Students work in Dr. Rick Dierenfeldt’s criminology class. Photo by Angela Foster.
The Chattanooga Police Department began tracking gun crimes closely after violence skyrocketed in 2016. But a data-crunching partnership with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga created four years later shows marked decreases in gun-related crimes and could be preventing future crimes by taking guns off the street.
The Gun Crime Intelligence Center (GCIC), funded in part by a federal Bureau of Justice Assistance grant and a collaboration of UTC and city police, has found that between 2019 and 2022, firearm homicides were down 26.67% and gang member-involved nonfatal shooting incidents—most local crimes are gang-related—have dropped by nearly 41%.
“Overall, we are seeing decreases in gun violence coupled with increases in case clearances and successful prosecutions,” said Dr. Rick Dierenfeldt, a former Missouri law enforcement officer and now UC Foundation associate professor of criminal justice in the UTC Department of Social, Cultural and Justice Studies. “The GCIC really embraces the idea of data-informed policing. We fund student researchers who are really helping us out and are contributing to something special.”
Dierenfeldt was a lawman for 10 years in his native Northwest Missouri before joining UTC’s faculty in 2018. He earned an undergraduate degree at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, a master’s at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg and a doctorate at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
UTC graduate student Dana Stripling, who recently presented her master’s thesis on how structural deprivation—economic and other inequities—in more than 150 Chattanooga census block groups used the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network lead logs maintained by Chattanooga Police to track gun seizures, movement and dates.
Stripling and other researchers used the data to craft technical reports showing the effects of camera installments across the city, bullet traps (shell casing data) and the efficacy of the Chattanooga Police Gun Team headed by UTC 2000 graduate Sgt. Joshua May. The partnership features a $750,000 grant from the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance.
Sgt. Josh May is a Chattanooga police officer and UTC alum.
“The UTC partnership has been really big,” May said from his office on Amnicola Highway next to police headquarters. “This has given us the ability, first and foremost, to get a different set of eyes to crunch the numbers … to look at these metrics and identify spatial issues between the location of a last-known address of a suspect and incident locations.
Shell casing fingerprints captured by a 3D computer allow police to find comparisons to guns in previous shootings. (Officers do not say “match” because that implies scientific certainty.)
“Our initial database was really small,” May said. “It would take nine to 10 months to get back reports. We went from nine months to getting information back to three or four hours. What they say about the first 48 hours (after a homicide) is true.”
Rather than focusing on solving murders, May and UTC partners thought, “Why don’t we stop this from happening?”
The federal grant, shared by city police, UTC and the University of Arkansas, embraces baseball’s equivalent of metrics, Dierenfeldt said. “A lot of what we do is reduced to dollars and cents, but the work we’re doing means lives that are not lost and families not shattered by gun violence. We produce regular technical reports—frequency of shootings, cases cleared, shooters prosecuted. We describe incident and neighborhood factors and whether they are gang involved versus non-gang involved and which gun offenders are likely to recidivate.”
Like graduate student Stripling, Samatha Scott also delivered a master’s thesis chronicling her research.
“We noticed that most of the existing studies about firearms revolved around the factors that influence gun crime or the characteristics of victims and offenders of gun crime. However, there was little information about the firearms themselves—which was a huge deal considering the number of firearms in the CPD tracking logs that had been used in multiple incidents, 33.9%,” Scott said.
“That was certainly surprising, and in turn, suggested that we may need to prioritize gun seizures and arrests before a case is considered ‘cleared.’ In other words, although an arrest may be made, a firearm may still circulate through the community and further contribute to violence if it is not seized following the first offense.”
The inclusion of students on a project of this nature is worth noting.
“Criminal justice students are the future of law enforcement,” she said, “and creating this partnership may allow for more preparedness and outcome-driven thinking among those wanting to work in the field. It certainly has for me.”
Dierenfeldt relates the following statistical changes from 2019-22:
- Firearm homicides, down 26.67%
- Gang member-involved (GMI)-related homicide victims, down 35.7%
- Non-GMI-related homicide victims, down 18.2%
- Nonfatal shooting (NFS) incidents, down 8.9%
- GMI NFS incidents, down 40.9%
“There is a difference between routine (non-gang-involved) and gang-involved gun violence within Chattanooga, and research and policy should take that into consideration moving forward. Our research has set the scene for positive change to occur within our community, other communities and academia,” said Stripling.
“I believe that this project can kick start societal good in a few different ways. Not only will it serve Chattanooga in terms of validating current policies and practices, but it can also help in creating new policies and practices,” she continued. “This research can exemplify areas that need more research and focus from the police department. Beyond Chattanooga, other police departments and researchers can look at our data and use it as a blueprint for their own future research, further enhancing police data and policies based upon it.”
