Investing in the Future: An Evaluation of Local Government Spending as a Modifiable Structural Determinant of Interpersonal Youth Violence

Project Summary/Abstract I am an epidemiologist and Assistant Professor at UC Davis primarily studying the causes, consequences, and prevention of firearm violence. My long-term career goal is to create a high-impact, methodologically rigorous research program on firearm violence prevention. I am particularly interested in studying modifiable

upstream causes of violence that can be leveraged to effectuate widespread, enduring reductions in violence- related harms. Aligned with this larger goal and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control’s interpersonal violence research priority of youth violence, the objective of the proposed study is to examine

local government spending as a potential structural determinant of interpersonal youth violence in the United States. This will be accomplished through the following specific aims: 1) to determine whether city spending on education, police, social services, and the community environment is associated with city rates of youth

violence; 2) to determine whether city spending on education, police, social services, and the community environment is associated with Black-white racial disparities in city rates of youth violence; and 3) to determine whether the ratio of city spending on policing to spending on the sum of other public goods and

services (education, social services, and the community environment) is associated with city rates of youth violence. Secondary analyses will examine outcomes by race/ethnicity and firearm involvement to identify race-based heterogeneity and firearm-specific trends. This will be a serial cross-sectional study of over 100

diverse cities in the United States, 1999-2018. It will draw on a novel dataset of city spending that has been standardized to account for variation in the allocation of fiscal responsibilities to overlaying governmental units (e.g., counties, school districts). Youth violence will be measured as victimization (homicide) and

perpetration (arrest for aggravated assault or homicide) among individuals between the ages of 10 and 24. Sophisticated causal inference methods, including lagged fixed effects models and longitudinal g- computation, will be used to minimize confounding bias and examine both short- and long-term associations.

This project will provide opportunities critical to my career development and research goals, including 1) deepening my expertise of violence prevention and expanding into the subfield of youth violence, 2) developing new methodological skills, and 3) moving toward research independence by serving as a primary

investigator. These training goals will be guided by my team of mentors and will be supplemented by technical workshops offered primarily online. This proposal will be carried out at the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, which has been engaged in firearm violence prevention research for more than

30-years. The proposed project will provide me the experience, skills, and support I need to advance my research career and will allow me to substantially contribute to our limited understanding of the structural determinants of violence.