Cities are increasingly embracing violence interventions programs to control deadly violence

The trend toward community violence intervention—a phrase that covers a handful of potentially useful initiatives to prevent violent crimes, notably shootings—has been spreading across the nation. As Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, says, “The field has been around for a long time now, but it exploded after the killing of George Floyd. There’s been a massive increase in both public and private resources aimed at these initiatives.”

“Old-style policing hasn’t worked,” says Tony McCright Jr., interim program director for justice initiatives at the National League of Cities. “It’s led to mass incarceration but hasn’t led to decreases in gun violence or violence overall or an increase in public safety. By contrast community violence intervention programs have not only produced measurable results, but also have led to a feeling among residents that they are safer.”

While many of the cities that are moving forward on this front are using a variety of tools, some of the most adopted initiatives are dubbed outreach-based violence intervention programs. They use credible messengers to show up at the scenes of violent crimes in order to “conduct direct street-level outreach and conflict mediation, negotiate cease-fires and attempt to shift the culture of conflict resolution with those at the highest risk of violence,” according to the 2023 Violence Prevention Index report, which was funded in part by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Credible messengers are generally people who are intimately acquainted with the community and have shared experiences with the people they are attempting to help.

The city of Pittsburgh has been moving forward with this approach, as well as other initiatives, and has seen a reduction of homicides from last year of about 27%. “Our credible messengers […] are mobilized on a daily basis to help intervene with crime,” explains David Jones, assistant director of public safety for the city. “When a shooting happens, they are the ones who know the people in the area and can maybe help stop the retaliation.”

Stopping retaliation is key to not just this, but other efforts to prevent violence. “Today’s victim could be tomorrow’s perpetrator,” says Thomas Abt, founding director of the Center for the Study of Violence and Prevention at the University of Maryland.

That’s the logic at the heart of hospital-based violence intervention programs. The key there, according to the Violence Prevention Index report, is to “help interrupt cycles of violence by bringing trauma-informed victim and survivor services to violently injured individuals and their families or social circles in the hospital setting.”

“Getting to victims of crime who might subsequently seek retaliation to provide support or resources works best when it’s done quickly,” says Timmeka Perkins, a senior associate with the Casey Foundation. “The golden hour is the time after a person has been shot when they have the highest readiness for changing their own behaviors in such a way that would decrease the likelihood that they’ll be engaged in violence in the future.”

Cities are also relying heavily on mentorship programs for at-risk individuals. These interventions don’t need to be performed by clinicians but can be done by others who are carefully trained to use the tools of cognitive behavior theory to help stop violent activities before they happen. “They are designed to have contact for short periods of time, and to help quickly affect behavior,” explains Perkins.

Chicago’s Rapid Deployment and Development Initiative, or READI, a program implemented by seven community-based organizations, has relied, in large part, on the mentorship approach. It identified people in the south and west sides of Chicago who were particularly likely to be involved in gun violence and gave them the opportunity to participate in the initiative. Early results indicate that homicide rates among participants appear to be somewhat lower than would have been the case for nonparticipants, but more evaluation is still needed.

Another surprising result, according to an evaluation by the University of Chicago Crime Lab, was that for every dollar spent on this effort, up to $18 was saved. As Monica Bhatt, senior researcher at the lab, explains, “Gun violence is one of the most expensive crimes and it accounts for about 90% of the cost of crime nationwide. So, 90% is financially and socially costly. Left unchecked, the status quo is unacceptable.”

Many of these programs got their start after the George Floyd killing and the subsequent “defund the police” movement. As a result, violence intervention programs can be confused with that effort. But in fact, most of the violence prevention programs work hand in hand with the police. “Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, who is chair of the National League of Cities’ public safety & crime prevention committee, will tell you that the first person you call is the police,” says McCright. “You call 911. The question is who should respond. Cities like St. Paul, working with county 911, make sure those calls are responded to by the optimal team. You have trained people, not just the police, when they’re not needed. This is not an anti-police movement.”

St. Louis is known as a national leader in its use of a variety of community violence intervention programs. Wilford Pinkney, director of the St. Louis Office of Violence Prevention, explains that “some of our programs were developed in partnership with the police department and consultation with the police department. In fact, one of the first things I did before this role was to work with the police department and other behavioral health organizations to apply for a mental health collaboration grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance to better improve the interaction between police and residents who are in the midst of a behavioral health crisis.”

Even though there are unquestionably long-term savings that derive from these programs, many of them have been funded by federal dollars through the American Rescue Plan Act. With that money quickly drying up, there’s every chance that— however successful they are—some of these initiatives may be shortchanged or cut back.

In Chicago, for example, “success means sustainability. Right now, READI is being disbanded into components and absorbed into various community programs to see who can do it,” says Bhatt. “The city can’t afford to keep it going in the way it has. This is a constant problem. I am a proponent of evidence-based programming. But even if a program is successful, you go to a government agency and they say, ‘Yes, but it’s so expensive.’ That’s a real consideration for a politician who is trying to balance a budget.”

One way in which St. Louis differs from many other communities is that its commitment to its various community violence intervention programs has led it to focus on making certain that there will be enough money in the till to keep them going for the foreseeable future. As Pinkney explains, “Unlike some other offices, we have a grants and fiscal component and staff, including a grants manager, contract compliance people and data analysts, who are strictly focused on identifying additional funding sources and sustainable funding streams.”

Of course, to gather funding, whether through the budget or other means, it’s crucial to be able to make the case that these programs are having impact. “There is still a shortage of the kind of rigorous evaluation of these efforts that allows you to isolate the effect of an intervention on an outcome,” admits Bhatt.

The absence of long-term evaluations "doesn’t mean they don’t work," says Gelb, "but they’re being taken to scale incredibly fast, with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding."

Evaluation is particularly important as these ideas spread, but also as tighter budgets threaten to pare away at past efforts that have shown promise. Further study is of particular importance as a program that works well in one city may not work as well in another. As the number of new programs multiplies, observers agree that now is the time for vigorous research to make sure the dollars being spent are being used most productively.