Evaluability Assessment of the NAFI Youth & Police Initiative (YPI) Training

Under the Community-Based Violence Prevention Field-Initiated Research and Evaluation Program OJJDP will fund field-initiated studies to inform efforts to prevent and reduce youth violence (including gun violence) and violence exposure at the community level.

The Community-Based Violence Prevention (CBVP) Field-Initiated Research and Evaluation (FIRE) Program is designed to support methodologically rigorous research and evaluations that inform policy and practice consistent with the Department of Justice's mission. This program seeks to fund field-initiated studies to inform efforts to prevent and reduce youth violence (including gun violence) and violence exposure at the community level by building the evidence-base in this area that will inform both policy and practice.
OJJDP encouraged applicants to propose research questions and/or evaluation studies designed to produce findings with practical implications for efforts to prevent and reduce youth violence (including gun violence) and violence exposure at the community level with an emphasis on two key elements for the design: 1) establishing a high level of rigor and 2) proposing research questions with a high degree of relevance on a national scale.

The Youth-Police Initiative (YPI) program is designed to strengthen the trust relationship between at risk youth and police in low-income communities with the long-term goal of reducing youth-involved violence. The approach is built upon several new evidence-based models of crime prevention and if successful would offer an innovative and cost-effective tool to improve the life trajectory of at-risk youth. YPI has been implemented in 11 jurisdictions so far and shows promising results. The goal of the proposed study is to examine the evaluability of the program to determine if the program is ready to undergo rigorous evaluation.

CA/NCF