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Anthony Braga, Ph.D. - Global Resilience Institute. Boston, MA, UNITED STATES

Anthony Braga, Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor and Director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University | Faculty Affiliate, Global Resilience Institute

Boston, MA, UNITED STATES

Anthony A. Braga is distinguished professor and director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice effective July 1, 2016.

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Biography

Anthony A. Braga is distinguished professor and director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice effective July 1, 2016. Braga’s record combines deep engagement in Boston and an international reputation as a leading researcher on crime prevention. He collaborates with criminal justice, social service, and community-based organizations to produce high impact scholarship, randomized field experiments, and policy advice on the prevention of crime at problem places, the control of gang violence, and reductions in access to firearms by criminals. With colleagues, Braga has published numerous peer reviewed journal articles in top criminology and criminal justice journals such as Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. Braga has authored three books and edited seven volumes with top scholarly presses such as Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

Braga has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on projects totaling more than $11 million dollars in external funding from a variety of federal, state, and private grant-making institutions including the U.S. National Institute of Justice, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation. He is currently serving as a committee member for the National Research Council Committee on Proactive Policing – Effects on Crime, Communities, and Civil Liberties and the Science Advisory Board to the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Braga is a fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC). He is also a past president and fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology (AEC), and the 2014 recipient of its Joan McCord Award recognizing his commitment to randomized controlled experiments.

Areas of Expertise (4)

Gang Violence and Criminal Access to Firearms

Violence Reduction

Social and Community

Crime Prevention

Education (4)

Harvard University: M.P.A., Public Administration 2002

Rutgers University: Ph.D., Criminal Justice 1997

Rutgers University: M.A., Criminal Justice 1993

University of Massachusetts: B.S., Criminal Justice 1991

Magna Cum Laude

Affiliations (1)

  • Center on Crime and Community Resilience

Media Appearances (5)

Guns in Chicago just '2.5 handshakes' away, study finds

ScienceDaily  online

2018-05-22

In one of the first studies to try to map a gun market using network science, researchers used the novel scientific approach to understand how close offenders are to guns in the city of Chicago. Recreating Chicago's co-offending network of approximately 188,000 people, the researchers used data on firearms recovered by the Chicago Police Department to locate who in the network possessed those guns.

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Police body cameras have some benefits, preliminary findings of Boston trial say

MassLive.com  online

2018-01-10

Placing body cameras on police officers may have some benefits, according to the preliminary findings issued after the Boston Police Department piloted the devices.

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Boston Police Body Camera Pilot Program Ends

WBUR News  online

2017-09-13

Boston police officers are no longer wearing body cameras. A yearlong pilot program, for which 100 cops wore the cameras, concluded as scheduled on Tuesday.

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New Professor Has Made Crime Prevention His Life’s Work

News @ Northeastern  online

2016-09-30

Anthony Braga has been working in conjunction with the Boston Police Department for more than 20 years, analyzing policies and developing programs aimed at reducing the city’s violent crime rate.

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The ‘Criminal Justice Tax’ on America’s Troubled Neighborhoods

The Crime Report  online

2017-07-31

Does aggressive policing of high-crime, mostly minority, neighborhoods reinforce patterns of racial segregation in America? Four of the nation’s top criminologists argue that municipal and police authorities should acknowledge the economic and social impact of strategies such as “stop, question and frisk” on African Americans and Latinos—and make sure that their efforts to make communities safer don’t at the same time widen racial inequalities.

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Articles (5)

Focused Deterrence Strategies and Crime Control


Criminology & Public Policy

Anthony A. Braga, David Weisburd, Brandon Turchan

2018 Focused deterrence strategies are increasingly being applied to prevent and control gang and group‐involved violence, overt drug markets, and individual repeat offenders. Our updated examination of the effects of focused deterrence strategies on crime followed the systematic review protocols and conventions of the Campbell Collaboration. Twenty‐four quasi‐experimental evaluations were identified in this systematic review. The results of our meta‐analysis demonstrate that focused deterrence strategies are associated with an overall statistically significant, moderate crime reduction effect. Nevertheless, program effect sizes varied by program type and were smaller for evaluations with more rigorous research designs.

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Did Post-Floyd et al. Reforms Reduce Racial Disparities in NYPD Stop, Question, and Frisk Practices? An Exploratory Analysis Using External and Internal Benchmarks


Justice Quarterly

John MacDonald, Anthony A Braga

2018 Various methodological approaches to constructing external and internal benchmarks have been applied to estimate racial bias in police stop, question, and frisk (SQF) patterns. We apply an external benchmark of the race of the residential population and an internal benchmark of similarly-situated stops to estimate if racial disparities in New York City SQF data were impacted by the Floyd, et al. v. City of New York court settlement. We find that after the settlement, the racial composition of census tracts were no longer significant predictors of the stop rate after controlling for reported crime, socioeconomic factors, and police precincts. We further find that differences in SQF outcomes and hit rates between Blacks and Hispanics and similarly-situated others diminished substantially after the settlement. These findings suggest that court reforms may be an effective method for reducing racial disparities in SQF patterns.

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Closer to Guns: the Role of Street Gangs in Facilitating Access to Illegal Firearms


Journal of Urban Health

Elizabeth Roberto, Anthony A. Braga, Andrew V. Papachristos

2018 Criminal offenders often turn to social networks to gain access to firearms, yet we know little about how networks facilitate access to firearms. This study conducts a network analysis of a co-offending network for the City of Chicago to determine how close any offender may be to a firearm. We use arrest data to recreate the co-offending network of all individuals who were arrested with at least one other person over an eight-year period. We then use data on guns recovered by the police to measure potential network pathways of any individual to known firearms. We test the hypothesis that gangs facilitate access to firearms and the extent to which such access relates to gunshot injury among gang members. Findings reveal that gang membership reduces the potential network distance (how close someone is) to known firearms by 20% or more, and regression results indicate that the closer gang members are to guns, the greater their risk of gunshot victimization.

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The Benefits of Body-Worn Cameras: New Findings from a Randomized Controlled Trial at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department


National Criminal Justice Reference Service

Anthony Braga, Ph.D., James R. Coldren Jr., Ph.D., William Sousa, Ph.D., Denise Rodriguez, M.A., Omer Alper, Ph.D.

2017 Many community stakeholders and criminal justice leaders have suggested placing body-worn cameras (BWCs) on police officers improves the civility of police-citizen encounters and enhances citizen perceptions of police transparency and legitimacy. In response, many police departments have adopted this technology to improve the quality of policing in their communities. However, the existing evaluation evidence on the intended and unintended consequences of outfitting police officers with BWCs is still developing. This study reports the findings of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving more than 400 police officers in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD). We find that BWC-wearing officers generated significantly fewer complaints and use of force reports relative to control officers without cameras. BWC wearing officers also made more arrests and issued more citations than their nonBWC-wearing controls. In addition, our cost-benefit analysis revealed that savings from reduced complaints against officers, and the reduced time required to resolve such complaints, resulted in substantial cost savings for the police department. Considering that LVMPD had already introduced reforms regarding use of force through a Collaborative Reform Initiative prior to implementing body worn cameras, these findings suggest that body worn cameras can have compelling effects without increasing costs.

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Can Homicide Detectives Improve Homicide Clearance Rates?


Crime & Delinquency

Anthony A Braga, Desiree Dusseault

2016 The available scientific evidence on the value of detectives in clearing crimes generally suggests that most crimes are solved through the random circumstances of crime scenes rather than special follow-up investigation. Other research, however, suggests that the work of criminal investigators can increase the likelihood that crimes might be cleared through arrest. After years of homicide clearance rates that were lower than the national average, the Boston Police Department engaged a problem-oriented policing approach to improve their post-homicide criminal investigation processes and practices. Our quasi-experimental statistical analyses suggest that the intervention significantly increased key investigative activities and improved Boston homicide clearance rates relative to existing homicide clearance trends in other Massachusetts and U.S. jurisdictions.

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