El Salvador Feasibility Study: Final Report

These interventions aim to minimize arrest and incarceration, strengthen communities, and cultivate stronger relationships between law enforcement and the community it serves. In "What Works in Reducing Community Violence," a 2016 systematic review commissioned by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Thomas Abt and Christopher Winship identified NNSC's focused deterrence approach as demonstrating the most significant impact on violence reduction and recommended that funders could launch a multi-site experiment of focused deterrence across the three countries in the Northern Triangle region. The dynamics of group violence in El Salvador are extreme, with a level and scale of group organization combined with the social, political, and economic landscape making disrupting group violence a complex task. However, similar to other contexts of urban violence, fewer than 1% of the population in each municipality studied was found to be driving the majority of community violence. This core finding is crucial to thinking about the applicability of NNSC's strategic violence interventions, shifting the problem from one that feels overwhelming to one that is concrete and approachable. NNSC's strategies, commonly referred to as focused deterrence, emphasize advanced communication of legal consequences for engagement in violence, harness informal social control, and direct help and support to the highest risk people to encourage them away from violence. In El Salvador, while the violence dynamics are extreme, there is nothing inherent to the violence that would impede a deterrence-oriented approach. Rather, these violence dynamics would have to be accounted for in the design and implementation of any strategy. Focused deterrence is not appropriate for application across El Salvador, nor would country-wide adaptation be the right starting point. Starting in one or two select cities would allow the time, attention, and learning necessary to adapt the core principles to the specific context. Existing and previous investments vary across municipalities, and leveraging what works and altering what doesn't takes nuance and precise action research, but can result in significant impact, elevating given investments across the prevention and intelligence arena. El Salvador's history of violence is complex and multifaceted. From 1979 until 1992, Salvadorans suffered through a devastating civil war that traumatized the entire country and left an estimated 50,000 civilians dead out of a population of roughly 5 million. During the conflict, thousands of people fled to the United States, where they were exposed to and joined LA-based gangs. Conflicts emerging from these gang and group associations escalated into violence, prompting the U.S. Government to repatriate many of those involved, now with criminal records and high levels of trauma, back to El Salvador. Following the official end of civil war, El Salvador's interpersonal violence replaced conflict violence, with homicide rates peaking in 2015 at 103 per 100,000 inhabitants. According to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, in 2017 the rates stood at 60 per 100,000 inhabitants. The country consistently ranks in the five countries with the highest homicide rates globally. Homicide rates across El Salvador have shown a general downward trend since 2015, attributed in part to the collapse of the "Gang Truce," which was negotiated in 2012-2013. Focused deterrence has demonstrated time and again effectiveness in addressing significant violence while simultaneously enhancing relationships between law enforcement and the communities they serve. The roll-out of a deterrence strategy can provide an opportunity for authorities to reset their relationship to communities through promising both effective diminishment of violence and legitimacy of effort. Taking advantage of recent declines in violence, the time is right to reinforce those gains through demonstrating a real commitment to advancement in the field. The feasibility study conducted in three municipalities across El Salvador found that the violence dynamics are extreme, but there is nothing inherent to the violence that would impede a deterrence-oriented approach. The study recommends starting in one or two select cities to adapt the core principles to the specific context, leveraging what works and altering what doesn't. The study also highlights the importance of creating space for such work and taking it seriously to avoid causing further harm through either the criminal justice system or sending the wrong signals to groups.