Alec MacGillis has a feature story co-published by ProPublica and The New Yorker, which surveys the landscape of community violence intervention programs across the country. It’s so long that even ChatGPT can’t summarize it, but it contains a concrete example of how community violence intervention works in practice that vividly illustrates why violence intervention workers can defuse some disputes that police officers could never resolve:
“Three months earlier, a sex video involving high school students had surfaced online, angering a rival group of teenagers, who had beat up one participant, stealing his designer bag and sunglasses, then fired shots at a car belonging to another participant’s mother … [The violence intervention worker] reached out to the mother of a member of the retaliating group, fearing that she might be a target, and, for several days, he accompanied her on the bus to work …. He also reached out to the father of one of the students in the video; the man was known as a ‘shot caller,’ someone who had the ability to arrange a killing or to defuse a conflict, and he had been making provocative comments about the episode online. At a 2 a.m. meeting on an abandoned block, arranged by the superiors in the crew that the father belonged to, [the violence intervention worker] urged him to de-escalate. ‘We were able to resolve it. That’s what we do out here … We squashed it. But nobody knows about those kinds of stories.’”