For The Trace, Chip Brownlee reports on Mecklenburg County’s Office of Violence Prevention, which has become the “centerpiece of a growing public health effort to combat gun violence in and around North Carolina’s largest city.” The department runs Alternatives to Violence, a community violence intervention program that functions as “a partnership between the city, county, and several nonprofit service providers.” Alternatives to Violence sends trained community members to respond to gun violence incidents “to interrupt cycles of retaliatory violence.” The program is already showing promising results, as Brownlee reports: “an early evaluation of Alternatives to Violence by the University of North Carolina Charlotte’s Urban Institute found evidence that gun crimes—specifically homicides and gun assaults—were significantly lower in the program’s catchment area.”
