OFVP Firearm Violence Research Group Meeting Minutes, May 16, 2023

Date: Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Time: 9:30am - 11:00AM

MEETING MINUTES

  1. Welcome/Roll Call/Approval of Minutes
    • Meeting Called to order @9:33am
    • Facilitator Joe Hoereth welcomed FVRG members to the meeting.
    • FVRG Members Present: Joe Hoereth, Tammy Kochel, Darryl Kroner, Timothy Lavery, Dave Olson, Kimberly Smith, Rebecca Weiland (Sitting in for Soledad McGrath)
    • FVRG Members Absent: Andrew Papachristos, Lance Williams, Jon Patterson, Eric Reinhart
    • Other Attendees: Christopher Patterson, Ana Genkova, Jaqueline Carrillo, James Pagano, Jonathan Hoyt, James Pagano, Stephanie Howard
    • Notetaker: Jessica Cortez
    • Meeting minutes for FVRG March 21, 2023, approval for these minutes were tabled until the next meeting.
  2. Public Comment - No public comments received
  3. Discussion & Work Items
    1. Office of Firearm Violence and Prevention Update - Assistant Secretary Patterson provided an update on OFVP.
      • All the notice of funding opportunities are closed, OFVP is in the process of reviewing applications and once that is completed another review will be done to identify any gap areas. ? 16 local advisory councils' areas across the state. ? 26 communities in the city of Chicago
      • RFP is still open for an evaluation partner and wants to inform the group and if anyone from the group is allowed to apply for that RFP to evaluate the OFVP overall.
    2. Presentation on "State of Firearms Violence in Illinois" - Report Facilitator Hoereth along with Ana Genkova shared a PowerPoint presentation.
      • Report Purpose: To make recommendations to OFVP regarding what data it should track regarding firearms violence in Illinois. The report intends to:
        1. Provide a full sense of the scale and nature of the problem to support better decision-making and provide baselines for comparison with regard to evaluation
        2. Identify the current gaps/limitations in the existing data and challenges of compiling data from disparate sources that need to be overcome
        3. Offer potential solutions to improving data collection and filling data gaps statewide.
      2. WISQARS (CDC)
        • What it tracks - Fatal and nonfatal injury, violent death, and cost of injury data.
        • Pros: Data compilation tool available for web-based visualization that includes death and injuries
        • Cons: Data lag by two years
      3. Illinois Violent Death Reporting System (IVDRS)
        • What it tracks - Data reported by coroners to the Illinois Department of Health
        • Pros: Complete/comprehensive violent death data
        • Cons: Data lag by two years; Data only includes deaths, not injuries; Full access requires research projects with IRB approval.
      4. National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)
        • What it tracks - Captures detailed data about characteristics of criminal incidents (formerly FBIs UCR)
        • Pros: Detail about violent crimes involving firearms for majority of the state, including weapon used, time, date, offender and victim demographics; Data available at most a year after incident and in many cases within 48 hours
        • Cons:
          1. Agency participation in 2022 was still 50 fewer agencies than in 2020 UCR summary reporting and covers at best 80% of the population.
          2. Access to data is largely limited to ISP and criminal justice agencies (ICJIA)
          3. ICJIA is building its capacity to effectively query and test data quality. Broader use may require formal agreement w/ISP.
        • FVRG Member Olson: Is the data actually available in 48 hours? Does that mean it's getting reported? ? FVRG Member Lavery: Carl is optimistic about that. Still need to review and authenticate what was written in the original draft. Member Lavery does not believe that to be true. A Lot of it's going to be batch updates.
      5. Illinois Department of Public Health Data
        • What it tracks - State-wide death and injury by firearm
        • Pros: Current and complete municipal data on counts of deaths and injuries with a lag shorter than other sources.
        • Cons:
          1. Data is not available without a special request.
          2. Data in some communities are redacted to protect victims' identities.
          3. Data comes from two streams of collection-deaths and injuries-and necessitate two separate requests.
        • Facilitator Hoereth: There may be other IDPH data that is relevant especially if we're talking about other kinds of injury other than gunshot. Well leave that open at the moment.
      6. City of Chicago Violence Reduction Dashboard
        • What it tracks - Data on violence trends within the city limits, include fatal and non-fatal shootings and other types of violent crime
        • Pros: Near real-time violence data with visualization tools; Detailed data down to the block level geography
        • Cons: Data only for the city of Chicago
        • Facilitator Hoereth: This is the only source that has homicide and injury in real time available through the web portal.
      7. Gun Violence Archive
        • What it tracks *-  basic count of deaths and injuries, state, and block-level address; Data on injury in shooting incidents with links to sources about the incident's nature, the persons and weapons involved
        • Pros: Gun-related death and injury data in near-real time available for free. Reports and web-based visualization tools are available to the public; Data available at multiple levels of geography
        • Cons: Ledger available for download, but additional information about the nature of the incident needs to be entered manually. Data on armed robberies with no injuries has a lag.
        • Facilitator Hoereth: This source is widely cited in the media. They are not 100% completely transparent on their process for identifying incidents and the details of the incidents. However, because the official systems out there nationally around gun violence data are either lagging so far behind or are incomplete. This is the best source the media has for current data.
        • FVRG Member Olson: Do they have an existing freedom of information act request with IDPH? They might match what Chicago has because they're using that source of data right?
        1. Facilitator Hoereth: Unfortunately, we will have to reach out to the nonprofit that is called Gun Violence Archive to ask those questions.
        2. FVRG Member Smith: We've done a bit of work with the gun violence archive, and we know a few of the folks over there. One of my colleagues is on the research analysis advisory group. If you want to talk to them about their methodology an introduction can be made.
      8. Building a Composite Measure: Our goal was to identify the "best" sources for OFVP to track considering:
        1. Comprehensiveness - most relevant data to OFVP programming
        2. Time lag - most current data available
        3. Geography - needs to include OFVP eligible areas AND the capability to be compiled by other levels (neighborhood, political jurisdictions, etc.)
        4. Accessibility - OFVP needs to be able to access the data as needed in a format that can be easily integrated into reports
          • FVRG Member Olson: One of the things we've gotten from IDPH frequently is their inability to provide data when the count is too low. Is there an actual official rule about that? They previously told us they can't release anything if the count is less than 10.
          • Facilitator Hoereth: I can comment that less than 10 is probably an ancient census practice of suppressing low level geography counts less than 10.
          • FVRG member Lavery: We have similar guidance in our agreement with the State for what we can release in terms of the arrest data that they provide us. There's some guidance that the Federal Department of health and Human Services has put out that may guide some of the adoption of these rules and the nature of the rules.
          • FVRG Member Olson: A Lot of the time lag is because they will not put out anything until the entire data set is complete, or until the entire state is complete. There are other State agencies that produce these annual reports and won't pull it out until all 102 counties data is complete.
    3. Preliminary Recommendations
      • Facilitator Hoereth: One recommendation is to continue utilizing IDPH data until NIBRS becomes more complete.
      • Considerations for discussion:
        1. Complement IDPH data with Gun Violence Archive?
        2. Working directly with local police jurisdictions for data in non-Chicago eligible areas?
        3. Utilize data from the Gun Violence Archive instead?
        4. How important is it to have non-injury data tracked?
      • FVRG Member Olson: I think it's really important to have non-injury data, because at least it's based on national data that 80% of firearm violence does not result in injury so we're missing the majority of the incidents. I'm reluctant to use the Gun Violence Archive to make policy decisions for the State when we don't know what the source is.
      • FVRG Member Lavery: My concern is whenever you have this many data sources there's always going to be discrepancies and confusion. Facilitator Hoereth: One of the things to consider is the way the eligibility is determined if we have these clusters.
      • FVRM Member Kroner: With the 6 data sets it would be good to evaluate the data sets according to the criteria on the previous slide and what FVRG Member Olson mentioned with disaggregation.
    4. Question added in chat.
      • Stephanie Howard: Hello all, my name is Stephanie Howard and I am the System Director of Security for Memorial Health, a 5 hospital health system based out of Springfield. I also serve on a Firearm & Workplace Violence workgroup for SIU School of Medicine. Curious if our groups might be able to collaborate. Just a couple thoughts on the current discussion...IDPH Injury Data related to gun violence is likely coming from what hospitals are required to report. If you may be looking at overall gun violence, you may have some luck working with the city of Springfield and/or Chicago as I believe they both utilize ShotSpotter, which is a gunshot detection system. It acoustically tracks gunfire. This may be one area where you might be able to validate against some of the other data sets.
    5. Lastly, just wanted to share this article about Illinois Data availability - news article on gun violence data
      • Facilitator Hoereth: Yes, it is and that comes from IDPH's emergency room admits data.
      • Ana Genkova: Does anyone know how the ShotSpotter data is submitted?
      • FVRG Member Kochel: It's transmitted to officer's phones when there's a shot fired, and ShotSpotter picks it up. It has a very limited, usually one mile square radius that each individual area would cover. It's not coverage for the entire city so not sure that it quite meets what we're wanting to do here, and sort of getting municipal level data unless many of the cities used it across the entire city but it tends to be very expensive and so the smaller agencies can't get other data and won't have ShotSpotter.
      • Facilitator Hoereth question to Stephanie Howard: Are you aware of what form it is that you all use to submit your emergency room data?
      • Stephanie Howard: Will reach out to the editor and get that information.
    6. Recommendation on ways the state can improve data collection/systems. Considerations for discussion:
      • Support full participation of all local jurisdictions in NIBRS?
      • Support capacity-building around data collection and management at local and state levels?
      • Facilitator Hoereth: I think this conversation has been helpful for us being able to get this report to an actual draft form that we share with everybody. Please keep an eye out for information on the next meeting. Due to vacation schedules, it may not happen.
    7. Links Shared:
  4. Proposed Next Meeting Date/ Time - Tuesday, July 18th 9:30am
  5. Meeting Adjourned @ 10:49am