What Is This?

Six categories of work define what community violence intervention does on the ground. What follows draws on reporting from ProPublica, named program officials in cities from Minneapolis to Orlando, and evaluations from the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

What Actually Happens on the Street

A 2023 ProPublica investigation by Alec MacGillis documented how the work operates in practice. In one case, a sex video involving high school students 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.” A violence interrupter “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 then arranged a 2 a.m. meeting on an abandoned block, going through “the superiors in the crew that the father belonged to.” As the interrupter explained afterward: “We were able to resolve it. That’s what we do out here… We squashed it. But nobody knows about those kinds of stories.”

In Minneapolis, a violence interrupter with the MinneapolUS program described talking down a man holding two guns who was preparing to shoot another young man. Sasha Cotton, who heads the city’s Office of Violence Prevention, reported in 2022 that in the program’s first six months, violence interrupters had more than 8,900 contacts with the public and mediated more than 1,500 incidents before they became violent.

In Orlando, an Advance Peace worker named Raysean Brown described checking in with assigned high-risk individuals “three times a day,” according to WESH reporting. In Baltimore, the Safe Streets Penn North site went 478 consecutive days without a single homicide in a neighborhood that the Baltimore Banner described as historically one of the city’s most violent. In Chicago, the CRED (Creating Real Economic Destiny) program provides what it describes as “job training, counseling, and real opportunities” alongside the READI (Rapid Employment and Development Initiative) program’s combination of “subsidized, supported work combined with group cognitive behavioral therapy.”