How Is This Different?

Most cities already have some response to gun violence: gang units, homicide divisions, after-school programs, and in some jurisdictions, focused deterrence strategies. What follows is how law enforcement leaders, researchers, and program officials describe what CVI does that these existing approaches do not.

CVI vs. Traditional Policing

The field describes the distinction: CVI deploys “trained experts in conflict resolution and trauma response” rather than law enforcement officers, and these workers arrive “without sirens, weapons, badges, or legal authority.”

Three law enforcement leaders have described the operational boundary in specific terms.

Deputy Mayor Todd Bettison of Detroit, himself a former police official, described CVI workers as “doing something police can’t do.” Chief Ellery Backus of Lansing: “I don’t know anybody else can pick up that space.” Commander Andre Parham of Chicago: CVI workers “build relationships in a way that us, the police, we just can’t. It just is not possible.”

The workforce differs (credible messengers with lived experience in violence versus sworn officers with legal authority), the activation differs (proactive outreach through street intelligence versus 911 dispatch), and the time horizon differs (months and years of sustained engagement versus minutes to hours per encounter).

The complementary relationship carries a structural tension. CVI workers access information through trust. Police seek information through investigation. As the 2023 ProPublica investigation documented, when those two streams cross, the trust that makes CVI effective can be destroyed. The operational protocols governing information sharing are not well documented in public sources.

CVI vs. Focused Deterrence and Group Violence Intervention

Focused deterrence, developed by criminologist David Kennedy and sometimes called the Group Violence Intervention model or Operation Ceasefire, shares CVI’s focus on the small number of individuals driving community violence.

The mechanism differs. Focused deterrence delivers a dual message — consequences and support — typically through structured call-in meetings where law enforcement, prosecutors, community leaders, and service providers present together. As the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College describes the model, police are central to the design: the law enforcement presence is what makes the deterrence credible.

CVI carries no enforcement threat. A credible messenger shows up in the neighborhood, builds a relationship over time, and works to redirect someone’s trajectory through trust rather than the prospect of arrest. The absence of authority markers is what allows access.

The two can coexist. Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which used a focused deterrence approach, went 543 days without a juvenile homicide before the streak ended in June 2025, per THV11 reporting. Chicago runs both READI (a CVI program) and focused deterrence efforts through different institutional channels. Focused deterrence requires police credibility in the target community. In neighborhoods where trust in law enforcement is low, CVI does not depend on that credibility. It depends on the credibility of the individual worker.

CVI vs. After-School Programs and Youth Services

Youth services are universal or near-universal — they serve large populations of young people, most of whom will never be involved in violence. CVI targets what Orlando’s Advance Peace described to WESH as “the guys that are committing the gun violence or most likely to be the victim.” Aurora’s SAVE program targets what Division Chief Mark Hildebrand described as “specific social groups of kids in the highest risk.”

Chicago’s CRED program operates in fifteen neighborhoods that account for roughly half of the city’s gun violence, per the Chicago Tribune. Neither approach substitutes for the other.

CVI vs. Mobile Crisis Response

Mobile crisis teams respond to 911 calls for behavioral health emergencies. The workforce is clinical: licensed mental health professionals. The engagement lasts for a single encounter. The activation mechanism is 911 dispatch.

CVI is proactive. Workers seek out people embedded in violence networks before a specific incident has occurred. The workforce is non-clinical: credible messengers whose credential is lived experience with violence. The engagement lasts months or years. As program descriptions put it: “When someone sends a text that sounds like revenge, they’re the ones who get the call.”

The populations served overlap only at the margins. A person in a behavioral health crisis needs clinical stabilization. A person embedded in a retaliatory violence cycle needs trust-based relationship and conflict interruption.

CVI vs. HVIP (Hospital-Based Violence Intervention)

Both CVI and HVIP use credible messengers, both serve populations involved in violence, and both are part of the same ecosystem. The difference is temporal and spatial.

Street CVI operates before the shooting, on the street. HVIP operates after the shooting, at the hospital bedside. As Baltimore hospital leaders have described it, hospitals have moved beyond simply treating wounds and discharging patients back into the same conditions. The immediate HVIP goal is preventing retaliation. The longer-term goal is sustained case management over months.

Together with Trauma Recovery Centers, which provide long-term recovery support after discharge, the three address different stages of the violence cycle. A city with street CVI but no HVIP has no mechanism to intervene at the bedside when prevention fails. A city with HVIP but no street CVI intervenes after violence but does nothing to prevent the next shooting.

CVI vs. Safety Ambassadors

Ambassador programs place trained civilians in public spaces to provide visible, approachable presence. Ambassadors are visible — their value comes from being seen. CVI workers often operate invisibly — their value comes from private conversations, per the ProPublica investigation’s documentation of 2 a.m. meetings and bus accompaniment.

Ambassadors serve the general public in defined zones. CVI workers serve a narrow, identified population. Ambassadors de-escalate in the moment. CVI workers build relationships over months that prevent conflicts from reaching escalation.

What CVI Uniquely Provides

Three structural properties documented across the programs above distinguish CVI from every other alternative response model.

First, proactive activation — identifying risk and going to people rather than waiting for a 911 call.

Second, trust through violence-specific lived experience — the credential described by program descriptions as access to spaces where workers “get access to information about conflicts before they boil over” because “they live in and are members of the community.”

Third, sustained engagement over months and years — the time horizon documented from Orlando’s three-times-daily check-ins to Chicago’s multi-year wraparound services.

What CVI Does Not Replace

CVI does not replace policing — as Superintendent Snelling said: “We can’t arrest our way out of this,” but officers are needed for investigation, enforcement, and response to active violence. CVI does not replace mobile crisis teams, after-school programs, or focused deterrence. Each addresses a different population, at a different time, through a different mechanism.

As Aqeela Sherrills, advisor to the White House Community Violence Intervention Collaborative, stated: “You can’t have public safety without the public. Police can’t do this job by themselves. Community violence intervention complements law enforcement. They are both vital for public safety.”

Bottom Line

CVI differs from policing in activation (proactive vs. reactive), mechanism (trust vs. authority), and time horizon (months vs. minutes) — differences that Superintendent Snelling, Chief Paul, Chief Beck, Chief Backus, and Commander Parham have each described from operational experience. It differs from focused deterrence in carrying no enforcement threat. It differs from mobile crisis in population (violence networks vs. behavioral health) and workforce (credible messengers vs. clinicians). It differs from HVIP in timing (before vs. after the shooting) and setting (street vs. hospital), though both use the same workforce concept. What CVI uniquely provides is proactive activation, trust built through violence-specific lived experience, and sustained engagement over months and years.

Source Appendix

Deputy Mayor Bettison, Detroit — “doing something police can’t do.” Detroit Free Press. Also: City of Detroit. https://detroitmi.gov/
Chief Backus, Lansing — “I don’t know anybody else can pick up that space.” The Trace, Josiah Bates, May 2025. https://www.thetrace.org/2025/05/advance-peace-lansing-michigan-shootings/
Commander Parham — “relationships police just can’t build.” Chicago media reporting. Also: Chicago CRED. https://www.chicagocred.org/
Focused deterrence / David Kennedy / Operation Ceasefire. National Network for Safe Communities, John Jay College. https://nnscommunities.org/ Also: Kennedy, D., “Don’t Shoot,” Bloomsbury, 2011.
Pine Bluff, Arkansas — 543 days without juvenile homicide (streak ended June 2025). THV11, May 2025. https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/pine-bluffs-gun-violence-intervention-program-500-days-no-juvenile-homicide/91-371d5b84-ded6-438d-b0b7-8a2df3cec869 Also: KARK, June 2025.
Orlando Advance Peace — targeting description. WESH reporting. Also: WESH reporting, Orlando..
Aurora SAVE — Division Chief Hildebrand. 9NEWS, September 2023. https://www.9news.com/article/news/crime/aurora-program-reduce-youth-violence/73-49d6756d-113b-4653-98a2-e4ab972d3bfa.
Chicago — 15 neighborhoods, half of gun violence. Chicago Tribune, February 2024. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/02/01/foundations-business-interests-raise-66-million-to-fight-crime-in-chicago/
CVI program descriptions — “trained experts,” “when someone sends a text,” “live in and are members of the community.” Term used across HAVI, University of Chicago, and multiple program descriptions.
ProPublica investigation — 2 a.m. meetings, bus accompaniment, information-sharing tension. ProPublica, Alec MacGillis, May 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/are-community-violence-interruption-programs-effective
Baltimore hospital leadership on violence intervention. LifeBridge Health/Center for Hope. See also: NPR, Andrea Hsu, April 8, 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/08/473379238/baltimore-sees-hospitals-as-key-to-breaking-a-cycle-of-violence
Aqeela Sherrills — “You can’t have public safety without the public.” Philadelphia Citizen, January 24, 2022. https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/aqeela-sherrills-brokering-peace/ (First half confirmed; extended version from CVI Collaborative event.)
Superintendent Snelling — “can’t arrest our way out.” See Q01 Source Appendix entry 8.