The Birmingham City Council voted Tuesday to approve a consulting agreement with the Aspen Institute, which will launch a data collection study of neighborhoods in the city to study ways of reducing violence.

Douglas Wood, director of the Aspen Institute’s Criminal Justice Reform Initiative, told the council that Birmingham would be among the first of six cities studied as part of a $6 million investment from the Ballmer Group, with $2 million spent on studying Birmingham.

The City of Birmingham will pay up to $275,000 as part of the consulting agreement.

The study will compile neighborhood-by-neighborhood data on arrests, jail and prison admissions and releases, hospital emergency room admissions, traffic stops and citations, probations, school discipline, income, housing, race and ethnicity, Wood said.

“We need to know how much that costs in order think about how we might re-invest in those neighborhoods in a way that’s a very targeted way to mitigate against violence,” Wood said.

The information will be publicly available, he said.

“We want people to all have access, right down to your neighborhood,” Wood said.

The information collected on neighborhoods in Birmingham and Jefferson County will be combined with information from the American Community Survey, he said.

The Aspen Institute was founded in 1949 in Aspen, Colorado. Its headquarters is now in Washington, D.C., but it maintains a campus in Aspen where it conducts seminars and programs.

City Council President Pro-Tem Crystal Smitherman said she and council members LaTonya Tate and Clinton Woods visited Aspen to learn about the program.

“They really showed us we have to use numbers in order to re-allocate our resources,” Smitherman said.

“Attacking crime needs to be approached from different angles,” she said. “This will take awhile before we see benefits.”