Objectives. To determine if remediating blighted vacant urban land reduced firearm shooting incidents resulting in injury or death. Methods. We conducted a cluster randomized controlled trial in which we assigned 541 randomly selected vacant lots in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to 110 geographically contiguous clusters and randomly assigned these clusters to a greening intervention, a less-intensive mowing and trash cleanup intervention, or a no-intervention control condition. The random assignment to the trial occurred in April and June 2013 and lasted until March 2015. In a difference-in-differences analysis, we assessed whether the 2 treatment conditions relative to the control condition reduced firearm shootings around vacant lots. Results. During the trial, both the greening intervention, −6.8% (95% confidence interval [CI] = −10.6%, −2.7%), and the mowing and trash cleanup intervention, −9.2% (95% CI = −13.2%, −4.8%), significantly reduced shootings. There was no evidence that the interventions displaced shootings into adjacent areas. Conclusions. Remediating vacant land with inexpensive, scalable methods, including greening or minimal mowing and trash cleanup, significantly reduced shootings that result in serious injury or death. Public Health Implications. Cities should experiment with place-based interventions to develop effective firearm violence–reduction strategies. Trial Registration. This trial was registered with the International Standard Randomized Controlled Trial Number (study ID ISRCTN92582209; http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN92582209 ).

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Scorecards have become an increasingly common tool for public policy decision making about important issues in education, finance, and health care. Few scorecards have been applied in criminal justice and none has been developed to highlight racial disparities in incarceration. We constructed county-level scorecards for racial disparities in incarceration rates for the New York State Permanent Commission on Sentencing. Using detailed data on felony cases in New York State between 2000 and 2014, including the specific penal law criminal offense, features of the underlying charges, and criminal history, we assembled a set of White defendants within each county that collectively resembled Black and Hispanic defendants in that county. Statewide, Black defendants were more likely to receive prison sentences than similar White defendants (43% vs. 40%). Some individual counties had much greater racial disparities with relative risks of prison as high as 1.36. We found similar results for Hispanic defendants. Policy Implications: Early institutional support for our scorecard receded once racial disparities were flagged in specific, named counties. The scorecard was never deployed by the Commission. Commission members and the research team met with individual counties but the Commission was disbanded during this process. New York State still lacks a formal sentencing commission. We recommend future scorecard efforts