The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) gave state and local governments an unprecedented five-year period of flexible funding. Through ARPA’s State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds, state and local governments received $350 billion to hire staff, launch programs, and build infrastructure they otherwise couldn't have afforded. Many jurisdictions directed these resources toward public safety and violence prevention programming at a time when annual homicides nationwide increased by an all-time high of 30 percent from 2019 to 2020.

With ARPA funding set to expire on December 31, 2026, state and local policymakers will face a new fiscal reality, marked not just by the end of ARPA funding, but also broader fiscal pressures and staffing constraints tied to recent federal policy changes. At the same time, violent crime has declined sharply. In 2023, homicides saw their greatest single-year drop (11.6 percent), and they have continued trending downward in subsequent years.

Cities now face a pressing question: what programs and services funded with ARPA dollars should continue once that support expires? As leaders consider which investments to maintain, scale back, or cut, local data should help guide these difficult choices. Local policymakers can consider three strategies.

1. Analyze where ARPA funds were invested and how violence outcomes changed in your locality.

Cities already have this data. Their local budgets and US Department of the Treasury Project and Expenditure Reports show ARPA period spending. And other public outcome data show how local violence changed. Combining these data can help leaders determine where investments led to positive outcomes.

For example, Baltimore directed $50 million in ARPA funds to support an integrated approach to violence reduction that included Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) efforts, community-based violence intervention, victim services, reentry programs, and trauma-informed practices. This approach was initially concentrated in the western police district, a community experiencing some of the highest rates of violence in the country.

Just 18 months after GVRS was implemented in 2022, homicides and shootings had decreased by about a quarter and carjackings by about a third (compared with similar neighborhoods in Baltimore). Recent analysis suggest the program prevented 57 homicides and nonfatal shooting victimizations in the western district in 2022 (which saved roughly $122 million in costs, about 35 times more than GVRS’s first year of spending and 25 times more than its budgeted allocation). They also suggest the results stem from of an integrated approach that combined deterrence, incapacitation, service delivery, and the legitimacy of community-based messengers. Research also found no evidence that violence was displaced to other areas, nor that overall enforcement activity expanded. These analyses have informed Baltimore’s expansion of the strategy to additional police districts and embrace of a “targeted, partnership-based response to group violence,” and the city continues to experience historic lows in violence.

These analyses also demonstrate the value of understanding not just how cities spent ARPA dollars, but also their impact. Few cities will have the research partnerships to evaluate their investments as rigorously as Baltimore, but all can assess their ARPA spending and use those results to track impact and inform future spending.

Recovery Plan Performance Reports, which large counties submit to the Treasury annually, are a starting point for cities to think about what to assess and what data to pull when thinking about impact. These reports document program goals and key performance indicators for each State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund investment. In addition, the American Rescue Plan Data and Evidence Dashboard assesses 200 plans submitted by state and local governments and provides a list of notable projects with evaluation frameworks, which cities can use to inform their own approaches for assessing impact.

2. Adopt leading (rather than lagging) indicators alongside current key performance measures at the city level.

A robust body of evidence shows early intervention and prevention services can reduce violence. But many localities rely on metrics like homicide and crime rates to guide their decisions. These are important but lagging indicators, meaning that by the time they begin rising, the conditions that contributed to violence have been building for a long time.

Taking a more prevention-oriented approach starts with collecting data that track the upstream conditions that the available research has demonstrated is linked to violence:

• shooting (nonfatal) and assault data from police and emergency departments
• scale and scope of youth not enrolled in school or disconnected from school
• indicators of economic stress like eviction filings, unemployment, and benefit enrollment gaps
• the reach of violence prevention programs, including whether they are engaging people at highest risk of violence

Measuring and tracking these conditions can better inform officials where interventions are needed most. For example, if officials notice an uptick in school absenteeism, they can use that data to figure out why and then invest in solutions (e.g., transportation support, youth mentorship programs, mental health services, and other nonpunitive measures) that strengthen community well-being before conditions become more severe.

By incorporating leading indicators into operational decision-making, city leaders can more effectively and efficiently deploy resources, saving lives and city funds in the process. They can measure and track these conditions (accounting for robust privacy protections and community buy-in) through data linkages and shared data hubs.

3. Build integrated cost models to understand the fiscal effects of violence prevention.

The evidence base is clear on the personal and societal costs of violence. Take Washington, DC, where gun violence add up to more than $1.8 billion, or about $2,536 a person, each year. Researchers estimate that a homicide in one year in DC is associated with a $9,000 decrease in median home prices and the loss of two retail and business services in the following year, and other cities follow a similar pattern.

Yet cities rarely track these expenses in an integrated way; costs sit where they are directly incurred, in health, the criminal legal system, and social service systems, and are rarely aggregated in a policy-relevant manner. For example, data from 2016 and 2017 showed that the initial hospital costs for firearm injuries were more than $1 billion a year, and 60 percent of those costs were covered by Medicaid or other public insurance patients.

Developing an integrated understanding can be complicated, requiring data from various systems, agencies, and actors. But when done, it illuminates the impact of prevention and where investments are fiscally responsible.

As ARPA funding comes to an end, these strategies can help local leaders heading into an era of fiscal constraint. Cities that are positioned to sustain their public safety gains will be those that demonstrate which investments deliver strong fiscal value. Integrating costs and benefits can help them determine what to protect, what to rethink, and what to let go as they build a more durable strategy for a leaner fiscal future.