factors. Mary Bassett has described mapping as a technology that "makes injustice visible." Using this technology, we will be able, for example, to look at the locations of shootings over time against a map of vacant lots and buildings that have been remediated. The criminologists at the DVIC have developed a pilot technology to study social networks, which will be further refined, tested, and used for analyses. Social network analysis is a powerful tool for better understanding how violence spreads.

It has become common for leaders to talk about taking a public health approach to gun violence, but there is a core aspect of the public health approach that is often ignored: the importance of evaluation to any public health activity. We look to the prevention of deaths from car crashes that has resulted from attention to driver behavior (e.g. drunk driving campaigns), cars (e.g. seatbelts and airbags), and roads (e.g. rumble strips and highway ramp design), but we often leave out of those discussions a mention of the many mistaken hypotheses that were evaluated and discarded before we got to the safer cars, roads, and driving behaviors we have today. Evaluation is critical to the design of effective public health approaches to any problem and firearm violence is no exception. As we work to identify high risk individuals and replicate gun violence reduction strategies implemented successfully in other municipalities, we must make sure that our programs roll out effectively and we must make that evaluation process transparent to the communities most affected by violence in order to earn and keep their trust. A real-time data portal accessible to the public can help to ensure both program effectiveness and transparency.

Approximately 1200-1300 Philadelphians per year directly experience firearm violence by being shot themselves. Their immediate families and close friends make up a circle of roughly 12,000 close contacts. But in terms of the impact on the physical and mental health of the city, we need to consider all of those who experience stress and trauma related to firearm violence. If we are to build a healthy, thriving city, all residents must feel safe. At the same time, we are aware that a relatively small number of city residents are at highest risk of committing or becoming the victims of violent acts. Both to protect these highest risk individuals and to best contain the violence overtaking our city, we will focus most on these high-risk individuals.

With the resources and infrastructure we have now, we are very limited in our ability to rigorously evaluate the city’s violence prevention programs. A 2018 program evaluation revealed that there is a gap in services for young men between the ages of 18 and 34 but was not able to show which of our existing programs were most effective. By the end of 1 year, we anticipate coverage for the city of Philadelphia, which has roughly 1.58 million residents, This number will be the same for our 5 year goal. We also plan that after a year, the portal will provide us with the data necessary to evaluate from a public health perspective the effectiveness of the approximately 50 city-funded violence prevention programs. 

Our goal is to have the portal up and operational, with input from city and community stakeholders, within 1 year and to continue to expand its content over the next 5 years. Once the portal is functioning, we will work with our network of community contacts to ensure that they know about the data available in the portal, to continue to incorporate their feedback over time, and to adjust and add to the data visualization based on their input.

Once created, we will work to further disseminate information about the data portal with a particular focus on grassroots community groups. The portal can help to create transparency and accountability for the city's violence prevention efforts, allowing individuals, community leaders, and policy makers to assess progress and the equity of that progress for themselves. Our hope is that these efforts will encourage stakeholders to put forward new ideas for anti-violence efforts based on the data, support the work of groups applying for funding to support evidence-based anti-violence programs by making data easily available, and build trust between city departments and agencies working to reduce violence and community leaders.

Barriers include costs to cover the data analyst to create the portal, cooperation from city agencies to contribute the necessary information in a timely fashion, and ensuring that community members who could benefit from the tool are aware of it and of how to most effectively use it. 

The SOLVE MIT grant would fund the data analyst position. To make sure city agencies contribute all necessary data and information, we plan to leverage the Philadelphia Roadmap to Safer Communities Executive Team (the team convened by the Mayor with leadership from all relevant city agencies), which meets bi-weekly, as well as the existing infrastructure used in the creation of the similar opioids data platform. To make sure the public is aware of the resource and how to use it, we will similarly leverage the infrastructure created in the opioids work, as well as the connections that the public health department has built with communities in previous violence prevention public health campaigns. The city-wide violence prevention team also has a communications group that will be working to build public trust and buy-in for the city's violence prevention work as a whole. 

Our solution team is part of a governmental agency, the Division of Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. We would use project funds to hire an analyst who would create the data visualization portal using data from police, criminal justice, health and human services, and community partners utilizing Tableau software purchased by the department. To help gather input for the design and dissemination of the portal, we will collaborate with the City's Office of VIolence Prevention, the Managing Director's Office, the District Attorney's Office, the Philadelphia Police Department, the Department of Licenses and Inspections, and with hospital-based and community-based anti-violence programs. The input of these collaborative team members will be invaluable in ensuring that the portal achieves its intended goals.

Our solution team includes the division director, a part-time program manager, a half-time project manager, an public health analyst embedded in the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center, and another half-time public health data analyst for a total of 4 people. We would use SOLVE funds to hire an additional analyst to carry out the creation of the data portal. Collaborative partners, as discussed above, will also be integral to the solution.

Our team includes physicians, public health experts, and data and evaluation staff who have built collaborative relationships with police, community-based organizations, and other city departments over the past 2 years that will enable us to obtain access to the data necessary for this project. Both the Division Director (Dr. Cheryl Bettigole) and the Program Manager (Dr. Ruth Abaya) are physicians and public health experts with a longstanding interest in strategies to reduce gun violence. We will also leverage the work of the city's opioid program, which created and maintains a Tableau data dashboard used to track the City's work to decrease overdose deaths. Philadelphia’s Mayor has made a public health approach to gun violence in the city a major focus for his administration, with an all-hands-on-deck approach that includes the leadership of all relevant city departments. This includes widespread support, both within city government and among community leaders, for taking a data-driven approach to this problem including repeated demands from civic leaders for evaluation of the effectiveness of current city spending on violence reduction programs. The timing is right for Philadelphia to implement a system for analyzing and sharing data that is clear, transparent and user-friendly. 

The Philadelphia Police Department has already agreed to allow a public health analyst to be embedded in the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center, a fusion center that will give the analyst access to police, FBI, and other criminal justice activity in the city. We are also partnering on this work with Health and Human Services and will have access to their CARES data warehouse, as well as with the Office of Violence Prevention, the Managing Director's Office, the District Attorney's Office, and numerous other city departments and agencies. Our division has also conducted extensive community outreach and coalition building over the past 3 years and has strong ties to grassroots community groups in affected neighborhoods. We are partnering with the Medical Examiner's Office on the creation of a Firearm Homicide Death Review team and the Chief of Homicide for the City's District Attorney's office, the Chief of Homicide for the Philadelphia Police Department, and the Mayor's Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Strategic Initiatives  have all agreed to serve on that team. 

We are a governmental agency tasked with improving the health of Philadelphians and funded through city general funds.

Key resources: staff, Delaware Valley Intelligence Center (a fusion center) data, CARES Health and Human Services data warehouse, community antiviolence program data, data on environmental interventions including vacant lot greening and abandoned building abatement.

Partners and stakeholders: Police, District Attorney, Managing Director, Office of VIolence Prevention, Hospital-based violence prevention initiatives, community programs

Key activities: data analysis including mapping, data visualization, dissemination, feedback integration

Type of intervention: data portal

Channels: phila.gov/health (portal TBD)

Segments: city government, community groups, hospital-based violence prevention groups

Value proposition: Effective use of data can help decrease gun violence, saving lives and decreasing economic cost of violence.

Cost structure: staff, software

Revenue: avoided costs, increased city wage tax and sales tax if violence decreases.

The City of Philadelphia has committed to fund work on firearm violence prevention due to its impact on the health and well being of city residents. The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence estimates the costs of gun violence at $700 per American per year or over $1 billion per year in Philadelphia. If Philadelphia could reduce its firearm homicide and shooting rate by 10% per year, we have the potential to save $100 million in avoided costs in the first year alone. That includes some costs (e.g. Medicaid costs) that are borne by the state or federal government, but substantial savings would accrue to the city, including avoided prison costs, the potential for increased city wage tax revenue, and increased economic opportunity in neighborhoods that have been blighted due to gun violence. If we can create a data portal that has clear value both to city leadership and to community partners, it will be easy to make the case for covering the relatively small cost to maintain that portal and the data analysis that underlies it. 

We are excited about the potential for SOLVE to help us develop the most effective visualization strategy for this work, to help us best disseminate information about the portal, and to learn from experts in related fields about how to maximize the capabilities of the solution we design. Within the public health department, we have expertise in epidemiology and statistics and experience with using Tableau. But through the networks available to us through SOLVE, we would be able to share best practices with other cities, learn from a range of public and private partners about innovative ways to use ArcGIS and Tableau technology to enhance the user experience of our data portal and maximize the effectiveness of our efforts. There is an immense difference between making data publicly available and making that data really speak to a wide variety of audiences, particularly lay audiences. SOLVE offers us the potential opportunity to do the latter. SOLVE also offers us the chance to hone the way we present information about the portal so that we can be the most effective communicators possible as we work to disseminate this tool to policy and community leaders. We want to create a tech tool that is easily understandable, that meets the needs of stakeholders across the city, and that becomes better and better over time as we tweak it based on user input. That tool in the hands of city and community leaders can help us build toward a peaceful, healthy, thriving city.

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Experts in data visualization (TBD): we have an in-house ArcGIS analyst who developed the maps we use in our work already and tools like Philadelphia's Community Health Explorer (https://healthexplorer.phila.gov/) but we know much more is possible and would welcome the opportunity to learn from experts in the field. 

TED: The development of the tool is important, but it will only truly achieve our goals if we are able to get it into regular use by the varied stakeholders in the city. We would welcome the opportunity to partner with communication experts such as those at TED who can help us develop a variety of presentations for policy makers and community groups on the tool. 

Experts in gun violence prevention at Everytown for Gun Safety: we hope that if we were to be awarded this prize, one advantage would be an opportunity to work closely with experts at Everytown for Gun Safety to ensure that the approach we take is as comprehensive and effective as possible. 

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The Everytown for Gun Safety Prize would enable us to fund the work of creating a clear, effective data visualization portal in Tableau utilizing data from a wide variety of community and city partners and to communicate it broadly to key stakeholders. This portal will help to build trust and transparency for the city's violence reduction efforts and provide a much needed resource for community groups that may not have the capability to access or analyze data themselves. Data utilized in the portal will be de-identified to ensure that confidentiality is maintained. Prior to public display of all new portal visualizations, the analyses will be discussed by a group that will include representation from police, public health, and a community representative to ensure that ethical and community sensitivity considerations are respected and included. The City's Law Department will also be consulted to ensure all laws and regulations about the confidentiality of data are followed. 

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