{"id":50643,"date":"2023-05-16T01:08:49","date_gmt":"2023-05-16T05:08:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/news\/?p=50643"},"modified":"2023-08-11T08:06:20","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T12:06:20","slug":"utc-professor-students-helping-chattanooga-police-decrease-gun-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/news\/2023\/05\/utc-professor-students-helping-chattanooga-police-decrease-gun-crimes\/","title":{"rendered":"UTC professor, students helping Chattanooga Police decrease gun crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Students

Students work in Dr. Rick Dierenfeldt\u2019s criminology class. Photo by Angela Foster.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Chattanooga Police Department began tracking gun crimes closely after violence skyrocketed in 2016. But a data-crunching partnership with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga created four years later shows marked decreases in gun-related crimes and could be preventing future crimes by taking guns off the street.<\/p>\n

The Gun Crime Intelligence Center (GCIC), funded in part by a federal Bureau of Justice Assistance grant and a collaboration of UTC and city police, has found that between 2019 and 2022, firearm homicides were down 26.67% and gang member-involved nonfatal shooting incidents\u2014most local crimes are gang-related\u2014have dropped by nearly 41%.<\/p>\n

\u201cOverall, we are seeing decreases in gun violence coupled with increases in case clearances and successful prosecutions,\u201d said Dr. Rick Dierenfeldt, a former Missouri law enforcement officer and now UC Foundation associate professor of criminal justice in the UTC Department of Social, Cultural and Justice Studies. \u201cThe GCIC really embraces the idea of data-informed policing. We fund student researchers who are really helping us out and are contributing to something special.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dierenfeldt was a lawman for 10 years in his native Northwest Missouri before joining UTC\u2019s faculty in 2018. He earned an undergraduate degree at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, a master\u2019s at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg and a doctorate at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.<\/p>\n

UTC graduate student Dana Stripling, who recently presented her master\u2019s thesis on how structural deprivation\u2014economic and other inequities\u2014in more than 150 Chattanooga census block groups used the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network lead logs maintained by Chattanooga Police to track gun seizures, movement and dates.<\/p>\n

Stripling and other researchers used the data to craft technical reports showing the effects of camera installments across the city, bullet traps (shell casing data) and the efficacy of the Chattanooga Police Gun Team headed by UTC 2000 graduate Sgt. Joshua May. The partnership features a $750,000 grant from the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance.<\/p>\n

\"Sgt.

Sgt. Josh May is a Chattanooga police officer and UTC alum.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe UTC partnership has been really big,\u201d May said from his office on Amnicola Highway next to police headquarters. \u201cThis has given us the ability, first and foremost, to get a different set of eyes to crunch the numbers \u2026 to look at these metrics and identify spatial issues between the location of a last-known address of a suspect and incident locations.<\/p>\n

Shell casing fingerprints captured by a 3D computer allow police to find comparisons to guns in previous shootings. (Officers do not say \u201cmatch\u201d because that implies scientific certainty.)<\/p>\n

\u201cOur initial database was really small,\u201d May said. \u201cIt would take nine to 10 months to get back reports. We went from nine months to getting information back to three or four hours. What they say about the first 48 hours (after a homicide) is true.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than focusing on solving murders, May and UTC partners thought, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we stop this from happening?\u201d<\/p>\n

The federal grant, shared by city police, UTC and the University of Arkansas, embraces baseball\u2019s equivalent of metrics, Dierenfeldt said. \u201cA lot of what we do is reduced to dollars and cents, but the work we\u2019re doing means lives that are not lost and families not shattered by gun violence. We produce regular technical reports\u2014frequency of shootings, cases cleared, shooters prosecuted. We describe incident and neighborhood factors and whether they are gang involved versus non-gang involved and which gun offenders are likely to recidivate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like graduate student Stripling, Samatha Scott also delivered a master\u2019s thesis chronicling her research.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe noticed that most of the existing studies about firearms revolved around the factors that influence gun crime or the characteristics of victims and offenders of gun crime. However, there was little information about the firearms themselves\u2014which was a huge deal considering the number of firearms in the CPD tracking logs that had been used in multiple incidents, 33.9%,\u201d Scott said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was certainly surprising, and in turn, suggested that we may need to prioritize gun seizures and <\/em>arrests before a case is considered \u2018cleared.\u2019 In other words, although an arrest may be made, a firearm may still circulate through the community and further contribute to violence if it is not seized following the first offense.\u201d<\/p>\n

The inclusion of students on a project of this nature is worth noting.<\/p>\n

\u201cCriminal justice students are the future of law enforcement,\u201d she said, \u201cand creating this partnership may allow for more preparedness and outcome-driven thinking among those wanting to work in the field. It certainly has for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dierenfeldt relates the following statistical changes from 2019-22:<\/p>\n