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  Governing Magazine Features Richmond
September 17, 2014
 
 

Governing, a magazine for states and localities, featured Richmond in its September 2014 issue, excerpt below:
http://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-cities-new-way-gun-violence.html
Shortly after gun legislation stalled in Congress last year, a spate of local homicides prompted the city council in Richmond, Calif., to consider new municipal regulations. As recently as 2008, Richmond ranked as one of the nation’s 10 most violent cities of more than 100,000 residents. Almost all its homicides and half of its robberies involved guns. Nonetheless, Councilman Tom Butt, a self-described champion of gun control, voted against a resolution that would have studied options for new gun regulation. California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, he says, but “it’s not enough. Regardless of what kind of gun laws you have, people who really want to have a gun are going to find one.”
Seven years ago, Butt became an early supporter of a local anti-violence strategy that sidesteps guns entirely and focuses instead on the people who use them. “Illegal guns have always found their way into urban communities by some mechanism,” says DeVone Boggan, the director of neighborhood safety in the Richmond mayor’s office. “We need to find a way to get these young men not to pick these guns up, to develop the mindset that ‘I’m not going to deal with conflict by using a gun.’”
With the help of a data analyst from the police department and tips from street informants, Boggan’s office identifies young men who are suspected of being involved in a shooting­ -- but who have not been charged or convicted -- and invites them to join the city’s peace fellowship program. The perks of being a peace fellow include trips outside the city or even outside the country (destinations have included Cape Town and Dubai), plus financial rewards for participating longer than six months. While those benefits help recruit program participants, the real boon is the support services available to the city’s peace fellows. A team of older neighborhood residents -- often with a criminal past -- coaches the men on setting goals and mapping out the small, specific steps needed to accomplish everything from obtaining a driver’s license to applying for college. A caretaker accompanies the fellows through the maze of social services that they may need to stabilize their lives, from housing to drug addiction counseling. Finally, every fellow takes classes on anger management.
Boggan’s holistic approach to gun violence started in 2007. As of this past July, the program had recruited 68 peace fellows, with 25 completing the full 15 months. Fifty-seven had avoided being charged with a firearm assault since joining. All but three were still alive. The public image of the peace fellowship received a boost in January when the police department reported that 2013 saw the lowest number of annual homicides in three decades.
Since the program’s launch, other cities in California and around the country have called Boggan for advice on how to introduce a peace fellowship in their own jurisdictions. Public safety officials express excitement about the approach, he says, but by the end of the discussion they’re pessimistic about replicating the fellowship. “The challenge,” Boggan says, “is being able to go back home and sell this idea of providing positive resources to individuals who have often committed heinous crimes.”
Indeed, it’s an open question whether other cities will want to use a Richmond-style program as a road map for tackling gun violence. One of the model’s biggest assets, says Angela Wolf, a community psychologist studying the program, is long-term intensive mentoring that extends beyond the fellows’ graduation. At least two years later, former fellows still call their mentors for advice about how to handle a conflict or career decision. The model requires a major investment of time and money to turn around the lives of a small number of residents.
Nonetheless, Boggan argues that supporting a few violent residents with human resources might be the most efficient use of tax dollars. When the city hired Boggan in 2007, it faced a $24 million structural deficit, much of it driven by expenditures of $6 million per year for law enforcement. Like most cities, Richmond had responded to spikes in violent crime by hiring more officers and putting violent people in jail. That was expensive, and it wasn’t doing much to solve the problem. “If you look at most cities where the public safety budget is going through the roof, it’s justified by the actions of a relatively small group of men doing a lot of damage,”
Boggan says. “We have to identify alternative solutions that are much more responsive.”

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