How San Bernardino is learning from Oakland, Stockton to decrease deadly violence

Gang violence in Chicago is not uncommon, but one organization is working to change what happens in the aftermath of funerals. Dubbed a public health program, Cure Violence enlists the help of community members to attend funerals, provide food and build trust with those that have been impacted by this violence in order to deter future incidents from taking place.

CeaseFire Illinois have worked for years on the streets of Chicago intervening as “violence interrupters” to stop problems escalating into tragedy. Some volunteers are former gang members and they use community connections and personal relationships to stop shootings and retaliations before they happen. The group was the focus of a documentary called “The Interrupters.”

Now that a coalition of Milwaukee preachers, police and prosecutors has witnessed firsthand the success of a crime-fighting partnership in Boston, the local coalition is clearing its first obstacle -- putting its ideas into action at home.

In 2019, a South Sudan chief organized and empowered local “vigilante groups” (networks of households tasked with supporting each other), and since then, the community has transformed from a sparsely populated and violent neighborhood into a crowded but safe place where markets can stay open later at night. This community policing tactic has since spread to other South Sudanese areas and relies on collaboration between various authorities and ethnic groups to succeed.

In New York's and San Francisco's Chinatowns, groups responding to anti-Asian hate crimes and harassment illustrate the tension between community-led public safety efforts that either rely on the police for assistance or actively avoid entanglement with the police because of a lack of community trust. The groups actively patrol streets and get to know residents and mediate disputes, maintaining a visible presence as a deterrent. There's no evidence they have reduced anti-Asian bias incidents, but residents of the two neighborhoods, mainly business owners, said both types of groups make them feel safer.

When protests against police violence turned into looting and anti-Black violence in some Latinx neighborhoods, violence interrupters from groups such as UCAN, EnLace, and Chicago CRED brokered a peace agreement that almost immediately ended that violence. The outreach workers’ years-long relationships and training in dispute mediation gave them credibility to address historic racial tensions among gangs in Lawndale and Little Village. The violence could have escalated, but three days of negotiation – and a sense of common cause against racism in policing – united the neighborhoods.

In Rochester, NY, the Center for Teen Empowerment, a nonprofit that trains youth in community organizing, personal development, and anti-violence, is working to bring kids off the street and into safety. The program, which started in Boston, is centered on four ideas: jobs (paying the youth hired as organizers), teamwork, agency (letting them build their own activist agendas), and peer influence. While hard to evaluate because of its situational, qualitative nature, city officials, including law enforcement, point to the program as a factor in the decrease in violence across the city.

Sacramento is implementing a program developed in 2011 in Richmond, Calif., that showed success curtailing gun violence among young men caught up in gangs or potential shootings. They get numerous social services and mentoring from men previously incarcerated. Stipends are a controversial part of the program, but a review of the Richmond program in 2015 found most participants were still alive and had not suffered a gun related injury, or been arrested for gun-related activity.

The creation of CompStat fostered a huge drop in crime rates in New York City by the 1990s. The idea came from an odd and obsessive transit cop was to track every single crime daily in every precinct and use that data to systematically go after everything from murders to low-level crimes once ignored by police. It was a drastic shift in the way NYPD worked and was credited with making the city far safer, but was also flawed.

Police in Ensenada, Mexico, have been using drones since October 2017 and it has led to more than 500 arrests and a 10 percent drop in crime. The drones have fostered faster response times and help police decide how to allocate resources appropriately, while highlighting risks before officers approach a property. Officials in Chula Vista, Calif., are working with the same drone company to start a similar program, which could prompt changes in federal policies on using drones in the U.S.