Identifying and Responding to Chronic Offenders

Law enforcement agencies can use a wide range of approaches to identify chronic offenders and implement tailored interventions to prevent re-offending. Predicting repeat offending is typically done through an analysis that accounts for individual, family, and community risk factors. To prevent re-offending of for gun-involved crimes such as gang violence and non-fatal shootings, agencies can focus on increasing the severity, certainty, or swiftness of sanctions or they can leverage informal forms of social control in the community. To be the most effective, and to reduce potential harms, this approach should be developed with and tailored to the community where it will be implemented.