UMSL Criminology and Criminal Justice alum Paige Vaughn completed research she conducted with the late Richard Rosenfeld on the efficacy of the St. Louis Police Partnership, a joint initiative of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and Missouri Department of Corrections that is aimed at reducing crime. (Photo by August Jennewein)
Paige Vaughn is among the legion of former University of Missouri–St. Louis students on whom the late Richard Rosenfeld left an indelible mark over his more than 30 years as a member of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
Vaughn credits Rosenfeld – a founding faculty member in UMSL’s renowned doctoral program in criminology and criminal justice and a national expert on crime trends and crime statistics – with stoking her curiosity. He gave her both permission and an example to unapologetically ask questions while admitting she doesn’t have all the answers. He also showed her the value of working with and learning from practitioners, recognizing that they often understand the intricacies of how things play out in real life better than anyone.
Vaughn, who earned her PhD from UMSL in 2020, has carried those lessons with her as she’s started her own academic career. She has spent the past 3½ years as an assistant professor at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama.
“I don’t know where I’d be without Rick, but I know I’d be a worse scholar,” Vaughn said. “I take pride in going into communities and agencies, learning from them and making sure my research findings are made accessible and useful to them. I will forever be grateful for lessons I’ve learned from Rick and hope to one day be half the mentor he was.”
Last year, Vaughn had the opportunity to complete some of his work and add to his legacy.
The two were nearing the end of almost eight years spent researching the efficacy of the St. Louis Police Partnership, an intensive program run in partnership with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and Missouri Department of Corrections using the strategy of focused deterrence to help probationers and parolees avoid illegal activity and other risky behavior while connecting them to social services, including job training resources as well as substance use treatment.
Rosenfeld had had a role in designing a pilot for the partnership program in 2016. Unlike other group-based focused deterrence programs, this one used individual in-person meetings between participants and detectives and parole officers. Rosenfeld tapped Vaughn – then still a student – to work as his research assistant. The two had first met when she enrolled in one of the last violent crime classes he taught before retiring as a full-time faculty member, and they’d bonded over course discussions of crime clearance.
“The idea is you take people that are at a very high risk of committing some sort of offense that’s a problem in the community – in our case, it was gun violence – and you have law enforcement tell them, ‘We will help you if you let us, and we’ll stop you if you make us,’” Vaughn said. “If you do stop committing crime, then we’ll help you, and we’ll give you all of the social services you need.”
The pilot program had showed promise, but Rosenfeld wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of the program on the likeliness of arrest and prosocial outcomes, such as employment and social support. In 2018, Rosenfeld secured a $635,300 grant from the National Institute of Justice to do just that.
Members of the police department and Missouri’s Division of Probation and Parole screened offenders with a history of gun violence for participation in the program, and they passed along a pool of 117 individuals to Rosenfeld and Vaughn. Of those, 58 were selected to receive treatment as part of the program beginning in 2020. The remaining 59 made up a control group.
Working with a group of six detectives from the police department as well as probation and parole officers, they tracked more than 440 home visits between June 17, 2020, and June 26, 2023.
“Every time that they did a home visit, the probation and parole officer and the officer, they would do a report of what went down at the home visit, if they’re improving or not,” Vaughn said.
Vaughn, Rosenfeld, and another researcher later conducted semi-structured interviews with eight of the program participants as well as five police officers, four community corrections personnel and a judge who had referred individuals to the program.
“It was a lot of work, and it was sad because he got sick right when we were finishing everything up,” Vaughn said. “But it was also incredible, in a way, to see Rick finish so strongly. He contributed to this project, his city, and our field until the day he passed away. He was that passionate about his work.”
She wound up giving a presentation without him to members of the police department and Missouri’s Division of Probation and Parole about their findings days before he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. On the day of the presentation, Rosenfeld stated, in an email to Vaughn and program stakeholders: “I’m so proud to have played a role in this wonderful program and to have worked with such impressive partners.” Rosenfeld died about two months later, on Jan. 8, 2024.
Their work was impactful, and the St. Louis Police Partnership remains in operation today.
“Although we had some challenges with the sample size due to COVID, there were still important findings this research showed us,” said Brooke Harvey, a two-time UMSL criminology and criminal justice alum now serving as a unit supervisor for Missouri’s Division of Probation and Parole. “The first being how important finding stable employment affected our clients and reduced their violations while on supervision.”
Harvey, who has been involved with the St. Louis Police Partnership since 2017, said another unexpected outcome was the impact working with police had on participants and their views about police.
“Most of the clients came into the program hesitant to work with the police but many of them built a strong rapport and have continued that contact even when they are off of supervision because of the relationships they built,” she said. “This is so essential to improving community relations between citizens and the police.”
Rosenfeld and Vaughn were listed as co-authors on an April 2024 report published by the National Institute of Justice and titled “The Impact of Individualized Focused Deterrence on Criminal and Prosocial Outcomes.” NIJ simultaneously released “The St. Louis Police Partnership: An Individualized Focused Deterrence Implementation Guide.”
In it, Rosenfeld and Vaughn provide 10 recommendations for departments looking to develop their own programs modeled after what’s being done in St. Louis. Among them are carefully selecting participating police officers, securing support from organizational leadership and other key stakeholders, leveraging staff expertise and considering limiting the program to individuals motivated to make change.
“Rick was really into practitioner-oriented research, so he wanted to make it so that you don’t just go into communities, take from them and then leave with all the data,” Vaughn said. “He wanted to make sure that people had access to all of the challenges that we ran into, as well as possible solutions to them. So, he prioritized making this implementation guide that can help guide other police departments who want to do this sort of thing in the future. I’ve talked to a couple police departments already about what we would have changed.”
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department also received recognition for its work with Rosenfeld. At its annual conference in October, the International Association of Chiefs of Police honored the department with the 2024 IACP Leadership in Law Enforcement Research Award for demonstrating excellence in conducting and using research to improve police operations and public safety.
Vaughn, who has accepted a faculty appointment in the University of South Carolina’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice beginning next fall, was not the only former student continuing work started by Rosenfeld over the past year.
Current UMSL doctoral students Ernesto Lopez and Bobby Boxerman recently released the latest in a series of reports for the Council on Criminal Justice on crime trends in U.S. cities in 2024. Rosenfeld began compiling the reports with Lopez’s assistance amid a spike in crime that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. The latest report revealed that reported levels of 12 of the 13 offenses covered – everything but shoplifting – were lower in 2024 than in 2023.
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