Early Intervention Systems: The State of the Art

The project's goals are to update the evidence about agencies' use of early intervention, and to execute rigorous evaluations in each of five agencies, whose EI systems differ from one another in key structural respects. The project includes two phases. Phase I will consist of a mail survey to all (344) law enforcement agencies that reportedly had an EI system in 2007 to identify five agencies for intensive study. Phase II will consist of process and outcome evaluations in each of the five agencies. The process evaluation will include: site visits (3 per site), interviews with agency representatives and external stakeholders (15-20 per site), content coding of policies/procedures, and a web-based survey of sworn personnel (4,000-7,000). The analysis will also describe formal and informal practices, perceptions, and the degree to which the "target population" of problem officers is reached. An assessment of the EI system impacts in each agency through an analysis of outcomes " including EI system indicators and enforcement outputs " for a minimum of 100 officers who were selected for EI intervention prior to mid-2011 (N>=500) and 200 controls (N>=1,000).

Quantitative analysis of the national survey will be mainly descriptive and qualitative data on EI system process will turn mainly on searching text for key words, concepts and themes. Quantitative analysis of problem behavior will include group-based trajectory modeling. Finally, the impact analysis will use a quasi-experimental design adapted to the particulars of each site, relying on propensity score matching or inverse probability weighting, to estimate intervention effects on performance indicators. ca/ncf