Director Brandon Sterling (at left) welcomes attendees, including St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones and St. Louis County Executive Dr. Sam Page, to the Save Lives Now! Advisory Council meeting last Thursday in the Millennium Student Center Chamber at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Save Lives Now! is a regional initiative to reduce violent street crime by 20% over the next three years. (Photo by Steve Walentik)

Elected leaders, law enforcement and criminal justice officials and representatives of community organizations from across the St. Louis region gathered Thursday morning in the Millennium Student Center at the University of Missouri–St. Louis for the latest Save Lives Now! Advisory Council meeting.

“There are some wonderful people doing wonderful work in the room,” the initiative’s director, Brandon Sterling, said as he surveyed an audience that included St. Louis County Executive Dr. Sam Page and St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones and welcomed them all to the third-floor Chamber.

UMSL criminologists Chris Sullivan and Lee Slocum are lending their expertise in research and data collection to the Save Lives Now! initiative, which aims to reduce violent street crime by 20% across the St. Louis region over the next three years.

A pair of UMSL faculty members, Chris Sullivan and Lee Slocum, both from the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, were also listening intently from the fourth row as Sterling began to discuss the progress of Save Lives Now!, which is working toward a goal of reducing violent street crime by 20% across the St. Louis region over the next three years.

Both Sullivan, the department’s chair and the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Youth Crime and Violence, and Slocum, a professor and the director of the department’s master’s program, are serving as part of the implementation team for the effort, which is being led by the East-West Gateway Council of Governments.

Next month, Save Lives Now! will begin rolling out a pilot program in the city with plans to begin serving 40 individuals considered at high risk of becoming offenders. The initiative aims to break the cycle of violence by deploying a three-pronged strategy of focused deterrence, cognitive behavior theory and street outreach.

The expectation is that Save Lives Now! will launch similar efforts with an additional 45 participants from targeted areas of St. Louis County and St. Clair County in Illinois.

Sullivan and Slocum will provide research and evaluation of those efforts, not only this year but over the next three years, as the initiative ramps up to a planned 500 total participants across the region.

“Chris and Lee are incredible resources to the Save Lives Now! regional anti-violence initiative,” said Jim Wild, the executive director of East-West Gateway Council of Governments. “They have dedicated countless hours of their time helping East-West Gateway’s research department and partners crunch and present data on violent street crime in our region.

“We see both of them leading evaluation efforts to ensure Save Lives Now! strategies are being delivered with fidelity and results are being properly measured and documented. This type of oversight will help the initiative make any needed course corrections and also ensure that the work being done is truly reducing shootings and homicides. We are so deeply grateful to them and to UMSL for the ongoing partnership. This demonstrates the true power of collaborating across jurisdictions for regional gain.”

Save Lives Now! grew out of a one-day crime summit in May 2023 with Thomas Abt, the founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction and an associate research professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland.

Abt returned the following December to lead a five-day practicum to develop a regional anti-violence strategy. The late Richard Rosenfeld, a Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UMSL, had been involved in planning for that practicum but had to step away after being diagnosed with cancer. Slocum and Sullivan both joined the effort in his stead with Slocum sharing research during the practicum and Sullivan signing on to assist with implementation in January 2024.

The work aligns with a $779,614 grant Sullivan and Slocum received from the National Institute of Justice in 2023 for “Understanding and Refining Violence Intervention Implementation: St. Louis, MO as a Crucial Case.”

“The funding that we received was predicated in part on us being more dynamic in reporting to practitioners in the field and community stakeholders,” Sullivan said.

They’re hoping to provide data and research in a timely enough manner that will help practitioners adjust their activities as needed to ensure success.

Sullivan and Slocum don’t believe this three-pronged strategy of focused deterrence, cognitive behavior theory and street outreach has been tested before, at least at this scale. It will be difficult to gauge the effectiveness of each intervention together and individually.

“Even evaluating one of those components can be tricky, and that’s why some of the evidence base is called evidence-informed, because some of those are so hard to evaluate,” Slocum said. “It’s going to be really hard to evaluate so many different things going on in so many different places. Even though these efforts are focused in specific areas, people live in the county and then operate in the city, and they’re getting services all over. It’s going to be tricky to think about what that looks like and how to capture that.”

Both Sullivan and Slocum are grateful for the opportunity to engage with people from so many different organizations and work together on a project with the potential to have real impact on the St. Louis region.

“I’ve spent a lot of my career building data skills and writing papers, and that’s all well and good,” Sullivan said. “But to be able to see how something has evolved and to be a partner and bring the skills and experiences that we’ve been working on since grad school to something like this is really important and gratifying in a way that having a paper published isn’t.”

It’s very much in line with the role UMSL plays in St. Louis.

“We’re a very community-engaged institution,” Slocum said. “I think it’s important to be involved here. You get to learn what other people are doing out in the community, and I like that. I like being able to learn what’s happening in local organizations and seeing all the work that they’re doing.”