Program Goals
The Cardiff (Wales) Violence Prevention Programme (CVPP) is a multiagency partnership designed to prevent all forms of violence and reduce violence-related, emergency room admissions, particularly late at night and on weekends, when services are overextended and alcohol-related disorders are common. In 1997, the UK decided to adopt a multiagency approach to violence prevention and specifically include the health sector because of research that showed that a significant percentage of violent incidents, which required treatment in emergency departments, were not known to police. CVPP was developed to serve as a data-sharing strategy and became fully operational in 2003.
Through CVPP, city government representatives, police, city-licensing regulators, and an emergency-department consultant work together, and use data collected in emergency departments and through police intelligence to inform targeted-policing efforts and other strategies. It is believed that including emergency departments leads to increased violence prevention, as emergency departments have the unique ability to share anonymized electronic data about the precise location, weapon use, assailants, and the day/time of the violence that is not always known to the police (Florence et al. 2011; Shepherd 2007).
Program Activities
In CVPP, when a patient first reports to an emergency department for an injury caused by a violent incident, information about the precise location of the incident (i.e., name of bar, nightclub, school, park, street), the time of day, and the weapon used in the incident is captured electronically by emergency department reception staff. This information is stripped of all personal identifiers and shared by hospital IT staff with the partnership crime analyst on a monthly basis.
The crime analyst combines this data with police intelligence to generate updated maps of violence hotspots and summaries of weapon use and violence type (classified as stranger, acquaintance, or domestic to fit with the National Crime Survey categorization). The information can indicate if it was a knife or gun crime; if the person is a repeat victim, and if so, if he or she were injured by the same attacker; and if the violence has been occurring in similar locations (such as particular night clubs). This constantly updated information is then used to aid in violence prevention efforts, as police departments are better informed of where and how to target their efforts.
Using the combined emergency department and police data, the CVPP met about every 6 weeks to introduce or try to sustain a range of strategies that were designed to address the specific risks and patterns identified through the combined hospital and police data. Police strategies could include adjustments to patrol routes, employing more police in the city rather than the suburbs, targeting problematic areas, and informing the public of the use of closed circuit television.
Program Theory
CVPP is grounded in the idea that information-sharing-partnerships across police, emergency departments, and health professionals can aid in violence prevention. According to this approach, coupling police and relevant data from emergency departments, and including health professionals in the initiative–given that they treat the injured and can serve as advocates for prevention–can help prevent more violence than would be possible from police efforts alone (Florence et al. 2011).