The city of Birmingham struggles with a high poverty rate and one of the worst violent crime rates in the nation. There were 89 homicides in Birmingham in 2016, a 13 percent increase from 2015, with domestic violence related homicides almost doubling. The Birmingham Police Department (BPD) plans to combat high homicides and non-fatal gun related violence through the Violence Reduction Initiative, designed as a local Gun Violence Intervention. BPD will use technology including gunshot detection systems intelligence to visualize instances of gun violence in order to identify places and people most at risk for being involved in gun violence. The Birmingham SPI will also employ a segmentation model that will use a self-organization cluster model to group violent offenders and victims based on their statistical similarities across various attributes in order to identify persons at risk of: committing their first-time violent crime, being victimized by a violent crime, repeat offending, and involvement in another homicide. This method will be tested on an existing list of individuals in need of the greatest amount of law enforcement or supportive services intervention.
