Business View Caribbean | Feb 2019

NEW STUDY SHOWS HOWTRINIDAD AND TOBAGO CAN PREVENT CRIMESWITH INNOVATIVE APPROACH T he Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Arizona State University presented a study showing that treating violence as an epidemic and intervening to prevent its trans- mission can be an effective tool to reduce violent crime. The study, “Evaluating Cure Violence,” pre- sented at the IDB’s headquarters in Washington, DC, evaluated the results of the Cure Violence program in Trinidad and Tobago, a project that was financed by the IDB. Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean has been an ongoing humanitarian crisis for decades, fueling an immigration and refugee crisis across the region. The “Evaluating Cure Violence” study is the result of an extensive, three-year evaluation of Project REASON, a local violence prevention program that used the Cure Violence methodol- ogy to address homicides, woundings, and shoot- ings. The Cure Violence program uses a public OPENING LINES 10