Albany, NY, September 20, 2013 – Today the John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety, Inc., announced that it will continue to serve as the research partner to the Syracuse Police Department (SPD) in 2013-2014. The Institute will assist SPD in its analysis of gang intelligence, focusing on social network analyses of Syracuse street gangs and other violent groups. The members of violent groups and gangs make up some of the small number of offenders who are responsible for a disproportionate share of gun violence in the City. The social network analyses provide a visual and mathematical display of who is in a gang network and the location of actors within a network, and like previous analysis of the same kind that the Institute performed earlier in 2013, they will help to inform the implementation of Syracuse Truce, a focused deterrence initiative.
Sarah McLean said “Network analysis provides a powerful tool for better understanding dynamics within and across gangs. We know that not all groups and their individual members are equally violence prone, and this form of analysis provides one of several sources of information that will be used to prioritize the delivery of the Truce message and the targets of law enforcement actions.”
