OFVP Firearm Violence Research Group Meeting Minutes, September 19, 2023

Date: Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Time: 9:00am - 11:00am

Meeting Minutes

  1. Welcome/Roll Call/Approval of Minutes
    • Meeting called to order 9:35am
    • Facilitator Joe Hoereth welcomed FVRG members to the meeting.
    • FVRG Members Present: Joe Hoereth, Tammy Kochel, Darryl Kroner, Timothy Lavery, Dave Olson, Kimberly Smith, Soledad McGrath
    • FVRG Members Absent: Andrew Papachristos, Lance Williams, Eric Reinhart
    • Other Attendees: Ana Genkova, Jaqueline Carrillo, Roy Rothchild, Sarah Pointer, Kari Branham, Dana Kelly, Orlando Mayorga, Karl Groschow, Kayla Butler
    • Notetaker: Jessica Cortez
    • Meeting minutes for FVRG March 21, 2023 and May 16, 2023 have been approved.
    • Facilitator Joe Hoereth welcomed FVRG members to the meeting and announced Dr. Jon Patterson has resigned for the FVRG group via email to that effect.
    • Dana Kelly introduced Orlando Mayorga to FVRG. Mayorga is going to be the Executive Director of the Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission.
  2. Public Comment - No public comments received
  3. Discussion and Work Items
    1. Office of Firearm Violence and Prevention Update - Kari Branham provided an update on OFVP 
      • There will be a new assistant secretary for the Office of Violence Prevention. Ms. Quiwana Bell will be starting October 1st and will include a link to the press release.
      • OVFP has gone through the last grant cycle and is vigorously working to get grantees up and running. As of yesterday, there are 283 grantees and 190 serving the RPSA Chicago communities and 93 serving the Greater Illinois communities. OFVP are identifying where there are gaps in having service providers in the PSA communities and working on developing some strategies to close those gaps.
      • Last year the innovative program called FLIP (Flatlining Violence Inspires Peace), the peacekeeper program, was Launched. This program allows individuals with lived experience, their influencers in the community, there's leaders in their own community and they help to ensure that hotspots in different communities' people feel safe in their communities. OFVP is now expanding the program. There are 14 community areas that are covered with 100 hotspots, and it will be increased to 30 communities and working to identify what those additional hotspots will be. OFVP is closely working with CORNERS (The Center for Neighborhood Engage Research and Science) and they are providing very critical analysis on the positive impact this program is having in the community. OFVP is seeing decreases in violence in these hotspot communities where peacekeepers are present. 
      • The office is preparing a monthly dashboard for the governor's office and hopes to be able to share the dashboard with FVRG.
        • Kari Branham shared the July dashboard with FVRG.
      • Kari Branham gave a reminder to the FVRG group about completing annual trainings as soon as possible.
      • Facilitator Hoereth:  How is FLIP Program complementing the other non-FLIP grantees activity in the neighborhood where it's active? Kari Branham: We're seeing organizations that are providing violence prevention services as street outreach workers. Those organizations are also involved as peacekeepers and they're not the same. We have our street outreach workers, but we also have the peacekeepers from those organizations that are working in assigned hotspots. 
  4. Open discussions of various topics
    1. Facilitator Hoereth wants to revisit the status of the Assessing Firearm Violence in Illinois Report. We looked at a wide range and did a scan of different data sources that were available with violence data on firearms particularly injuries specifically injury and homicide. Our goal was to define if we could cobble together the best kind of combination date available that OFVP can use to track progress. 
      • Member Lavery: Are there any plans for us to polish up the report and seminate it more widely? Facilitator Hoereth: Yes, the plan is to truncate it where we were at. There were a couple more sections that we wanted to write about building a composite measure justifying what it was. Member Olson: When you and colleagues looked at NIBERS data, what is your conclusion? Is it still too inconsistent even if you focus on larger jurisdiction? Karl Groschow: It's not quite bad but it will be better for 2023 than 2022. Many state entities or local entities across the state get on board with the same system so there's a couple of notable lags. 
      • Member Olson: Would like to express frustrations. Looking at the IDPH opioid data dashboard that they have and data id through June or July of 2023 by county, is it possible to generate these data in real time? Dane Kelly: IDPH has recently received a large CDC grant to be able to pull all this data together. We don't know when that will be pulled together but they are able to do this for the opioid data. We can stay in touch with IDPH and have them come present once that is done.
    2. Member Olson shared in the chat and discussed a paper he recently wrote with his colleagues from Loyola "non-fatal firearm victimization in Chicago vs. other large cities in the US". 
      • Facilitator Hoereth: What is the relationship if there's one between nonlethal and non-gunshot injury victimizations and then later becoming gunshot injury victims, or homicide victims? Member Olson: Victims are often the victims of violence multiple times, whether it escalates from non-weapon victimization to those involving firearms not sure about that. Facilitator Hoereth spoke about a study he read out of the Michigan Emergency Room. The Department of Michigan had a program they called either START or SMART where they fielded a questionnaire to teams of folks who are coming into emergency with gunshot injuries and trying to look at different factors that might be predictors. To the extent that any of this data helps with that could help our peacekeepers or our interrupters in some way. Member Olson: I think in the data there is the ability to link individuals across the different administrators of the survey. 
    3. Facilitator Hoereth: How do people feel about Dave's position on whether we should be gathering a broader range of data for OFVP to track attention to just gunshot injury and homicide by gun?
      • Member Smith: We should be trying to collect as much data as possible. The question about what to prioritize I think comes from how the data will be used and how quickly we need the data. I think the question about which data to use for which activities those two things are linked and the recency or the time with which the data is made available I think is important given the intended goal of what we're trying to do with it.
  5. FVRG Agenda Moving Forward-Discussion 
    1. Facilitator Hoereth shared with FVRG a couple of slides from a PowerPoint presentation that was previously presented to the local advisory council. 
      • How can FVRG Best Serve OFVP Moving Forward? (ideas below are not mutually exclusive) 
        • Focus on research on models of intervention and their effectiveness.
        • Focus on "root causes" factors that are highly associated with firearms violence injury and homicide, particularly, poverty, individual and community-level trauma, and systemic racism. 
        • Focus on improving the collection of and accessibility of relevant data important for informing OFVP in decision-making, including identifying data that is not currently compiled in a meaningful way. 
        • Focus on research methodologies that offer new and/or deeper understanding of the causes, nature of, and extent of firearms violence injuries. 
      • Member McGrath: I think it's a little tricky because all of these things are important and related. I'm struggling with what the office would like from FVRG. What has been useful and what has not. 
      • Member Lavery: If it's the high-level administration and they're trying to develop their NOFO's and they're trying to decide on a meta path going forward then it'll probably be bullet one. They would want to know what works and maybe could fold that into a component. They probably would like more data pursuant to previous conversation. If we just add NIBERS data that right, there gets it. 
      • Facilitator Hoereth: Is anyone seeing in their own current work research moving in a particular direction that's relevant to this? 
        • Member Kroner: Yes, in one project working with a social ecological model which is similar they start from the individual and go outward. To get something helpful out the other end there needs to be some type of parameter set in whether it's the stakeholder one or other issues. Going the stakeholder route would be great because you would be delivering something that would be needing interest and would move their interest or policy forward. 
        • Member Olson: One thing that was talked about at some point and just wanted to raise again is the idea of trying to understand precursors of gun violence by identifying people who are illegally carrying guns. In terms of changes in the last years, those offenses are being more frequently encountered by the justice system and figuring out what to do with those individuals. The problem is how we identify the extent nature of the problem is getting a better understanding of how those populations vary across the communities. 
        • Member Lavery: We have to write a report for the crime reduction task force. We received all thee recommendations for all these different types of things but it seems the group shouldn't be recommending things without knowing what's already going on in all these crime reduction areas. If this comes to fruition, he will let the group know.
        • Facilitator Hoereth: We may find that different elements of the ecosphere are all serving the same individuals or mostly the same individual.
      • Facilitator Hoereth: Good moment to have this conversation even if we need to have it in a more structured way with OFVP leadership given there's OFVP leadership coming on board.
  6. Links Shared:
  7. Proposed Next Meeting Date / Time - November 21, 2023 9:30am
  8. Meeting Adjourned @ 10:58am