For the second year in a row, the Department of Justice, in partnership with LISC, brought together hundreds of community violence intervention practitioners from across the country to share their experiences and insights on the front lines of gun violence and trauma. Their stories and wisdom are reshaping narratives about victimhood and perpetrators, and helping implement solutions to create safer, healthier communities.
In August 2009, 26-year-old Aswad Thomas stopped at a convenience store in Hartford, CT, to buy a lemonade. Leaving the store, he was accosted by strangers and shot twice in the back. Thomas was all too familiar with the pain caused by gun violence. Growing up in Detroit, his childhood best friend had been killed in a drive-by at age ten. Then his father was shot, then a brother, two cousins, dozens of friends. This was a fate that Thomas, a recent college graduate with a contract to play pro basketball in Europe, had worked all his young life to escape.
Leaving the hospital, he understood the serious nature of his physical wounds. But no one prepared him for the flashbacks, the nightmares, the anxiety and depression, or the thoughts of retaliation that would plague him upon returning home to the neighborhood where he was harmed.
While his physician, in a follow-up procedure, removed the bullets from their lodging-place near his spine, Thomas had another experience that profoundly shaped his perspective on what it takes to heal individuals and communities—and that inspires the work he does today, organizing crime survivors and promoting smart safety policies as vice president of the Alliance for Safety and Justice. The doctor began describing another youth he’d treated several years earlier, a 14-year-old who’d been shot in the face and lost sight in one eye. Thomas recognized the details with a shock: this boy had gone on to become his own assailant. “At the age of 14, he was shot just like me, released back to that same community with no supportive services,” Thomas said. “Right then, I knew how the cycle of violence continues in communities. I strongly believe that his unaddressed trauma played a huge role in me getting shot four years later.”
This searing personal story was one of many shared at a gathering of 700 frontline workers, program managers, advocates, researchers, technical assistance providers, and others working in the field of community violence intervention (CVI). Hosted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in collaboration with LISC, the Chicago conference brought together grantees under DOJ’s Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative (CVIPI), a historic federal investment in civilian, community-driven solutions to violence launched in 2022.
As I listened to Thomas and others explain their work and how they came to it, I couldn’t help but think of the starkly different narratives that took root about the same time LISC Safety & Justice began our work with communities in the mid-1990s. The myth of the new juvenile “super-predators,” for instance, a supposedly unfeeling, morally depraved, and irredeemably violent cohort that needed to be locked up “in deference to public safety.”
The ways we understand a problem—the stories we tell about it—have consequences. Whereas the super-predator narrative actively suppressed empathy for young people at risk of engaging in violence (and falsely predicted a surge in juvenile offending), CVI does just the opposite.
It relies on the people closest to the problem, people who’ve grown up in disinvested, racially segregated places, who’ve lost loved ones to violence and incarceration alike, and who many times have experienced both those things personally. From this position CVI frontline workers move even closer, bear-hugging young people at highest risk of engaging in violence, offering them tireless mentorship, healing services, help with educational and employment challenges. They broker truces between rival gangs. They talk to people on streets and porches. They monitor social media and teach conflict resolution in schools. They show up at hospital bedsides to embrace the injured and their families.
Despite its painful subject, the conference felt hopeful, exhilarating even. That it was taking place at all, convened by the nation’s chief law enforcement agency and attended by top officials, shows that stories and advocacy from the CVI field are shifting the dominant narrative about community violence, and along with it, the preferred remedies.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland chose the occasion to announce a new $78 million investment in CVIPI, adding to some $200 million already strengthening the work of 100 organizations nationwide. Kristina Rose, director of DOJ’s Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), discussed proposed new guidelines for crime victim compensation designed to ensure victims and their families are not refused assistance with expenses like medical and mental-health care or burials due to past convictions or reluctance to provide evidence to law enforcement. Greg Jackson, deputy director of the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, informed the group that executive actions have made 26 grant programs across numerous federal agencies open to violence intervention and prevention practitioners. And Eddie Bocanegra, a veteran violence interrupter from Chicago who designed and led pioneering CVI programs, emceed the event as the first-ever senior advisor for community violence intervention in DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs.
Paul Carillo, another longtime practitioner from LA and now vice president at Giffords Center for Violence Intervention, said it well: “Honestly, what gives me hope is seeing Eddie Bocanegra sitting at the table with the Department of Justice supporting the work that we do. I see progress when I see Eddie sitting at that table.”
Credible messages from credible messengers
The stories emerging from this field are more complex than just “bad people do bad things and should be punished.” CVI understands the problem of violent crime as a system and a cycle that involves relatively few individuals directly, but afflicts entire communities at multiple levels. It’s one thing to read studies documenting the so-called victim-offender overlap—the fact that most violent offenders have also been victims. It’s another thing to hear what it’s like to operate from that nuanced perspective.
Kurtis Palermo, executive vice president of Roca Maryland, said that when he first came to Baltimore in 2018 to help stand up the anti-violence nonprofit there, he might not have said the program was working with survivors or victims. But he and his colleagues quickly realized that many of those referred to the program as being at risk for committing gun violence had already been shot themselves. Indeed in six years Roca has seen over 50 participants die by violence.
Roca, said Palermo, is “racing the clock” to locate and engage youth who are at “acute heightened risk” of violence involvement in a long-term behavioral intervention that may include GED studies, help with transitional employment, and, crucially, cognitive behavioral therapy and other psychosocial supports. “Our young people carry guns, let’s not sugarcoat it,” Palermo said. “We have conversations with them about what that means for them. ‘Do you value your safety? Do you value your life, your freedom? Are you a parent? And why, every night when I see you at 7 o’clock, do you have a gun in your waistband? Because that behavior is in complete conflict with the value of being free, alive, and a father to that child.’ We’re not judging them, but we’re holding them accountable.”
Again and again during the three-day conference we heard from speakers who emphasized that to effectively address a community’s cycle of violence, we must develop a detailed understanding not just of how it functions presently, but also of how it came to be.
For instance Donald Frazier, CEO of Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS) in Alameda County, California, gave a sweeping description of the racist “upstream” policies that created what he calls a “poverty, crime, violence, and incarceration corridor” stretching from South Berkeley to South Hayward—including (but not limited to) discriminatory mortgage underwriting by federal agencies in the wake of World War II, destruction of Black communities for highway and transit construction, and long-term disinvestment and racial residential segregation. “This wasn’t an accident,” he said. “And these conditions created an underground economy and ultimately a culture of crime and violence and poor and inequitable health outcomes in low-income communities of color.”
BOSS’s Wellness, Empowerment & Resiliency Campus at the Eastmont Town Center in Oakland reflects that deep examination of root causes. It’s a 12,000-square-foot multi-partner, multi-strategy service hub that includes a violence intervention and prevention center (with special programs on gun and gang violence, gender-based violence, and restorative community healing); a behavioral health services center; educational and career training and housing assistance; and a trauma recovery center for victims of crime. “We provide services to both the perpetrator and the survivor,” said Frazier, “and sometimes it’s the same person.” BOSS is also at work with partners creating affordable housing and retail-business opportunities, necessary steps in the long project of addressing persistent poverty.
Some of the convening’s most powerful stories came from childhood trauma survivors who were criminalized and incarcerated as minors, yet emerged as leaders in justice-seeking fields.
OVC director Kris Rose and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention administrator Liz Ryan moderated a discussion with young adults featured in the documentary Juvenile: Five Stories. Shimaine Holley, 26, is today an inspiring speaker, advocate, and consultant as founder and CEO of Change Is Inevitable, LLC, as well as working in trauma-informed wellness services for military families. Growing up in southern Georgia, she was sexually abused by a stepfather and at age nine placed in foster care. She would get into fights and run away. It was during one of these flights that the system “pinned a charge” on her, she said, leading to multiple adolescent stints in detention due to probation violations.
The first police officer on the scene that day was “so sweet,” Holley recalled, but soon the officer’s supervisor rolled up and insisted, “’Get her a**.’” Holley continued, “I’m 13 years old, I’m crying, and I’m just trying to figure out, should I try to buck real quick? Should I buck and run? Or should I go on ahead and go? And I’m like, let me buck.” She was tased and taken into custody.
During a period for audience questions, one woman stood up to remark that in “the new CVI ecosystem” police can call on community-based organizations with social work background to “come and give that empathetic love and support to deescalate somebody with a social-emotional need.” “You should not have been tased at 13,” she said to Holley. “I need you not to own that you were disorderly. No, you were experiencing trauma. And you were making a decision in that moment…about which trauma was going to be the lesser of two evils.” The room erupted in applause.
“I was eight years old when I was first taken out of my third-grade classroom, placed in handcuffs, and given a date to appear in court,” Angel E. Sanchez writes in his 2019 Harvard Law Review article, “In Spite of Prison.” It is essential reading. In 1999 Sanchez went to prison for gang-related shootings as a 130-pound 16-year-old, and was released 12 years later to a Florida homeless shelter. Today he is a lawyer and DOJ Bureau of Justice Assistance Second Chance Fellow working to expand access to education for incarcerated and system-involved people. At our gathering in Chicago Sanchez announced his acceptance to Yale Law School’s ultra-selective PhD program—an effort, he said, to “make legible” possibilities he had to illuminate mostly by himself against staggering odds. “It’s so hard to be what you can’t see,” he said. “Let’s use these stories as a catalyst.”
The words—and the strategies—that work
As so many speakers made clear, to successfully scale a civilian anti-violence and trauma recovery infrastructure requires sharing accurate narratives that convey the why and the how of the work. “We have to bring others with us, so that people demand this everywhere,” said Fatimah Loren Dreier, executive director of Kaiser Permanente Center for Gun Violence Research and Education. She said research on how particular stories “land” suggests some of the most persuasive emphasize CVI’s effectiveness at reducing violence involvement and imparting economic benefits. That evidence base is growing, with very promising findings from recent evaluations of Chicago CRED and READI Chicago (the latter developed by Bocanegra).
Jamila Hodge, executive director of Equal Justice USA, talked about planting trees—and uprooting “false trees”—in a “narrative forest.” Longer prison terms really don’t make communities safer, she said: “All of our excessive punishment is in the name of justice for victims. Being able to organize with victims is how we shift the narrative, redefine ‘justice’ as more than punishment but instead as safety, healing, accountability that actually repairs.”
Just like Thomas, who got shot buying a lemonade, White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention deputy director Greg Jackson is one of those victims. He was shot in 2013 in Washington, DC, while walking with his cousins after a wedding party. At the hospital Jackson faced police interrogation as a potential suspect even before doctors went to work to stop the bleeding from his two ruptured arteries. Already an organizer at 28, during recovery Jackson discovered The Interrupters documentary and Eddie Bocanegra. He’s been a champion of CVI work ever since.
Though his role at the White House keeps Jackson close to the daily pain and grief of gun violence, he left his audience with an optimistic message. He cited a 13 percent decline in homicides last year, and indications of a 20 percent reduction in the first quarter of 2024. “And I don’t care what nobody tells you, the biggest change has been our investment in your work and investment in communities,” he said. “It’s starting to work, y’all.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mona Mangat, Vice President, Safety & Justice Initiatives
Mona directs national safety and justice initiatives at LISC, including overseeing efforts in dozens of cities funded through private and government investments. Her experience includes providing technical assistance to community-law enforcement alliances seeking to reduce crime while building the trust and infrastructure that make communities resilient and safe.