Towards Greater Community Safety: The Case for Community-Based Violence Intervention

Members of the Newark Community Street Team in Newark’s South Ward. Photo: NCST

Every day, members of the Newark Community Street Team (NCST) walk the streets of Newark’s South Ward. They mentor students, ensure safe passage to and from schools, and listen to young people tell them about the loved ones they’ve lost to gun violence. They work in hospitals to support victims of violence and ride with EMS to respond to overdoses. They draw on their own experiences on the street or in prison to connect with the people who are where they’ve been — and to help them find a way out. And ultimately, they keep Newark safe.

Since the NCST’s inception just under a decade ago, Newark has seen a more than 50% reduction in homicides with the city now experiencing 60-year lows. The program, which employs members of the community as interventionists and outreach workers, has been trusted by the city’s government — and its residents — to take a community-centered approach to public safety. Although NCST is certainly special, its impact isn’t anomalous. Cities around the country are beginning to invest in this model of community safety, which is backed by an emerging body of research and supported by real-world results. 

It’s a long-overdue reimagining of a field that has historically been the purview of police departments and prisons, tasked with addressing crime after it happens but ill-equipped to address its root cause. Modern policing is rooted in America’s long history of institutional racism, including the slave patrols of the early American south to the often-brutal enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the 19th and early 20th century. Mass incarceration and the war on drugs have perpetuated the harms they purported to solve, while high-profile incidents of police brutality have deepened mutual distrust between law enforcement and the communities it is supposed to serve.

Against this backdrop, it’s clear that we need to invest more in bottom-up, preventative approaches — not just to community safety but also to overall wellbeing. Community-based violence intervention (CVI), the strategy finding success in Newark and elsewhere across the country, takes a holistic approach that puts the public itself at the heart of public safety.

CVI looks beyond individual acts of violence to tackle the systems that produce them, addressing crime as the product of failing institutions and community disinvestment. Most CVI strategies rely on trusted messengers — often people who have firsthand experience as former victims and perpetrators of violence — to act as credible ambassadors within at-risk neighborhoods and communities. Those credible messengers build relationships, conduct targeted outreach and act as ambassadors for proactive social service interventions, including housing resources, job counseling and more. They also step in to disrupt the cycle of violence, mediating conflicts and reducing the risk of retaliation by meeting victims where they are (figuratively and literally — even visiting emergency rooms to offer support).

CVI is not a replacement for policing but a complement to it — a way to make it both less necessary and more effective. At the Ford Foundation, our focus on criminal justice reform has led us to challenge mass incarceration, champion necessary changes to policing, incarceration and criminalization, and invest in community-based organizations that are shifting the paradigm of community safety strategy.

The evidence is clear: CVI works. Cities that have invested in effective, comprehensive, community violence intervention and prevention strategies have seen decreases in gun violence and recidivism rates. Even outreach workers themselves benefit from new employment opportunities bolstering  meaningful community workforce development.

In a broader sense, the recent drop in murders and other crimes also validates the importance of community-based solutions. Homicides spiked in 2020, when the pandemic shuttered schools and limited social services, just as George Floyd’s murder further eroded trust in the justice system. The national narrative blamed important criminal justice reforms for the rise in crime despite the facts. Now, as we emerge from the pandemic and as communities rebuild their social infrastructure and invest in CVI-aligned civic resources, the cumulative impact has set the country on a trajectory towards the lowest level of violent crime in over 50 years. 

There are glimmers of hope everywhere, from the growth of broader networks of hospital-based intervention programs to Offices of Violence Prevention now operating in dozens of cities across the country. And at the federal level, the inclusion of $250 million for CVI in the recently passed bipartisan Safer Communities Act was a critical acknowledgment of the role these programs must play in community safety going forward.

As CVI gains momentum, the field still needs greater public investment. And philanthropic support is crucial to grow proof-of-concept programs into proven operations that cities — and the country — can fully embrace. The holistic nature of community safety makes it ripe for contributions from funders in public health, education, economic and workforce development, housing, youth opportunity and beyond.

At the Ford Foundation we are strengthening our support for CVI and calling on our colleagues in the sector to join us. In Newark and across the nation, let us rise together to meet this moment, with robust support for partners on the ground who are breaking down systems of injustice — and building something better in their place.

Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation.

david rogers is program officer for community safety at the Ford Foundation.