Southern California Academic Center for Excellence on Youth Violence Prevention (ACE Center)
Since 2001 the Presley Center has participated as one of eight (now ten) Academic Centers on Youth Violence Prevention. The center is housed at UC Riverside and operates as a consortium of facility and community in Southern California. The Presley Center is highly committed to the ACE centers research interests in working with ethically and culturally diverse communities to reduce youth violence, and participate with community partners, research and evaluation done in collaboration with the ACE center.
This project was initially funded 1.2 million dollars for three years; in 2003 the project was funded for a non-competitive renewal of $800,000 dollars for 2 years; and in 2005 the center was one of seven centers to be funded for an additional five years.
As a collaborative member of the ACE Center, the Presley Center continues to work and pool resources to research, evaluate programs, present, and work with community partners on youth violence prevention. More about the ACE center can be seen by going to their web site at www.ace.ucr.edu.
Gang Intervention and Suppression Project (Project Bridge)
Since 1998 the Presley center has collaborated with the Riverside Police Department on Project Bridge: A Community-Wide Approach to Gang Prevention. This was originally a project funded by the office of juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) of the US Department of justice. Riverside was selected as one of the 6 sites nationally for a major 12 million dollar effort to test the efficacy of a gang prevention model developed by Irving Spergel of the University of Chicago. The Presley Center provides continuing evaluation support, data collection, and analysis of outcome data. Although the federal funded portion of the project has ended, based partially on results provided to the City Council by the Center, Riverside allocated $500,000 in 2002 to continue the program and to expand the intervention throughout the City of Riverside. The Presley Center is continuing to provide evaluation and analysis of outcome data.
PREP (Placement Readiness Evaluation Program)
In 1999 the Presley Center collaborated with the Department of Probation for San Bernardino County. The agencies managed to secure funding, under the Challenge Grant II program, which allowed for a four-year project. This project established a special unit with the San Bernardino Juvenile Hall with the goal of reducing recidivism rates. The Center provided support n evaluation, data collection and analysis for the entire project period.
Healthy People/Healthy Places
The Center worked in collaboration with the Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) to write a grant proposal submitted to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for federal funding. The joint effort resulted in a nine-million dollar grant to RUSD. The Center assisted in the development of school-based wellness centers, with the aim of reducing youth violence. Technical assistance for the design of an evaluation plan, data collection, and analysis was also provided during the first year and a half of the project.
Mental Health Court
The Presley Center joined forces with Riverside County Department of Mental Health, the Superior Court of Riverside, the Riverside County Department of Probation, and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department to development another grant proposal to SAMSHA. The result of this collaboration resulted in a 900,000 grant to establish a mental health Court in Riverside designed to deal with mentally ill offenders who appear in the local criminal justice system. The purpose of the court was to provide therapeutic rather than punishment orientated solutions to offender’s illness and criminality.
Racial Profiling
This was a collaborative effort between the Press-Enterprise, the largest newspaper in Riverside and the Center to address an issue of major public concern. The newspaper provided a small grant, and the Presley Center provided a number of services that led to a number of news stories and a number of scholarly papers to include a masters theses written by a graduate student who participated in this effort.
Domestic Violence
During the past six years, the Center has been involved in the development and validation of domestic violence risk assessment instruments. These tools are administered at intake for arrested domestic violence offenders and have been used to assess the risk of domestic violence re-offending in the future, thereby guiding decisions about the intensity of supervision and intervention. The Center has also been involved in research on intimate partner violence using the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), with analyses including the psychological, social, and behavioral consequences of early violence exposure in the home and community and reliability of “husband” and “wife” reports of violence in their relationships.
Youth Homicide
The Center has an ongoing research program on national patterns and trends in youth homicide. Using data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Supplementary Homicide Report, analyses are conducted to document the temporal patterns of youth homicide and to determine how those patterns vary across the nation’s largest urban areas. Using data drawn from the U.S. Census, characteristics of those areas are analyzed to account for variation in these temporal patterns.
