OFVP Firearm Violence Research Group Meeting Minutes, June 18, 2024

Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Time: 12:00 pm

Meeting Minutes

Welcome/Roll Call/Approval of Minutes
- Meeting Called to order @ 12:03 pm
- Facilitator Joe Hoereth welcomed FVRG members to the meeting
- FVRG Members Present: Joe Hoereth, Timothy Lavery, Maryann Mason, David Olson
- FVRG Members Absent: Andrew Papachristos, Kim Smith, Lance Williams
- Other Attendees: Quiwana Bell, Kari Branham, James Pagano, Stephanie Jones, Kevin Brown, Fernando Constabile, Kathryn Strimbu, Ana Genkova
- Notetaker: Jessica Cortez
- Meeting Minutes Approval for March 19, 2024 will be tabled until the next FVRG meeting Sep 17, 2024
Public Comment - No public comments received
Discussion and Work Items
1. Facilitator Joe Hoereth welcomed FVRG members to the meeting and announced Eric Reinhart has resigned from the FVRG group via email to that effect.
2. Facilitator Hoereth welcomed new FVRG member Dr. MaryAnn Mason.
  - Dr Mason's roles:
    - PI for Illinois Violent Death Reporting System
    - PI for State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System
    - Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Northwestern
3. Discussion on review of an updated ranked list of OFVP eligible municipalities and Chicago community areas using the same process to determine eligibility used for 2022, now with updated data from IDPH.
4. Facilitator Hoereth: The one agenda item for this meeting today is to review, discuss and then vote on the process for determining eligible communities, revisiting a process that was done in fall of 2021 when the office was first established.
5. Facilitator Hoereth sent out the following documents to the FVRG Group which he will also be sharing on screen.
  - Draft List of Eligible OFVP Eligible Communities 6-17
  - 2024 Data Review for FVRG 6-17
6. Facilitator Hoereth: First I would like to pick up in December of 2021 after this group had agreed on a process and selected the communities a memo was issued, and this is what we are working towards and trying to issue a similar document now.
7. Facilitator Hoereth shared and discussed the following memo on screen to FVRG Group.
  - RE: Reimagine Public Safety Act-Eligible Community Areas and Municipalities.
8. Facilitator Hoereth: We are working towards a document by which I transmit a list of the eligible areas both the community areas in Chicago and then a portion with the bullets the eligible municipalities and a description of the methodology that we used. I would like to start to the 3 steps below:
  - Step 1. The municipalities with populations between 35,000 and 1,000,000 are sorted by rank order on highest per capita rate of fatal and non-fatal firearm-shot victimization 2016-2020 (excluding self-inflicted) for the municipalities of this population size. As per the RPSA, the first 10 municipalities on that list are selected.
  - Step 2. Illinois municipalities of any population size that were not already selected are then sorted in rank order by absolute (raw) numbers of fatal and non-fatal firearm-shot victimization 2016-2020 (excluding self-inflicted). As per the RPSA, the top five municipalities on this list are selected.
  - Step 3. After each list is ranked by its respective measure (rate or raw number), any selected municipalities that are contiguous to another selected one are joined together in a cluster. If a cluster is formed in this way, the next highest municipality on the ranking lists is selected in the open slot created by clustering. If that next municipality is contiguous to one in the original selected 15 slots, then it is also selected and joined to that cluster. The process continues down the appropriate list until there are fifteen total slots filled with selected municipalities and/or clusters of municipalities.
9. Facilitator Hoereth: There is also discretion that the OFVP gets with regard to selecting additional municipalities outside of Chicago.
10. Assistant Secretary Bell: We had 10 that are based upon Chicago, 10 based upon a per capita and mandated, 7 based upon total number of victims also mandated but the rest are at discretion. So, 17 based upon 2016 to 2020 data was determined to be required in that area. We have 26 areas in Chicago so that means those were at the discretion at that time of the OFVP.
11. Facilitator Hoereth: I believe the office may have applied its own clustering in that discretion at that point. So those community areas are why the total is 26. This body does the ranking, we select what's required, and then we make the recommendation to the office based on that.
12. On the list for the City of Chicago community areas. What we have done is gathered the same data from the previous five-year period in which there is a complete set of data available which is 2022 going back to 2018.
13. Facilitator Hoereth: Shared and discussed the 2024 Data Review for FVRG 6-17 spreadsheet with the FVRG Members.
14. James Pagano: Has there been any change in the list here versus the list that was previously provided by FVRG specifically whether any in the areas have moved up into this top 22 or were seeing an identical list with some changes in the absolute order.
  - Facilitator Hoereth: I believe the list is identical with some slight shifting in order.
15. FVRG Member Mason: Is the number of communities selected mandated?
  - Facilitator Hoerth: Yes
  - FVRG Member Lavery: It's better that way it becomes less political and kind of polarizing in some respects a good thing.
16. FVRG Member Lavery: It looks like you used the IDPH for this, but it wasn't the case the last time. FVRG Member Smith used the up-to-date stuff that's on the City of Chicago Dashboard based off of that.
  - Ana Genkova: The source that was used for the city data is City of Chicago Dashboard.
17. FVRG Member Mason: You are using the combined five year rate, but have you looked at change over time? Maybe a certain magnitude of increase over time combined with a rate would give a little more information about what is going on in that community.
  - Facilitator Hoereth: For the 17, I believe the RPSA references combined fatal and non-fatal. I'm not sure how much leeway we have with trend and the language, but it certainly is something we could do.
18. Facilitator Hoereth: Would we look at communities that had been eligible in the past differently than ones that hadn't with regard to trend? Some had been receiving this extra money and some hadn't and would that factor in?
  - FVRG Member Mason: I personally think it could get complicated because that extra money could be underpinning a reduction trend if there were one. Maybe trend information could be more like the 5 extra communities where you're seeing emergent problems.
    - Facilitator Hoereth: Maybe for the discretionary portion, we could make a recommendation including our recommendations for anything that gets added later for whatever reason, discretionary that the office considers trend.
    - Assistant Secretary Bell: I will also just like to point out in terms of a recommendation from FVRG, the funding scenario we are in fiscal year 25 is different than if funding scenarios we've been in in the last few years right so We had more availability because of ARPA dollars expiring to get monies out the door. We could look at more expansive areas and that may have been part of the motivation to expand beyond the 10 or 17 and mandated with more discretion. We're currently in this in a funding scenario where we have fewer dollars, and we have to reduce contracts while still wanting to have the maximum impact we can on firearm violence. We're looking for recommendations as to what areas where investment would maximize and have firearm victimization reduction.
19. Facilitator Hoereth: What areas are falling outside of this? What areas are not touched? Is it enough? Or is there something else we might glean from that?
  - FVRG Member Lavery: I think it's both. The 17 for Chicago that's a no brainer because that's in the statute and then the other 2 would be the natural break or proximity within groups. For example, if you were to use mapping software and a chloroplast map it usually has 3 to 4 different algorithms. You could choose to cluster based on natural breaks in the data.
20. Facilitator Hoereth: One of the things that I tried to do in advance was anticipate the language of what we might be voting on and put that on a slide and also recognize that the conversation could go in such a way we wanted to add a recommendation, and I was ready to do that. It doesn't sound like we have anything specific enough yet other than to say something like we recommend that any additional community areas that are selected that the OFVP consider factors then we could list them.
21. FVRG Member Mason: Does each of the selected communities get the same amount of funding or is it prorated by some factor?
  - Assistant Secretary Bell: What the list does is provide eligibility for our NOFO's. There are no conclusions as to who can apply for what, but it just allows grantees in those areas to be able to apply but there are no set amounts for each area.
22. Ana Genkova: Are these organizations that are based in the geographical areas where I have the scope of servicing that area. In the past cycle there was no programming and just getting started in this cycle. Is there a potential for considering capacity of absorption to fund or some other metric of specific targeting of the problem?
  - Assistant Secretary Bell: They must have a physical location inside of the community in which they're serving, and it was mandated.
23. Facilitator Hoereth: I think we will want to put in our recommendations to you, Assistant Secretary Bell, that you should consider geographic proximity to others that are already selected and our geographic isolation.
24. Facilitator Hoereth reviewed the 2024 Step by Step Ranking-Non-Chicago tab in the 2024 Data Review for FVRG 6-17 spreadsheet with the FVRG Members.
25. FVRG Member Olson: One thing to at least either think about or investigate in more detail is when I was looking at the stuff that was generated for the most recent time period. There were some other communities that appeared to have that same odd pattern. Aurora was one of those where we applied that logic before to adjust for what we knew from conversations with people was an issue of those nonfatal victimizations showing up in another state's trauma centers. We must figure out what we do when we see that pattern in other places where that doesn't make the same kind of logic.
  - Facilitator Hoereth: Maybe the victimization injury and the victimization data is a combination of ER and hospitalizations. And initially when we were sent this data, we had a little mix up and was only ER. We figured that out and we got them to add the hospitalizations to it. But we got a little peek at that difference in that process.
26. Facilitator Hoereth: I would like to recommend the non-Chicago that was selected as part of a cluster before and something else that is not a cluster that didn't make the list on its own by rank that we still cluster it to keep that cluster intact.
27. Facilitator Hoereth: Reviewed the Draft List of Eligible OFVP Eligible Communities 6-17.
28. Facilitator Hoereth: How do people feel about the proposal to keep clusters intact?
  - Assistant Secretary Bell: I think the clusters in some of these areas make a lot of sense from my vantage point. A lot of the time if these areas are small enough where if you have a street outreach team that can do Maywood, they should be able to do Bellwood Broadview as well, you know, and so I think the clusters allow us to serve more areas with the same provider. I really like the cluster idea. I'm even thinking about how we may cluster some of these areas in Chicago where we don't have capacity so that we can. I would be interested to see a side-by-side analysis from 2018 to 2022 side by side versus the analysis from 2016 to 2020.
29. Facilitator Hoereth: I think there's a whole host of things we can start doing as a group as far as tracking this data and looking at these kinds of trends that could provide some insight for OFVP beyond just this eligibility exercise. We're now at a point where there's enough data available.
30. Assistant Secretary Bell: I just really want to just express my gratitude for your hard work on this and you know, for putting this together and explaining it in such a way that You know, late people, late data people like me can understand it. I just really want to just express my gratitude for your hard work on this and putting this together and explaining it in such a way that late data people like me can understand it. I like the one memo that you presented, but if we could just kind of have good numbers for 2016 to 2020 as well. That'd be helpful.
31. FVRG Vote #1
  - Approve applying the same process used in fall of 2021, as per Chair Hoereth' s memo to Assistant Secretary December 23, 2021, to determine the updated 2024 FVRG recommended list of eligible Chicago neighborhoods, and Non-Chicago Municipalities, as per the RPSA, with the following amendments:
    - a) With regard to discretionary additions of Chicago Community Areas, OFVP should consider, geographic proximity/isolation, as well as recent trend data on fatal and non-fatal victims
    - b) Previous clusters of municipalities with the central municipality still eligible will be kept intact, so that all municipalities previously in that cluster become eligible again.
      - FVRG Member Lavery-Yes
      - FVRG Member Olson-Yes
      - FVRG Member Mason-Yes
      - Facilitator Hoereth-Yes
32. FVRG Vote #2
  - Approve the resulting list of eligible communities.
    - FVRG Member Lavery-Yes
    - FVRG Member Olson-Yes
    - FVRG Member Mason-Yes
    - Facilitator Hoereth-Yes
33. Facilitator Hoereth: Assistant Secretary Bell, I will craft the same kind of memo with this in it and I'll also add the comparison for you. FVEG Members before I give that memo to Assistant Secretary Bell, I circulate that to you all just to make sure you're comfortable with the language in it.
Action items
Proposed Next Meeting Date/Time: Tuesday, July 16, 2024 @ 9:30am
Meeting Adjourned @ 1:36 pm