Amidst the racial injustice seen in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality, police violence and community unrest, governments are beginning to invest in a variety of public safety strategies. This approach capitalizes on insight and community relations and focuses on healing and prevention rather than punishment.
This strategy, called community violence intervention, supports individuals at the highest risk for interpersonal violence, including shootings, through wraparound services and healing relationships with trusted messengers – individuals whose experience provides insight into interrupting and preventing violence. Harborview Health Center is one example of a site using this intervention as part of the Regional Peacekeepers Collective, an initiative of the King County Regional Office for Gun Violence Prevention.
The Harborview program offers hospital-based treatment, intensive engagement and wraparound care and resources for individuals and families affected by gun violence. The intervention team at Harborview reaches out to these patients while they are in the hospital to connect them with services – social workers, counseling, mentoring, job training, housing assistance and other community resources – in hopes of changing their life trajectory and setting the individual up with a program. and resources after leaving the hospital.
After recent investments in community violence interventions, the logical question is: Have rates of violence changed? As researchers in UW Medicine’s Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program who investigate causal relationships and partner with the program to study their work, we also want to know the answer.
We quickly learned from colleagues who work on the front lines of community violence interventions that this question is too simple and can set the program up for failure. Antidote: Have patience, broaden your definition of success and understand the resources needed to do this work well.
Community violence intervention programs combat decades of disinvestment through holistic support. For example, there is a direct link between discriminatory housing policies, such as redlining, poverty, limited access to health-promoting resources and violence today. To break this cycle, community violence intervention programs provide practical assistance such as helping people get housing and conflict mediation. With the leadership of seven programs in Washington state, we developed a road map that outlines specific goals and strategies to achieve them.
We found that all programs strive to prevent violence, but because they are fighting an entrenched system that cannot be turned around, violence prevention is a long-term goal that takes years. Sometimes, it even takes a year to fully implement the program. If we look for a reduction in violence now, we won’t see anything — not necessarily because the program isn’t working, but because we haven’t waited long enough.
Instead of concentrating exclusively on reducing violence as the ultimate goal, we learn the value of examining intermediate steps and successes along the way. These steps include things like young people making progress towards personal goals, starting to think hopefully about the future and using less harmful conflict resolution. As researchers, we know the steps in between are important to help us understand why a program works or not.
Program leaders also taught us to focus on resources and capacity. Many community violence intervention programs have only recently begun to receive much-needed government investment. This means that many are just beginning to develop the necessary organizational infrastructure and support for staff, who often have traumatic histories and experience violence on the job. In addition, new investments are important but still few. They often come with bureaucratic obstacles. Not to mention that the success of this program depends on the availability of resources, at a time when the state of Washington faces shortages in the availability of housing and mental health, for example.
Investments in community violence interventions are often immediately followed by questions about their impact on violence, with implications for continued funding. We need to look critically at these seemingly simple questions. While we all share the goal of reducing violent casualties, making continued investment in community violence intervention programs dependent on the immediate reduction of violence is unthinkable. The program also has higher standards than the status quo system. As one collaborator said, “It’s hard to expect to save the world in a year.”
