Accurate Data Helps Advance Violence Prevention Efforts
 alifornians
received good news earlier this year when the state's attorney general reported that the
number of serious crimes dropped by nearly 15 percent in 1999, continuing a seven-year
trend that has brought the crime rate to its lowest level since 1964.
Despite this welcome decline, rates of injury and death attributed to violence in
California - especially among the state's young - continue to rank as one of the highest
in the industrialized world.
Hoping to stimulate policies that reverse those alarmingly high rates, TCWF is a
long-time funder of efforts to build and share a reliable database about the effects of
violence on the state's population.
"It's hard to attack the problem of violence without comprehensive, valid
information, and people need a place where they can get reliable, unbiased data,"
said State Department of Health Services expert Roger Trent, whose staff is leading the
way in building a data bank with funding from TCWF.
Trent heads the department's Injury Surveillance and Epidemiology section of the
Epidemiology and Prevention for Injury Control (EPIC) Branch. EPIC recently received a
three-year grant of $310,000 from TCWF to continue data collection efforts on the
relationship between firearms and violent injury and to expand its surveillance to
encompass data on all violent injuries in California.
   An earlier
grant from TCWF helped establish and sustain EPIC's Firearms Injury Surveillance Project
(FISP) to document deaths; serious, nonfatal injuries; and risk factors associated with
firearms. One result of that undertaking is an economic analysis of firearm injuries that
calculates how much they cost the state in terms of lost lives, hospitalization, other
medical costs, lost productivity and police services.
"FISP provides valuable information to legislators and advocacy groups, who use
the data to promote policies aimed primarily at firearms-related injury prevention,"
said project staff member Jason Vancourt. "With the new grant, we will be able to
furnish trustworthy data on all violence-related injuries, concentrating on younger age
groups - that segment of the population most affected by violence."
FISP will also focus on putting its data to work, relying mainly on the Internet to
make its findings readily available to policymakers, law enforcement, health
professionals, community advocates and the general public.
"We're building one of the nation's largest banks of data on the impact of
violence, and we want to make sure the information is used," Vancourt said.
"We're putting together a website that can become an important resource in finding
interdisciplinary solutions to the problem."
An unusual feature of the data collection and reporting project will be the use of
geocoding, a system that describes victims according to the locations and characteristics
of their neighborhoods rather than by their race or other personal attributes.
"By developing a method to assign victims to small areas classified by
socioeconomic status, we hope to bring a systematic approach to determining the
relationship between inequality and violence," Vancourt said.
Vancourt and Trent emphasized the importance of nonbiased data in developing sound
policy.
"Good data should lead to good policy decisions," Vancourt said. "We've
all spent a lot of time debating the extent of the problem of violence. We now need to
devote more energy to solutions."
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