When Shootings Erupt, These Moms, Pastors And Neighbors Step In To Defuse Tension

Jasmine Garsd

August 14, 2021 |

NPR |

Radio |

5-15 Minutes

Response Location: United States, New York, New York

Rock Safe Streets in the Red Fern Public Houses of Far Rockaway, Queens, ramped up its violence interrupter work starting in 2020 as gun violence increased. Red Fern then went nearly a year without a single shooting. Violence interrupters work apart from the police, banking on the community's trust in formerly incarcerated counselors to mediate disputes before they turn violent. Success is measured in daily increments, and many other factors influence community violence. But the residents do what they can to influence those driving the violence.

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Minneapolis Is Testing a New Approach to Public Safety

Joe Barrett Deena Winter

August 13, 2021 |

Wall Street Journal |

Text |

800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States, Minneapolis, Minnesota

The Agape Movement was born during the tensest moments of the 2020 social-justice uprising in Minneapolis, using unarmed community members to provide safety to protesters. Since then the city awarded it multiple contracts to field dozens of "credible messengers" to mediate disputes and serve as a buffer between the police and the community. Agape workers helped maintain a peaceful transition as a protest space called George Floyd Square was reopened to traffic in June 2021. It serves as an early test of community-led policing alternatives in the city.

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Could this reentry program be the key to less gun violence in Philly?

Jo Piazza

August 05, 2021 |

The Philadelphia Citizen |

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1500-3000 Words

Response Location: United States, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project started an intergenerational healing circle in 2020 that brought together young men with older men who served decades in prison, after being sentenced as youth. As a form of group therapy combined with life-skills coaching, going from old to young and vice versa, the group fostered a sense of personal growth and hope in participants – all aimed at lowering people's likelihood to commit violence. The results, as intangible as they may seem, inspired a repeat of the group in 2021, and the addition of a group serving younger and older women.

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How emergency workers are combating gun violence: 'We have to invest'

Shannon Lilly

July 14, 2021 |

WTVR-TV |

Broadcast TV News |

3-5 Minutes

Response Location: United States, Richmond, Virginia

Bridging the Gap is a violence prevention program at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center that emphasizes treating more than the physical wounds of gunshot victims. Starting in the hospital and continuing afterward, the program gives victims case managers and mentors to link them to services that will change their life's trajectory, including job opportunities. The aim is to interrupt the cycles in which the same people get injured repeatedly, sometimes leading to their deaths. Since the program started in 2007, people it has helped experience far fewer repeat injuries.

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Police response to mentally ill people is under scrutiny. Denver may offer way forward.

Vicky Collins

July 04, 2021 |

NBC News |

Broadcast TV News |

3-5 Minutes

Response Location: United States, Denver

As the nation’s largest city to embrace an alternative approach to responding to 911 calls in non-violent personal crises, Denver finished the first year of its pilot program having never needed police backup when its medics and social workers handled problems on the streets. About a third of calls to STAR (Support Team Assisted Response) came from police who saw STAR as a better responder to certain calls. In about 40% of calls, people in mental health or substance use crises received the services they needed without involving arrests or conflicts with police.

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Get There Fast or Safe? A Crowdsourced Map Gives You the Option

Chandni Doulatramani

June 29, 2021 |

Reasons to be Cheerful |

Text |

800-1500 Words

Response Location: India, Gurgaon

In 71 cities around the world, users of the My Safetipin mobile app can decide whether to visit a particular neighborhood or plan a travel route based on how safe others deem those places. While the 100,000 or so users, more than half in India, constitute too small a user base to make the mapping app truly universal, its crowdsourced data already have prompted the Delhi and Bogota governments to improve street lighting on streets deemed unsafe because they are not well lit. The app's primary goal is to make the streets safer for women.

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Food insecurity linked to gun violence. In St. Louis, Black farmers work on a solution

Hurubie Meko

June 27, 2021 |

The Kansas City Star |

Multi-Media |

Over 3000 Words

Response Location: United States, St. Louis, Missouri

Black, urban farmers have formed a grassroots "ecosystem" to grow and distribute fresh, affordable produce in St. Louis neighborhoods where food insecurity and gun violence go hand in hand. Heru Urban Farming is a startup businesses and CSA growing vegetables in vacant lots that it then sells by subscription and gives away to families in need. Along with a new farmers market and a mobile produce vendor, the "food justice" activists and entrepreneurs are meeting a nutritional need where quality supermarkets don't exist and corner stores typically sell packaged, processed foods.

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Safe Streets celebrates a year with no homicides in a South Baltimore area they serve, with hope for rest of the city

Jessica Anderson Phillip Jackson

June 26, 2021 |

The Baltimore Sun |

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800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States, Baltimore, Maryland

South Baltimore's Cherry Hill neighborhood enjoyed its third homicide-free year since the violence intervention program Safe Streets began operation. While a formal evaluation of the program's nine neighborhood sites is yet to be completed, community members credit it with lowering violence by putting "violence interrupters" on the scene of conflict or in hospitals to counsel gunshot victims against retaliation. Safe Streets mediated more than 400 disputes in Cherry Hill in the past year, most of them involving people armed with guns and likely to commit violence. Violence citywide has remained high.

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How Does Treating Gun Violence As A Public Health Crisis Work? One Bronx Program Offers A Potential Flagship Model

Elizabeth Kim

June 21, 2021 |

Gothamist |

Text |

800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States, New York, New York

Stand Up to Violence is the only street-outreach gun-violence-prevention program in New York that centers its work in hospitals. Street outreach is a policing alternative that uses former gang members and formerly incarcerated people to intervene before arguments turn deadly. Hospital-based intervention work puts counselors and mediators at gunshot victims' bedside to start the intervention, and offers of services, at the earliest stage. In a four-year span, the areas covered by Stand Up, based at Jacobi Medical Center, saw many fewer shootings and instances where victims got shot again.

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In Egypt, online group Qawem saving hundreds of women from sextortion

Ihab Zidan

June 20, 2021 |

Deutsche Welle (DW) |

Text |

800-1500 Words

Response Location: Egypt

The Egyptian Facebook group Qawem (Arabic for resist) helps victims of sextortion by turning threats around to target the attacker. Sextortion, in which threatened disclosure of a person's nude or other embarrassing photos are used as a tool of extortion, is illegal in Egypt. But women – the typical victims – are often reluctant to report incidents to the police, out of shame or fear. When victims report sextortion attempts to Qawem, volunteers counsel the victims while other volunteers track down the extortionists and threaten to expose them to their family or friends. About 200 cases per week get resolved.

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