Jun 2025
Webinar: Overview of the City of Chicago’s Violence Reduction Dashboard
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Projects
The Crime Lab hosted a webinar that explored the City of Chicago’s Violence Reduction Dashboard—a publicly available tool launched to support efforts to reduce gun violence through transparent, real-time data.
Topics
Projects
This event provided an in-depth look at how the Violence Reduction Dashboard brings together key data on shootings and homicides to help community organizations, policymakers, and other stakeholders make data-informed decisions and better target resources. The conversation also highlighted opportunities for other cities to make similar datasets and tools publicly available.
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The webinar featured insights from dashboard experts, CVI leaders, and community partners, including:
- Garien Gatewood, Deputy Mayor of Community Safety, City of Chicago
- Eric Balas, Senior Data Analyst, Metropolitan Peace Initiatives
- Maritza Moran, Data Analyst, Metropolitan Peace Initiatives
- Javier Lopez, Analytics Manager, Crime Lab
Moderator: Katie Hill, Executive Director, Crime Lab
Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence
Crime Lab Pritzker Director Jens Ludwig authored a book that argues the lack of progress in reducing gun violence ultimately stems from our having misunderstood the nature of the problem, and that behavioral science gives us a new way to understand – and solve – gun violence in America.
Local Gun Violence Dashboards
Chicago’s Violence Reduction Dashboard, launched by the Crime Lab in 2021, is featured in a toolkit created by Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund as a part of its Gun Violence Data Fellowship.
Valuing the benefits of reducing firearm violence in the United States
This paper estimates the monetized value of the impact of reducing firearm violence and how that value is distributed across the population.
IL Office of Firearm Violence Prevention
The University of Chicago Crime Lab has partnered with the Illinois Office of Firearm Violence Prevention (OFVP) in support of the OFVP’s goal to use data to focus resources. The Crime Lab prepared the following interactive map to support the RPSA Youth Development Services grantmaking process.
Latest Updates
Curbing gun violence in Chicago doesn’t require that we first end poverty
Crime Lab leaders Katie Hill and Jens Ludwig penned an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune highlighting the root causes of gun violence and the growing body of research showing that increased neighborhood vibrancy generates surprisingly large changes in the prevalence of gun violence, by as much as 30%.
A fighting chance
In The University of Chicago Magazine’s Fall ’25 issue, Susie Allen profiles Crime Lab Pritzker Director Jens Ludwig to discuss his book, “Unforgiving Places,” which challenges conventional wisdom on gun violence and suggests new approaches to solving the problem.
Researchers: Violence intervention and policing should complement, not compete against, each other
The Crime Lab’s Executive Director Katie Hill and Pritzker Director Jens Ludwig discuss evidence-based solutions to crime, including violence intervention and data-driven policing, in an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune.