Acknowledgments

A project of this size and scope could not have been successfully completed without the support from several entities. First, we would like to thank the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – National Institute on Drug Abuse for their generous funding for the project (5R01DA032639-03, 2012). We recognize that providing substantial resources for a basic research project focusing on hot spots of crime would be seen by many as outside the scope of NIH funding. We think this book points to the benefits of this broad view of public health efforts. At the same time, we note that the points of view in this book are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

We would also like to thank the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy (CEBCP) for its financial support for the project, and note in particular, the Director of the CEBCP, Cynthia Lum, who provided advice throughout the project. Naida Kuruvilla, the grants and program manager of the CEBCP, was also essential in the success of this project, for her help in managing the payment of sixty or more data collectors at a time and the bureaucratic and financial aspects of this project. We also want to thank the Department of Criminology, Law and Society for helping to implement the project, and particularly David Wilson and James Willis, who as Chairs of the Department continually helped us to manage the University processes that a large project involves. The College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University was also supportive of the project. And we note, in particular, Dean Ann Ardis, whose encouragement of this work helped us to complete the project and this book. We also greatly appreciate the cooperation of the Baltimore City Police Department in providing call and incident data, essential for defining our street segments in this study.

Several people were also essential for the development and completion of the study. We would like to thank Justin Ready and Brian Lawton for their help in defining the original study design, supervising data collection, and training field researchers, as well as Danielle Rudes for her help in designing the qualitative research and support in developing the qualitative data collection. We also want to thank Katherine Sikkema for her advice in developing the health measures in the study and preparing the NIH proposal, and Amanda Haviland for helping with the statistical design of the study. We are also thankful for David Wilson’s statistical advice throughout the project.

Multiple graduate students from George Mason University were also essential in project management and data collection, including Breanne Cave, Matthew Nelson, Zoe Vitter, Sean Wire, Victoria Goldberg, and Taryn Zastrow. We also want to thank Brianna Camero for her help in developing the index for the book. Lastly, we want to thank anonymously all the field researchers who accumulatively spent tens of thousands of hours on the streets of Baltimore collecting data, as well as the thousands of residents of Baltimore who participated in our study and shared their experiences.