Quote
“If our ideas are not evolving with verifiable evidence, they are not reliable ideas.”―
Highlights
There’s little proof that violence interruption programs work.
Per President Biden, violence interrupters are an integral part of his crime plan along with services to ex-offenders.
Both have minimal or unsuccessful histories.
The moral of the story? There are always anti-crime programs where proponents claim success only to find out that upon further examination, they don’t work.
Author
Article
I was a Violence Interrupter in the streets of Baltimore although no one called me that at the time. I was an ex-cop working my way through college. My job was to help young people caught up in a cycle of violence to find ways out.
I’ll make a long story short; the young men and women I “assisted” had endlessly complex histories and even when they wanted out, it was just the beginning of a very long saga.
One young man wanted to go back to high school after being expelled for fighting. His father wouldn’t sign the paperwork claiming that he didn’t need a high school education and that applied to his son.
I learned far more from those I tried to assist than they did from me.
Purpose Of This Article
Those of us in the justice system are supposed to approach issues from an evidence-based perspective. The problem is often a lack of research as to what works.
This article reviews data in Crime Solutions.Gov from the US Department of Justice to see if the claims of those promoting violence interrupters or violence interruption are valid. Crime Solutions rates the effectiveness of anti-crime programs. It’s considered the gold standard as to what works.
President Biden made violence interruption a major part of his recent anti-violence platform, The President’s Violence Prevention Plan.
There are publications like the Guardian (below) and SLATE and Time all calling for violence interruption programs. For the purpose of this article, I focus mostly on the claims made by the Guardian.
SLATE states that “Americans are worried about the rising murder rate. Thankfully, progressives have good, common-sense ideas to address it.”
But progressive thoughts didn’t exist in New York City where Democrats just elected a pro-police mayor, CNN.
Violence Interrupters
Violence interrupters range from former offenders to social workers or neighborhood residents trying to interrupt patterns of violence.
They staff hospital emergency wards knowing that crime “victims” are often “in the game” meaning that they are actively engaged in violence. They offer interventions designed to keep the “victim” from retaliating.
Violence interrupters are often ex-offenders or community members who use their knowledge of street life to counsel those engaged in nefarious activity and offering pathways out of crime.
The Complexity Of Violence
Society has offered an endless array of interventions designed to pull people out of criminal activity. Most have failed. From criminal rehabilitation programs to boot camps to job programs to endless additional endeavors, the data tells us that they don’t reduce criminality or that the vast majority of participants return to crime, Rehabilitation Programs.
The question is why?
Criminality is complex. It’s often correlated with considerable child abuse and neglect or brain damage or PTSD or the endless effects of growing up while witnessing family or community violence. Mental health or substance abuse issues are common. Assaultive behavior for many is a norm.
I interviewed hundreds of offenders at length throughout my career. I sat with over a hundred people charged with homicide and spent hours discussing their lives.
Many believe that violence is good; it protects themselves, their loved ones, and their property. Retaliation is a must or you are labeled vulnerable. Many (most?) believe that they will not live past their 30th birthday.
There are rehabilitation programs that spend an enormous amount of time and effort employing cognitive-behavioral therapy (analyzing issues and thinking clearly to make good choices). Per Department of Justice research, it’s considered the only modality that works; but the best it can do is to reduce recidivism by twenty percent. The vast majority of rehabilitation programs fail, Rehabilitation Programs.
The bottom line is that we do not have a good understanding of violence and proven methods to assist offenders.
Project Hope Was A Wonderful Success Until It Wasn’t
There was a program in Hawaii called Project Hope that vastly improved the rates of recidivism (i.e., technical violations and new criminal activity). All of us thought that they found the keys to success through a rewards and punishment approach to failing probationers.
The program was replicated throughout the country. They failed. Project Hope was reexamined and most commentators declared it a disappointing failure (although Crime Solutions.Gov rates it as “promising”).
The moral of the story? There are always programs where proponents claim success only to find out that upon further examination, they don’t work.
Criminality is far more complex than most people realize, Project Hope.
The Guardian-Advocates Insist That Violence Prevention Programs Work
From the Guardian (a UK publication covering American crime. Quotes rearranged for brevity):
Unlike in previous decades, there are many successful US gun violence prevention groups with a record of saving lives
In 2012 the Department of Justice recommended that hospital-based violence intervention programs like Youth Alive! Oakland and the Wraparound Project in San Francisco should be developed across the US.
Homicides in Oakland dropped by nearly half in the six years following the launch of an innovative police-community partnership called Operation Ceasefire in 2012.
And in Stockton, California, a recent evaluation of Advance Peace, a violence interruption program, found it contributed to a 20% drop in gun homicides and assaults and saved the city between $42.3m and $110m in its first two years of existence while operating on less than $900,000 over that same period.
In Richmond, AP is credited with helping to reduce gun violence in the city by more than 60%. Despite an uptick in shootings in 2020, the decrease has sustained for more than over a decade. Since its launch in Richmond in 2010, the program has started operating in cities across California, including Sacramento and Fresno.
“If the active voices that are on the ground aren’t amplified, we’ll continue running back to familiar faces who have antiquated ideas, are out of touch, and can’t speak the language of the people who are involved in the violence,” echoed Pastor Carl Day, a North Philadelphia native who runs development programs for at-risk young men and connects them to employment in the city.
“They intervene before it’s too late, these interrupters,” Biden said. “They turn down the temperature, halt the cycle of retaliation and connect people to services. And it works. States should invest American Rescue Plan funds in those kinds of violent crime programs.”
So What Does Crime Solutions.Gov Say?
As stated, Crime Solutions.Gov is the federal government’s repository of crime prevention programs rated as effective or promising or failures. The Office of Justice Programs started the effort because advocates on both sides were making claims regarding effectiveness that simply weren’t true.
There had to be a better way based on sound research methods and prior history.
Crime Solutions isn’t the easiest website to use. For example, if you search “violence interrupters,” you get a wide array of programs that have nothing to do with the efforts addressed here. Nevertheless, it’s the best we have as to figuring out effective programs or practices.
Note that Crime Solutions will declare an individual program as effective or promising but when compared to Department of Justice literature reviews or meta-analysis analyzing an array of similar programs, we find out that, collectively, the concept fails, see an overview of Rehabilitation Programs.
I searched for “violence interrupters” and “violence interruption” and “violence prevention” and the word “hospital” in the programs section of the website.
The Guardian’s Claims Of Successful Or Promising Programs:
CeaseFire: The Guardian article promotes CeaseFire. The CeaseFire effort is a program of the Oakland Police department and social service agencies.
The CeaseFire partnership communicates directly and repeatedly with the targeted gangs to 1) inform them that shootings will no longer be tolerated, and continued gun violence will receive special enforcement attention; 2) describe the kinds of increased enforcement and sanctions that will be focused on them; and 3) offer services and opportunities to gang members who want to stop their violent behavior.
These direct messages are distributed to targeted gangs through custom notifications to individual gang members in the street, at their homes, or during group “call-ins,” which are face-to-face meetings with law enforcement, social service providers, and representatives from the community.
The program was rated as “successful.” But CeaseFire is far more of a law enforcement initiative than a social work or violence interruption effort.
A similar program in New Orleans was also declared successful, Group Violence Reduction along with the original in Boston, Cease Fire.
Cure Violence, (not mentioned by the Guardian but advocated in other publications) is a program heavily promoted by advocates involving violence interrupters, receives a “promising” rather than an “effective” rating because of inconsistent findings.
In three of the seven Cure Violence intervention areas, there was a reduction in the number of actual shootings, compared with the comparison areas. This difference was statistically significant. In the other four intervention areas, there were no statistically significant reductions in actual shootings, compared with the comparison areas.
The Cure Violence intervention was associated with a reduction in gun homicides in only one of the seven intervention areas compared with the comparison areas. There were no statistically significant differences in gang homicides between Cure Violence intervention areas and comparison areas.
Hospital Programs. The only mention of a hospital or emergency room program (as cited in the Guardian article) in Crime Solutions was an English hospital collecting information on the characteristics of the crime that brought the patent to the hospital. It was rated as “promising”, not “effective.”
Using the combined emergency department and police data, the participants met about every 6 weeks to introduce or try to sustain a range of strategies that were designed to address the specific risks and patterns identified through the combined hospital and police data.
Per Crime Solutions, researchers found a lower average rate of total assaults in Cardiff, following the implementation of the Cardiff Violence Prevention Programme (CVPP), compared with the average rate of total assaults in the comparison sites. This difference was statistically significant.
Advanced Peace: The Guardian article heavily promotes Advanced Peace. There was no mention of Advanced Peace in Crime Solutions.Gov.
So We Shouldn’t Offer Social Interventions?
Heavens no. Offer programs based on humanitarian goals. All of us at some time in our lives have benefited from programs.
I spoke to former offenders who credited programs as helpful to their success. But they also said that it was their determination to change their lives, not programs, that made them successful.
Try social efforts and evaluate them to see if they reduce crime. With vastly rising violence, US Crime Rates, everything should be on the table.
I’m simply stating that criminality is vastly complex. We all want to believe that programs or religion or mentoring works because it influenced and assisted so many of us.
That’s how we got offender-based boot camps with strong social work components, now a discredited program, CrimeSoultions.Gov.
Many of us thought that boot camps were an experience that added discipline and order to our lives. We assumed that it would benefit offenders.
The problem is that criminal offenders, especially those engaged in violence, don’t see life as clearly as the rest of us.
Programs designed to intervene in the lives of offenders engaged in domestic violence are filled with people who don’t understand why they can’t hit their significant others. “She deserved to get what she got because she just wouldn’t leave it alone. The only way to shut her up was to hit her,” said some participants of a group I observed. Data indicate that these programs don’t work, Domestic Violence.
Using progressive values and applying them to the criminal population can create problems, not solutions.
Conclusions
We could argue methodology (methods use in evaluations) endlessly. Just because a program is not included in Crime Solutions.Gov doesn’t mean that the concept lacks merit. But if Crime Solutions is the gold standard as to effectiveness, the lack of program inclusion or an “iffy” rating doesn’t look very promising.
Representatives of these programs will passionately insist that their efforts work. Representatives of past failed programs also were equally passionate about their “successes.”
But at the moment, Crime Solutions is our best hope as to understanding what works.
Per President Biden, violence interrupters are an integral part of his violence reduction plan along with services to ex-offenders. Both have minimal or unsuccessful histories.
The only plan mentioned by The Guardian that has a record of success is Cease Fire which is essentially a police-owned and operated effort. I participated in two Cease Fire programs. Both were run by the justice system.
Police operations under the banner of proactive policing seem to have the best track record of violence reduction. Proactivity is probably the only modality with a research base as to reducing crime, Proactive Policing, per a literature review from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Proactive policing prompts officers to take action (i.e., a person with a history of violence suspected of carrying a gun) when they have a legal right to investigate. But proactivity requires enormous risks and is the center of endless complaints against law enforcement.
In the final analysis, many make insistent and passionate claims of success for a wide variety of violence prevention programs. Most are wrong.
There are no easy solutions. Police-based programs seem to work where others fail.
As complex as violence is, offenders understand the risk of apprehension and incarceration far better than a social worker or ex-offenders offering a way out. Offenders are often suspicious of people or programs offering help.
I understand that many will dispute my assertions, but program failure and people returning to the justice system don’t meet my definition of humanitarianism.
See More
See more articles on crime and justice at Crime in America.
Most Dangerous Cities/States/Countries at Most Dangerous Cities.
US Crime Rates at Nationwide Crime Rates.
National Offender Recidivism Rates at Offender Recidivism.
An Overview Of Data On Mental Health at Mental Health And Crime.
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