Most conversations around defunding the police will inevitably produce someone saying that without cops, violent crime will overwhelm everything. But, as it turns out, there are lots of ways to control violence that don’t involve the police. Here, I’m taking a look at a program that is designed to interrupt violence before it begins.
Before I get going, I want to make something very clear. Activists who are calling for defunding or even abolishing the police are not saying they want a lawless, Mad Max-style of living. We’re saying that there are better (i.e. effective and equitable) ways of strengthening public safety in our communities, and that current policing models are not achieving this goal (or, in fact, are a hindrance to that goal).
With that being said, I wanted to talk about a program called Cure Violence (or CeaseFire). Cure Violence considers the spread of violent crime as similar to the spread of a disease. And like a disease, that spread can be prevented by targeted help to the most at-risk individuals. The heart of the Cure Violence program are “violence interrupters”; members of the community who identify areas of conflict and provide mediation for the people involved.
A common occurrence with violent crime is retaliatory violence. A shooting occurs, and then the victims or their friends respond a few hours or days later with another shooting, which results in another retaliatory shooting, and so on. Violence interrupters go to the scenes of shootings and engage directly with the people involved, helping to cool off the situation so that it doesn’t result in another act of violence.
The program also involves the violence interrupters identifying people who might engage in violence or be the victim of violence in the future, and provides them with mentoring and services to help steer them away from violence. This includes job training and drug treatment.
You’ll notice that nothing that I just described involves policing. In fact, most Cure Violence programs want very little to do with the police. It hurts the credibility of the violence interrupters if they are seen as having too close ties with police departments.
There are a number of independent analyses in a variety of locations (e.g. New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia) that show large reductions in shootings and homicides following the Cure Violence program.
However, I want to make a claim here that is based only on my experience as a crime analyst. Programs like Cure Violence are not a guaranteed success. They depend very heavily on the people involved in each city. Without the right personnel and without financial support, these programs will fizzle out without having any major impact. And I am pretty confident in saying that this has happened dozens of times throughout the United States.
Local government is notorious for seeing something presented at a conference, making some half-hearted attempt to get it implemented in their own city, and then moving on a few months later. They can do this because the traditional policing structure is still in place, and it’s easier to do nothing and maintain the status quo than to try and make meaningful changes. But this isn’t a failure of the program — it’s a failure of people (and, more broadly, systems of government).
I’m a proponent of programs like Cure Violence for a few different reasons, not the least of which is their return-on-investment. It can be a little ghoulish to think of lives in terms of dollars, but it can be an effective tactic when talking to city leaders. A homicide has a cost of somewhere around $9 million to society. (One estimate puts it as high as $17.25 million.) A program that costs $500,000 to implement, and prevents one homicide is ultimately paying for itself more than a dozen times over AND saving a life.
The point here is that non-traditional methods at addressing violent crime can be highly effective, cost-efficient, and strengthen ties between public safety agencies and communities. Right now, the relationship between the police and at-risk communities is incredibly strained, making it even more difficult for crime prevention to occur.
We can have public safety that is effective at reducing violence, that saves money, and that generally improves the quality of life for citizens. That’s exactly what government should be trying to do all the time.
When Cure Violence gets implemented in a city, it’s often in a very limited capacity. It can involve only a few violence interrupters focused on a small neighborhood. Imagine what would happen if it were expanded to cover an entire city. Imagine if there were more violence interrupters than armed police officers.
What we’re seeing is that what is really effective at preventing violence is not the threat of armed law enforcement. It’s human beings who are able to directly reach the people who are most at risk of committing violence, and talking to them, helping them, giving them better options. Armed police officers can respond when there is an active violent crime taking place, but violence interrupters can prevent that crime from happening in the first place. And that makes everyone involved safer.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: Mike Erskine on Unsplash