Melt Thy Rifles Into Garden Tools

After piloting anti-violence initiatives across the city, leaders in Kansas City, Missouri, are re-evaluating their approach. While the steps taken to curb gun violence were similar to others across the country, here, they yielded few successes. Leaders in the community cite a lack of collaboration and responses that don’t take into consideration root causes like mental health, poverty, education, or police/community mistrust.

Amidst gun violence and mass shootings, 19 states and D.C. have enacted red flag laws, or extreme risk protection orders, that allow law enforcement to mitigate threats of gun violence by removing guns from a person’s possession. Studies in states that have adopted red flag laws, specifically Connecticut and Indiana, have found that for every 10 to 20 people who had guns taken away, one life was saved.

The Ethical Society of Police is an association primarily made up of officers of color. The association aims to encourage and educate on ethics among law enforcement and works to foster better relationships within the communities they serve.

Through peer support, street mediation, and assistance with underlying needs like groceries and help with schoolwork, Peace During War works to help people in Kalamazoo, Mich. leave gun violence behind. The organization's efforts alongside other prevention initiatives are thought to have helped the city record zero gun deaths in the first five months of 2022 after two years of record gun deaths.

Through peer support, street mediation, and assistance with underlying needs like groceries and help with schoolwork, Peace During War works to help people in Kalamazoo, Mich. leave gun violence behind. The organization's efforts alongside other prevention initiatives are thought to have helped the city record zero gun deaths in the first five months of 2022 after two years of record gun deaths.

When young people with criminal records get shot in Albuquerque, they may get visited by the police department's Violence Intervention Program: cops and counselors urging the victims to resist the impulse to retaliate. Shooting victims are offered social and health services meant to stabilize their lives. In its first year, the team contacted 149 people, nearly all of whom stayed out of criminal trouble. None got caught with a gun and only one got shot again.

MinneapolUS puts unarmed community members on Minneapolis streets to prevent street violence, part of the city's effort to redirect resources from the police to other crime-prevention efforts. Four teams of 20 to 30 members, many of them former gang members and formerly incarcerated, have intervened in beatings and potential shootings. They use a public-health approach pioneered by the organization Cure Violence, which has proven effective in other cities.

In their Group Violence Intervention program, Kalamazoo police use "custom notifications" to intervene before street violence erupts. Working in tandem with community groups, the police tell likely shooters that more violence will get them arrested and imprisoned, but stopping now will be rewarded with job help and other services. Progress is slow. It gets measured one by one as young men get jobs and stay out of trouble. The pandemic disrupted the program, followed by a surge in violence. Community members praise the approach as an alternative to overly aggressive policing, but want more services programs.

Baltimore’s Safe Streets program, which uses a public-health approach to stopping the spread of community gun violence, mediated more than 1,800 conflicts in 2019 and is credited with preventing homicides altogether in one neighborhood, despite the city’s overall violent year. Since the program’s launch in 2007, studies have shown it to be effective in its use of “credible messengers” whose street savvy can be deployed to “interrupt” retaliatory violence. But the Baltimore program also illustrates tensions between such community-based programs and the police, especially when the police are corrupt.

Within a year of its creation, a state-federal collaboration to reduce gun violence in Kansas City seemed to result in a deep decline in killings. But the program, called Kansas City No Violence Alliance, collapsed by 2019 after police pulled their support. The program's approach, called focused deterrence, has been proven effective in multiple studies in other cities. But an analysis of the program in Kansas City found multiple failures in consistently getting targeted people to attend call-ins, where they are threatened with arrest if they commit violence but offered social services to choose another path.