Community gun violence is a health crisis concentrated in communities most impacted by racism and structural violence, which includes systemic denial of access to economic, educational, and employment opportunities. The lack of opportunity resulting from this disinvestment constrains choices and perpetuates the cycle of violence. Many communities have declared gun violence as a public health issue and an “epidemic.” However, health departments often fail to diagnose and investigate this health issue harming our most vulnerable communities.

Far too many communities lack the proper assessment and surveillance to understand their community gun violence problems. Many are doing little to address gun violence because they lack understanding of the scope of the problem and the need for evidence-based interventions, while some who are engaged in community violence prevention and intervention (CVI) strategies struggle to do effective work because they lack the data to target the individuals most at risk. Without a clear understanding of the contours of the problem and those most impacted by it, public health violence prevention will lag behind the criminal justice system in addressing violence. Health departments should lead the way in providing foundational and continuing data to policy makers, interventionists, and community members that accurately describe the problem, capture progress on solutions, and inform improvements.

But what data should health departments be collecting and analyzing? Health departments must understand the core metrics for community gun violence and strengthen their cross-sector partnerships to access data from diverse sources. Understanding community gun violence requires examining data such as fatal and non-fatal shootings, aggravated assaults, and gun crimes, understanding who is impacted and exposing others to violence, and using data to improve existing interventions. To effectively combat gun violence, leaders must build surveillance systems to adequately reflect the lived experience of gun violence in the communities most afflicted by it, as to improve direct intervention and prevention strategies. Examples of this are the ability to detect influxes of the co-occurring issues, such as aggravated assaults and gun crimes, and fluctuations in the data at the local level beyond available monthly or yearly law enforcement tallies.

Health Resources in Action is a Boston-based public health consultancy collaborating with communities nationally (including Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston, and Baltimore) to support effective CVI initiatives. This interactive session will examine what data is necessary to understand the problem, posit a set of evidence- informed frameworks for examining the data, and explore the additional sources of data health departments can use to inform and direct interventions and engage community members and multi-sector actors. Through examples from national work at the city and county level, the authors will share lessons learned from misuse or lack of of data, common challenges to data access, and data-related successes from violence intervention practice in multiple states at the city and county level. The authors will share insights and recommendations that health departments may consider when developing their data collection plans; and will describe innovative uses of existing data that community-based organizations use to strengthen their CVI work.