Our Approach
Project
Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI) Chicago
READI Chicago is a gun violence reduction initiative that provides almost two years of intensive programming to men at the highest risk of shooting or being shot.
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The Crime Lab designs, tests, and scales data-driven innovations to improve the public sector’s response to the dual challenges of America’s gun violence crisis and a criminal justice system that is not truly just. Below find broad categories of our work.
Topics
Community Violence Intervention
Through a combination of street outreach by credible messengers and behavioral science-informed interventions, community violence intervention (CVI) programs help de-escalate stressful situations before they lead to violence.
Criminal Justice Reform
We’re advancing long overdue reforms to reduce the harms of America’s broken criminal justice system.
Methodologies
Behavioral Science
By learning more about human decision-making in stressful situations, behavioral science can help us identify better ways to deal with the harms created by gun violence and a broken criminal justice system — and can help prevent these harms before they occur.
Machine Learning
Machine learning tools continually leverage data to “learn” and improve performance — whether that’s cleaning datasets or analyzing the data within them to make recommendations.
Explore more of our work
Learn more about all of our projects at the Crime Lab.
Community Safety Leadership Academies
The Community Safety Leadership Academies, composed of the Policing Leadership Academy and Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy, aim to educate police and community violence intervention leaders.

Situational Decision-Making (Sit-D)
The Crime Lab and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) partnered to create and evaluate a behavioral science-informed training that helps improve officer decision-making in ambiguous, high-stress situations.

CVI Leadership Academy
The Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy is designed to deepen the leadership and management practices of senior CVI leaders so they can effectively manage community-based organizations and implement CVI strategies at scale.


Video about the Narcotics Arrest Diversion Program
This video provides an overview of the Crime Lab’s evaluation of the Narcotics Arrest Diversion Program, a program implemented by the community behavioral health provider Thresholds.
Violence Reduction Dashboard
The Violence Reduction Dashboard (VRD) is a publicly available visualization and analysis tool that provides greater transparency and accessibility to near-real-time violent crime data in the city of Chicago.


Community Violence Intervention (CVI) Leadership Academy Spotlight
Watch violence prevention experts speak to the significance of our CVI Leadership Academy in this short video.