Marshall University

Background
The Cabell County Substance Abuse Prevention Partnership (CCSAPP)—a broad-based community prevention coalition—started in March 2006 when Marshall University and six other agencies applied for a sub-grant from the state under its federal SPF-SIG grant for implementing a strategic prevention framework. Housed in the United Way, the coalition has since grown to include 30 partners, including the Huntington Police Department, the local newspaper The Herald Dispatch, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Highway Safety, the Housing Authority, the Health Department, the Cabell County Probation Department, several faith communities, the West Virginia Prevention Resource Center, and the local mental health services provider.

The partnership was focusing on environmental strategies to reduce underage drinking when Anne McGee, project director of CCSAPP and Amy Saunders, student health education specialist with Marshall University Student Health Education Programs, attended a workshop conducted in August 2007 by Harold Holder of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation on how geospatial analysis can support prevention policy change.

“We had also seen some information on geographic information system (GIS) mapping from the Higher Education Center, but at that workshop we really got to see how it works and thought it was very interesting to look at data in that way,” said Saunders.

In January 2008 CCSAPP received some asset forfeiture money that allowed it to fund an environmental strategy with regard to underage and high-risk drinking. In summer 2007, there had been some shootings in downtown Huntington and it seemed that violence was escalating. In addition, CCSAPP was concerned that in Huntington problem alcohol retailers whose licenses had been revoked were able to reopen under a new name.

It was decided to use the money to conduct a GIS mapping project related to location of alcohol-related incidents. Saunders asked some professors in the geography department if any of their students would be interested in working on the project. That’s how Andrew Lowe, a first-year master’s student, and Chad Pyles, a junior, both majoring in geography and GIS mapping, came to be involved with the project.

Lowe and Pyles used crime data from the Huntington Police Department (HPD) and licensing data from the West Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control Administration (WVABCA) for the year 2008. According to Lowe the alcohol data were readily available from a Web site. Pyles said that getting the data from HPD took only a matter of a few weeks. It was just a matter of the police printing out the data in a paper format, then manually entering it into the computer. After completing the analysis they wrote their report, A Spatial Analysis of the Relationship between Alcohol Consumption Points and Crime Frequency in Huntington, WV (April 15, 2009), and presented the findings to CCSAPP.

Alcohol Outlets and Crime in Huntington
Lowe and Pyles examined the relationship between on-premise alcohol retail locations and crime locations in Huntington. They wanted to determine whether more alcohol retailers in an area would correlate to more crime around that area. They used the date from HPD and WVABCA to conduct a spatial analysis method of cluster analysis and found that areas with high densities of on-premise alcohol retailers (blue clusters) in the downtown area correlated with areas of high density crime, more specifically violent crime (red clusters). Their report concluded that the results support the need for new licensing laws to prohibit problem alcohol retailers whose license has been revoked from reopening under a new name and new license.

The first step was to present the study findings to CCSAPP. In addition to the report, Lowe and Pyles presented the data in a series of slides, with over half of them being maps showing the different layers of their findings. According to Pyles, having those visuals helps people more clearly understand the relationships uncovered in the analysis. The following is one of the maps showing the overall findings of the study.

According to Saunders, the coalition members were really excited about the presentation, asking a lot of questions. Many of them had not seen information presented in that way. Lowe and Pyles provided clear explanations on how the analysis was conducted, what it showed, and what it meant in terms of supporting policy changes.

CCSAPP’s preliminary thinking on the kind of policy changes it would like to see to reduce violence related to these bad outlets is a moratorium on new licenses in the geographic area where most of the violence takes place, especially on new licenses for establishments that have been shut down because of problems.

According to McGee, such a moratorium could be imposed by a special zoning committee operating through the City Council or through the city planning department, which issues the special permit necessary to open an on-premises outlet in Huntington. “Such a moratorium would help to reduce the alcohol density downtown, which gives underage students the impression that is where to go to have fun. It also increases that perception of acceptance by the community. We would like to see density reduced.”

The next step is for McGee and Saunders to meet individually with a couple of key people, such as the mayor and some city council members, and then move forward from there. They are optimistic that the quality of the information from this study will be compelling enough evidence to affect policy change.

In addition, Lowe and Pyles have presented their study to the director of a U.S. Department of Justice Weed and Seed grant in Huntington. He was very interested in using their methods to evaluate his project. For example, in the cluster analysis of the data three areas really “pop up.” Two overlay with the alcohol density, but the third area is in the Fairfield area, which experiences high levels of crime and drug arrests. “We are interested in looking at that with the Weed and Seed data,” said Pyles. And Lowe has plans to meet with HPD to talk about how the study provides opportunities for more analysis and more data collection to gain a better understanding of environmental factors surrounding crime and violence.