Community Violence Intervention at a Crossroads

On a rainy November night just after the 2024 election, Jorge Matos stood in a downtown Chicago auditorium, giving a toast in front of an unlikely assembly: frontline peacemakers who’ve lived with street violence, philanthropists, community stakeholders and the city’s business elite. Six years earlier, Matos was working as a street outreach manager for an organization called ALSO, walking some of the city’s toughest blocks to mediate conflicts before they turned deadly. Now, as director of a major violence prevention initiative at the nonprofit Chicago CRED, he helps lead a five-year, $400 million joint public-private effort to scale community safety programs across the city. This historic partnership and fundraising effort hopes to build on recent developments in the violence prevention field and provide a pathway to sustainable funding and innovation.

Jorge’s journey from outreach worker to organizational leader and these latest efforts to scale violence prevention mirror the remarkable transformation of community violence intervention (CVI) itself — a field evolving from scattered, grant-funded programs into an emerging profession helping build a civilian public safety infrastructure.

Matos’ toast celebrated these achievements, but uncertainty lingered over the celebration. Like community violence intervention leaders nationwide, Matos and others in the room recognize this approach to violence prevention stands at a crossroads, facing threats that could dismantle its progress just as it’s proving its worth.

The CVI label is new, but this approach to reducing violence — which uses trusted voices in neighborhoods to persuade people to solve disputes without picking up a gun — builds upon a century-old tradition of grassroots interventions. From the “detached workers” of the 1950s working out of local churches and YMCAs to the “violence interrupters” of the early 2000s popularized by CureViolence, these strategies promote locally grounded approaches to reducing violence. But the speed and scale of the field’s recent transformation has been unprecedented. Forged by the historic COVID-era surge in gun violence, today’s CVI programs have wrestled with their internal histories — including debates around the work’s impact — and have evolved into a network of programs and organizations that are constructing new pathways for civilianized public safety efforts.

Today’s outreach workers do far more than canvassing the streets to stop violence. Take Chicago CRED, where Matos works. What begins as crisis intervention in a volatile dispute transforms into a longer journey of healing and opportunity. After the immediate tension subsides, participants move through trauma care and counseling into education and job training hoping to turn crisis points into lasting change. Similar transformations happen in hospital rooms, where programs like Detroit’s DLIVE expand a single moment of violence into a web of support. These organizations don’t just treat a gunshot victim’s wounds; they work with families through trauma, prevent retaliatory violence and create pathways out of cycles of harm.

Importantly, this new moment in the field of CVI also tries to weave together the lessons learned from local innovations into a broader public safety framework. National organizations like Giffords Center for Violence Intervention, The HAVI and Cities United have developed standardized practices and comprehensive action plans. These sorts of collaborations have elevated the profile and portfolio of the work. Whereas only a few years ago, only one or two community violence intervention organizations were recognized in the corridors of power, the field as a whole now garners White House recognition.

This evolution reflects not just stalwart local efforts but also a burst of innovation and investment. In 2021, Philadelphia’s violence prevention budget reached $155 million and, a year later, Indianapolis allocated $45 million of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds for community violence intervention efforts. The state of California invested $75 million annually to related service providers. At the federal level, the Justice Department funneled $150 million toward its Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative, and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act allocated $250 million for such programming.

What’s been built isn’t just programming but potentially the connective tissue of a new public safety paradigm. Whereas police departments handle law enforcement, CVI organizations can serve as core community resources, often accessing spaces and networks that police can’t — and perhaps shouldn’t — enter, like family cookouts and peace talks between warring street crews. Their credibility often allows them to reach the small networks where gun violence concentrates to mediate disputes, mentor young people at risk and guide them toward potentially life-saving opportunities. When cities deployed ARPA funds to build this workforce, they weren’t just hiring crisis responders but investing in work that is vital to neighborhood safety and stability.

The threat to community violence intervention’s future is both political and fiscal. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency could devastate this emerging violence prevention infrastructure. Appointments in key agencies like the Department of Justice could effectively dismantle the newly established Office of Gun Violence Prevention, gut vital funding streams and hamstring the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Appointments in the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Labor could easily dismiss the growing evidence that gun violence is a public health epidemic to be countered through a range of complementary approaches in favor of harsher criminal-legal responses. Such a whiplash in federal priorities threatens to unravel progress and return community violence intervention workers to the precarity of grant-dependent, part-time positions that plagued the field and stymied its impact for decades.

A second threat comes from academia. Though less dire than looming political dangers, this academic threat is more philosophical and centers on methodological debates about “rigor.” Infatuation with “gold standard” program evaluation — especially the notion of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the sole arbiter of such rigor — risks undermining progress in the name of misguided scientific conservatism. This narrative persists despite what any well-trained scientist knows: Rigor isn’t defined by any one method or statistical test. A variety of methods can be used to establish causality, and causal questions are far from the only important policy-related questions. Some of America’s greatest public health and safety victories — including the creation of clean water systems, the spread of automotive safety technology and the rise of child labor laws — succeeded without the blessings of “gold standard” research. Why, then, demand statistical perfection only from community-based solutions?

The methodological straitjacket fitted to community violence intervention by false debates around rigor is further tightened by narrowly defining “success” exclusively as producing “statistically significant” decreases in shootings. While reducing shootings remains core to CVI’s mission, the work encompasses a much broader vision of community safety.

Our Chicago study of nearly 200,000 participant contacts over a five-year period, for instance, revealed that direct violence interruption was not the most frequent strategy in the CVI toolbox; it was behind mentorship and service referrals. Even these metrics fail to capture vital safety-building work like building trust, strengthening community bonds and transforming neighborhood dynamics. The next chapter of research on community violence intervention needs to move beyond a singular focus on violence-defined outcomes to more closely align with the actual work that such organizations do to try to improve public safety (see Hureau and Papachristos 2024).

Critics who simply dismiss community violence intervention as an ineffective, failed social program are practicing dishonest science. Research shows that sometimes these tools work and sometimes they don’t — a statement that is equally true of other fields, including medicine and public health. For example, only 8% of medical trials succeed. Yet we don’t abandon medical research or shut down hospitals when treatments fail to produce statistically significant results. Instead, researchers seek to understand why some approaches work better than others and under what conditions. Community violence intervention’s evolution from scattered initiatives to structured programs is built on hard-won lessons that afford the opportunity to understand the mix of program design, neighborhood context and organizational characteristics that might create lasting impact. But these insights can’t be generated without the very things critics would deny the field: sustained funding, institutional support and honest evaluation.

This developing civilian architecture and its possibilities for enhancing public safety are strong but not indestructible. Its future depends on our willingness to protect it, fund it and give time to understand its impact. A path forward entails ensuring sustained and sufficient funding that will provide crucial time for community violence intervention to achieve the stability necessary for success and long-term evaluation. Investments should appeal to conservatives and progressives alike, since these programs create stable employment in historically disinvested communities, offering professional opportunities to a workforce long excluded from economic mobility.

Answering these questions intelligently is more than an academic exercise. It’s about giving community violence intervention the opportunity to mature rather than being snuffed out prematurely — and, in the process, helping to define what genuine public safety looks like in America.