An Equity Response to COVID-19 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania: The Development and Work of the Black Equity Coalition.

From the onset of the pandemic in the United States, racial disparities in COVID-19 outcomes have been evident. In April 2020, several events prompted a concerned group of colleagues to form the Black Equity Coalition (BEC), a Black-led coalition in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which brings together professionals from multiple sectors who aim to ensure an equitable response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Several significant milestones have been achieved, and this article describes the development, functioning, and outcomes of the Coalition in the first 15 months of operation (April 2020-June 2021). COVID-19 was the reason for such an unprecedented effort, but this BEC infrastructure will be needed long after COVID-19 is controlled. In addition to short-term activities and reactive measures to prevent and mitigate COVID-19 in Black populations, the BEC is serving as a crucial link between government, health care stakeholders, and communities to produce long-term systemic change.

Preventing Violence: A Public Health Participatory Approach to Homicide Reviews.

Death review teams are a common method for assessing preventable deaths, yet they rarely review adult homicides and do not typically include community members. Academic-community partnerships can enhance public health research by encouraging translation of research into practice and support a data-driven approach to improve community health and well-being. We describe the Pittsburgh Homicide Review Group, a community-partnered initiative to prevent future homicides through data review and community dialogue. Group members reviewed all 42 Pittsburgh 2012 homicides informed by three primary data sources: publicly available data, local service databases, and community outreach resources. Thirty-two individuals representing relevant county agencies and community groups participated in eight reviews. Data sharing among partners resulted in a comprehensive understanding of the context of homicides. Review meetings supported a collective discussion around potential contributing factors to homicides, intervention implications, and recommendations. Academic-community homicide review partnerships are a productive approach to inform homicide prevention and interventions that are relevant to communities and should be implemented widely.

Housing Relocation Policy and Violence: A Literature Review.

This article summarizes and reviews the cross-discipline literature on violent crime in destination neighborhoods postrelocation in order to build a more comprehensive picture of risk factors for violence, as well as how and why housing policies influence risk of violence. High rates of violent crime continue to be a persistent problem in areas of concentrated poverty and public housing. Modern housing programs such as Moving to Opportunity and Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere are popular interventions for reducing the density of low-income people receiving public housing assistance by relocating residents of distressed housing projects. However, evidence suggests that relocated residents may not experience less violence or improved safety in their new communities.

Dynamic simulation of crime perpetration and reporting to examine community intervention strategies.

OBJECTIVE: To develop a conceptual computational agent-based model (ABM) to explore community-wide versus spatially focused crime reporting interventions to reduce community crime perpetrated by youth. METHOD: Agents within the model represent individual residents and interact on a two-dimensional grid representing an abstract nonempirically grounded community setting. Juvenile agents are assigned initial random probabilities of perpetrating a crime and adults are assigned random probabilities of witnessing and reporting crimes. The agents' behavioral probabilities modify depending on the individual's experience with criminal behavior and punishment, and exposure to community crime interventions. Cost-effectiveness analyses assessed the impact of activating different percentages of adults to increase reporting and reduce community crime activity. Community-wide interventions were compared with spatially focused interventions, in which activated adults were focused in areas of highest crime prevalence. RESULTS: The ABM suggests that both community-wide and spatially focused interventions can be effective in reducing overall offenses, but their relative effectiveness may depend on the intensity and cost of the interventions. Although spatially focused intervention yielded localized reductions in crimes, such interventions were shown to move crime to nearby communities. Community-wide interventions can achieve larger reductions in overall community crime offenses than spatially focused interventions, as long as sufficient resources are available. CONCLUSION: The ABM demonstrates that community-wide and spatially focused crime strategies produce unique intervention dynamics influencing juvenile crime behaviors through the decisions and actions of community adults. It shows how such models might be used to investigate community-supported crime intervention programs by integrating community input and expertise and provides a simulated setting for assessing dimensions of cost comparison and intervention effect sustainability. ABM illustrates how intervention models might be used to investigate community-supported crime intervention programs.