OFVP Firearm Violence Research Group Meeting Minutes, November 21, 2023

Date: Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Time: 9:30am - 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, Dave Olson, Soledad McGrath 
    • FVRG Members Absent: Andrew Papachristos, Tim Lavery, Kim Smith, Lance Williams, Eric Reinhart
    • Other Attendees: Ana Genkova, Jacqueline Carrillo, Roy Rothschild, Dana Kelly, Orlando Mayorga, Karl Groschow, Jay Gragg, Kaitlin Soriano, Assistant Secretary Bell, Melissa Pfeiffer
    • Notetaker: Jessica Cortez
    • Voting quorum not met. Meeting minutes tabled for next FVRG meeting January 16, 2024
  2. Public Comment - No public comments received
  3. Discussion and Work Items
    1. Office of Firearm Violence and Prevention Update
      • Reminder FVRG Member that the ethics training needs to be completed by December 31, 2023.
      • The DEIA Training will need to be completed by the end of November. Email instruction have sent to all FVRG members' email addresses.
  4. Open Discussion
    1. How do we know we are getting to the right population?
      • Facilitator Hoereth: Did an overview for Assistant Secretary Bell on the work FVRG has done and dat that has been collected along with resources that were used to collect data.
      • Karl Groschow: NIBRS is the Illinois State Police uniform crime reporting program. They have a public portal and are completely live. The only issue is the federal state county local governance and getting the local police department to complete their conversion. 
      • Facilitator Hoereth: How are we reaching the right population? There seems to be two ways to approach this question. One is if you have a lot of data about the people or is it about the place.
    2. The periodic performance reports are the reports that all the grantees are required quarterly to submit to the office and gather information about the individuals that have been served along with basic demographics data like age, race and gender.
      • FVRG Member Olson: We need to understand the degree to which the funded programs are collection enough information about the participants that would help to identify what their risk level is for victimization or perpetration.
      • FVRG Member McGrath: Having the organizations collect a certain level of individual level data. Requiring a certain level of data from the organizational side and then being able to have access to data from the law enforcement side.
      • Assistant Secretary Bell: Talking to grantees about how much community feedback can help support or even give data. Also, grantees talk about  how they are working in silos and how young people in the streets are not being impacted and not being served.
      • FVRG Member McGrath: So many individual in a community or in a neighborhood or in a service area are at some level of risk. It's whether they are targeting the smaller populations. The smaller, narrower category of highest risk is determined based on a certain defined set of data.  
    3. Chicago is having success in reaching at least with the organizations that we have partnered with from the evaluations.
      • Assistant Secretary Bell: CPD is using social media to identify populations in areas of high risk for young people. Have we thought about using social media to identify some of the highest risk people and where the are?
      • Facilitator Hoereth: One of the challenges violence prevention providers have is the extent which requires that kind of surveillance it erodes their trust position and their license to operate in the community. This could put some providers in though spots as far as what they know about people and how they track that information through social media. The challenge for OFVP is adding the data about individual at that level of detail to what it collects.
      • Assistant Secretary Bell: Everything is put on social media and a lot of providers, case managers and outreach workers use social media as a tool  already to see what's goin on in the streets. This is not done in a formal way to inform themselves.
      • Facilitator Hoereth: This question might be a good idea to add to the form "Do you use social media at all?" "Is this part of your practice?" We can understand how common this is and how helpful.
    4. Does anyone have any knowledge of model programs that are in other places? 
      • FVRG Member Olson: The funding from this program is just one source of the state money that's going to address violence in communities. We can't look at these programs and say they are serving 40 people in a community that has 200 in need without figuring out those other 100 and 60 people getting services through some other program through money coming from the RFP grants. Some of these kids that are in the high-risk group might be on juvenile probation and getting services through juvenile probation in terms of cognitive behavioral therapy or other intervention.
      • Assistant Secretary Bell: There's this intergovernmental partnership between the county, the city and ICJIA understand and leverage assets, make sure we are not doing duplicative type services with the same use.
  5. Links Shared:
  6. Proposed Next Meeting Date / Time: Tuesday, January 16th @ 9:30am 
  7. Meeting Adjourned @ 10:41am