Considered a pioneer in the high-level action-research approach to public safety, criminologist David Kennedy has spent his career deterring gang violence in America through community-based violence reduction.

He has played a key role in group violence intervention studies that have proven to reduce violence in some of the country’s most historically crime-ridden areas, including the Boston Gun Project in the mid-1990s.

The way violence works in most cases is in very small groups, often less than 1% of a city’s population, and an even tinier fraction, what Kennedy described as “impact players,” drive most homicides and nonfatal shootings in a community.

On Wednesday, he spoke to Utah lawmakers, law enforcement, educators and others involved in the state’s Youth Violence Prevention & Pub

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