Who Are the Key Stakeholders?

Eight stakeholder groups shape whether a CVI program builds a durable coalition or collapses under unaddressed concerns. What follows presents each group’s documented positions, needs, and tensions using named voices and specific examples.

Law Enforcement Leadership

Law enforcement leaders who have worked alongside CVI programs have produced the field’s politically consequential endorsements.

Superintendent Larry Snelling of Chicago: “We can’t arrest our way out of this.” Deputy Mayor Todd Bettison of Detroit, a former police official: CVI workers are “doing something police can’t do.” Chief Murphy Paul of Baton Rouge: “Over 47% of our shooting incidents happen inside of a house or on a property. I could have 200 more officers on the streets and it wouldn’t solve the problem.” Commander Parham of Chicago: CVI workers “build relationships in a way that us, the police, we just can’t.” Chief Charlie Beck, who led both the LAPD and Chicago Police: “Intervention groups are the answer.” Chief Ellery Backus of Lansing: “I don’t know anybody else can pick up that space.”

These leaders share operational experience with CVI — they endorsed the programs after watching credible messengers do work their departments could not replicate.

Line Officers and Detectives

Sasha Cotton, who heads the Minneapolis Office of Violence Prevention, reported in 2022 that officers thank the CVI teams “for taking over in a situation where they’re like, ‘I’ve got to get to the next call.'” That describes one side of the relationship.

The other side involves a specific tension: a homicide detective working a case where a CVI worker has access to the same networks. If a credible messenger is perceived as a police informant, their access — and potentially their safety — evaporates. As the 2023 ProPublica investigation documented, the operational protocols governing what CVI workers can and cannot share with police are not well documented in public sources. Some cities have established formal confidentiality protocols. The challenge remains largely unresolved across the field.

Police Unions

Seventy-one percent of voters in a 2024 national survey find persuasive the argument that “crime has gone down because of investment in police, not alternative programs” — a frame that union leadership is positioned to amplify. No documented cases of organized police union campaigns against CVI at the scale seen in some mobile crisis debates have emerged in public reporting, possibly because CVI operates in a different space from policing (proactive outreach into violence networks rather than 911-dispatched response to calls police currently handle).

Implementation Stakeholders

Three operational stakeholder challenges appear across documented programs.

Dispatcher hesitancy: 911 operators are sometimes reluctant to route information to civilian responders rather than police. This pattern, limits program effectiveness at the identification stage because the 911 system is one pathway through which hospitals and first responders learn about shooting victims who may need CVI engagement.

Coordination complexity: CVI programs operate alongside police, hospitals, schools, courts, and probation offices. Negotiating roles, responsibilities, and information-sharing boundaries with each institution requires sustained administrative effort described across documented programs as an ongoing implementation challenge across documented cities.

Families and Community Members as Stakeholders

Families of shooting victims need documented support that goes beyond the immediate crisis. Per a 2024 national survey, 86% of likely voters say it is important for survivors of violent crime to have relocation costs covered when they face a continued safety threat. Eighty-five percent say no-cost medical care for family members is important. Eighty-three percent say funeral cost coverage is important. Eighty-two percent say lost wages should be covered.

The Albuquerque program illustrates how institutional partnerships address broader community needs. The West Mesa High School program provides what the Albuquerque Journal described as “on campus peer-to-peer support” in partnership with Foot Locker, which provides retail employment pathways. The school’s principal told the Journal that “being reactive is not working. We cannot rely on a single solution.” Programs describe providing “honorable exits” from violence — pathways that address both the practical dimension (employment, education, housing) and the identity dimension (leaving without losing standing).

Staff retention: The emotional toll of the work — maintaining relationships with people who are killed despite the intervention, attending funerals for clients, carrying the weight of both visible failures and invisible successes — creates occupational hazards that many programs have not adequately addressed. Competition from better-paying positions compounds the challenge. Workers describe burnout and secondary trauma as persistent issues.

Credible Messengers (The Workforce)

The 2023 ProPublica investigation documented the personal risk workers accept. In one case, a violence interrupter “accompanied her on the bus to work” for several days, physically protecting a threatened mother. In Minneapolis, an interrupter described talking down a man holding two guns.

The University of Chicago Leadership Academy has trained leaders from 21 cities in a six-month intensive program, per the Chicago Defender. Four hundred CRED participants have earned high school diplomas across nine graduations, per the Chicago Tribune. More than 40 companies in 17 industries hire graduates. But as workers describe, the credentialing infrastructure is still young, and many workers operate without salary, benefits, or career trajectory reflecting the difficulty and danger of the work.

Communities Experiencing Violence

The Oakland case documented by ProPublica illustrates what communities need. Violence interrupter Joseph Truehill met the family of a murdered 15-year-old at the hospital, stayed “until 5 a.m.,” provided “daily check-ins for two weeks, ordered DoorDash meals, helped with funeral costs.” The mother testified: “Without them, I don’t think I would have made it through mentally.”

Grady Hospital in Atlanta reported a 98% acceptance rate among eligible patients in its first year, per 11Alive — evidence that communities accept the programs when they exist. The worst documented outcome pattern is a program that arrives, builds relationships, and then disappears when funding shifts — as the April 2025 federal contraction demonstrated across multiple cities.

Trauma Surgeons and Hospital Leadership

Named physician champions include Dr. Randi Smith at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, Dr. Amy Makley in Cincinnati, Dr. Michel Aboutanos at VCU Richmond, Dr. Ashley Williams Hogue in Mobile, and Dr. Lindsey Dunkelberger at Prisma Health in Columbia, South Carolina. Dr. Smith described the approach in a 2021 AJC op-ed: treat violence like any infectious disease, with containment, root cause analysis, and prevention of spread.

Hospital administrators evaluate HVIP through institutional risk, cost, and reputation. Cleveland’s University Hospitals documented reinjury rates dropping from 29% to 19% among 600-plus participants, per Ideastream — data that makes the institutional case. Indianapolis’s Prescription for Hope documented a two-thirds reduction in repeat injury, per a 2018 evaluation.

Researchers and Evaluators

The University of Chicago Crime Lab, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Michigan State, UC-Berkeley, and Stanford have all evaluated CVI programs. The READI RCT (2,456 participants) and the Choose to Change evaluation (2,074 youth) are the field’s most rigorous evidence, per the QJE and Crime Lab publications. A February 2026 systematic review of Cure Violence evaluations published in INQUIRY found that 68.7% of 83 findings showed violence reductions but only 32.5% reached statistical significance — an honest measure of the field’s uneven documentation.

The research community faces a specific tension. Programs need evaluation to justify continued funding. Researchers need programs willing to be studied, including programs willing to participate in randomized designs where some eligible people are assigned to control groups. The READI program’s willingness to participate in an RCT produced the field’s most cited evidence, per the QJE publication. Not every program will agree to randomization. The urgency of saving lives and the rigor of experimental evaluation exist in documented tension across the field.

Durham, North Carolina and New Orleans have established CVI as part of broader community safety initiatives. These institutional models represent an emerging pattern where CVI is embedded within multi-function safety departments rather than operating as a standalone program.
Albuquerque’s Community Safety Department provides a third institutional model: a cabinet-level agency that houses CVI alongside other non-law-enforcement response, providing co-equal municipal standing with police and fire, per Albuquerque city government. The institutional home decision shapes funding access, political protection, workforce rules, and public perception — all of which affect whether stakeholder relationships develop as partnerships or as friction points.
The Oakland Department of Violence Prevention, led by officials partnering with nonprofits like the one employing Joseph Truehill, represents a fourth model: a city department that contracts with community organizations to maintain credible messenger employment flexibility and community trust.

Named Critics

CVI faces criticism from multiple political directions, and the specific arguments matter.

The workforce objection — employing people with criminal histories — targets the model’s foundational design feature. Program descriptions frames the response: these are “trained experts in conflict resolution and trauma response who are saving lives.” The University of Chicago Leadership Academy provides six months of training, per the Chicago Defender. Bob Karr, Senior VP of Blommer Chocolate, wrote in a 2023 Chicago Tribune op-ed: “Business leaders cannot sit back and hope that others will solve crime.”

The “soft on crime” objection draws support from the 71% of voters who find the police-investment argument persuasive in a 2024 national survey. The counterevidence: three RCTs, police chief endorsements, and 80% of voters agreeing CVI is as important as policing.

The “insufficient scope” objection comes from critics who argue CVI programs are too small and too focused on individual behavior to address structural conditions. This objection has factual basis: Chicago’s CRED serves roughly 15% of its identified highest-risk population, per the SC2 initiative. Workers describe their own role as “treating the bleeding while someone else works on the disease.”

The federal objection has become operational: the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention closed, more than 360 grants were terminated per Reuters, and the FY2026 budget proposes eliminating CVI grant funding entirely.

Aidan Johnston, federal affairs director of Gun Owners of America, told Reuters in July 2025 that CVI programs are “nothing more than a funnel to send federal tax dollars to anti-gun non-profits who advocate against our rights.”

The dual-attack pattern: CVI is simultaneously criticized as too soft (from the right) and too limited (from the left). A 2024 national survey data — 65% effectiveness, 51% preferred over more police — is consistent with a program occupying a moderate center with broad support.

Bottom Line

Eight stakeholder groups with documented positions: law enforcement leadership (Snelling, Beck, Paul, Parham, Backus, Bettison — strong operational endorsements), line officers (pragmatic support tempered by information-sharing tension), police unions (lower perceived competitive threat than mobile crisis), credible messengers (personal risk, compensation gaps, ProPublica documentation), communities experiencing violence (98% acceptance where programs exist, vulnerability to funding loss), trauma surgeons (named physician champions in five cities), researchers (three RCTs but uneven documentation field-wide), and named critics from multiple political directions (Johnston/GOA from the right, scope critics from the left, federal contraction as operational reality).

Source Appendix

Law enforcement endorsements — Snelling, Bettison, Paul, Parham, Beck, Backus. See Q01 Source Appendix entries 8-11. Also: Q03 entries 1-3.
2024 national survey — 71% police-investment, 80% CVI-as-important. 2024 national survey. https://safercitiesresearch.com/
ProPublica — bus accompaniment, two-guns, workforce risk. Alec MacGillis, May 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/are-community-violence-interruption-programs-effective
Leadership Academy — 21 cities, six months. Chicago Defender, September 2023.
CRED — 400 diplomas, 40+ companies, Karr quote. Chicago Tribune. Bob Karr op-ed, July 2023.
Grady Hospital — 98% acceptance. 11Alive, January 2024.
Named physicians — Smith (Grady), Makley (Cincinnati), Aboutanos (VCU), Williams Hogue (Mobile), Dunkelberger (Prisma). See Q05 and Q06 Source Appendices.
Cleveland — 600+ participants, 29%→19%. Ideastream, February 2025.
Indianapolis — two-thirds reduction, 2018. Bell et al., Journal of Trauma, 2018.
Cure Violence systematic review — 68.7% reductions, 32.5% significant. INQUIRY, February 2026.
Sasha Cotton — “taking over in a situation.” KSTP, May 2022.
SC2 initiative — 15% coverage, 75% goal. https://www.scalecvichicago.org/
Johnston / GOA. Reuters, July 2025.
DOJ terminations, FY2026. Reuters, April 2025. Giffords, September 2025.
Oakland mother testimony. ProPublica, May 2023.
CVI program descriptions — “trained experts” framing. 2024 national survey.
Dr. Randi Smith — AJC op-ed. AJC, July 2021.