The Nit and Grit of Street Outreach

The world of community violence intervention — on-the-ground, grassroots attempts to reduce the worst kinds of criminal victimization in our neighborhoods — is, perhaps ironically, insular. There are few qualitative narratives that explain to the broader world what community violence intervention work, called CVI for short, looks like and how it really works. Partly as a result, broad skepticism persists about whether these strategies can actually succeed, or whether they amount to deeply wishful thinking by ideologically blinkered progressives who are desperate to turn away from police. We’ve seen a few quantitative studies looking at the effectiveness or lack thereof of frontline street outreach programs — the results are mixed — but far too little serious reportorial attention paid to the textured and complicated ways people interact with these programs. 

Into the breach steps Josiah Bates’ book “In These Streets: Reporting from the Front Lines of Inner-City Gun Violence,” which refreshingly centers the voices of the individuals doing this heroic work. Street outreach workers — typically, members of the community who’ve had painful previous experiences with gangs and guns, often as perpetrators and survivors — are the heart and soul of CVI; without them, the work ceases to exist. As a gun violence researcher who conducts immersive ethnographic work on violently injured young Black men and boys, I am intimately aware of the lack of attention given to these voices of the frontline.

Recently, through funding from Arnold Ventures, my colleague Dr. Daniel Webster (heavily cited throughout Bates’ book) and I launched a longitudinal, mixed-methods study on the effectiveness of CVI street outreach programs in Washington D.C. What I have consistently heard during my site visits with city government officials, CVI administrators, site directors, program managers, case managers, outreach workers and violence interrupters is the need to clarify and demystify the mechanics of anti-violence interventions. Describing CVI work from 30,000 feet or doing “drive-by” research is not what the field needs. Instead, the people I spoke with wanted answers to questions like: How do CVI workers define success? What does true transformative change look like when a street outreach worker is involved in the lives of high-risk youth? And what more can be done to build up this low-paid work, which requires tremendous judgment, poise and commitment?

“In These Streets” tries answering some of these questions. It sheds light on the challenges and struggles of CVI workers to remain safe in an occupation that provides no hazard pay, no overtime pay, no life insurance, no health insurance, no workers compensation and no protective gear such as bulletproof vests despite the fact that every day they work with high-risk individuals in disinvested communities. Bates tells the story of “Roy Alfonso” (not his real name), a violence interrupter working in New York City, where the cost of living is extremely high. In the nation’s capital, a city that is ranked among the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the U.S., the salary for a violence interrupter is around $50,000 per year.

Consequently, when we see high-profile stories in the media exposing violence interrupters arrested for selling drugs, we should ask ourselves: Might this have something to do with their egregiously low salaries? In a recent conversation I had with a site director in D.C. regarding why some violence interrupters continue to hustle on the side to supplement their income, he stated, “people’s behaviors are often a reflection of how much they are being paid.”

We also must also ask hard questions about what we are doing to protect violence interrupters. In some cities, more CVI workers have died from gun violence than have law enforcement officers.

Not least, there is a lack of job security in the CVI space. In D.C., CVI work is subcontracted to private vendors who are responsible for hiring and training staff, collecting and submitting data and reducing gun violence in their catchment areas. Yet their contracts are typically only for one year and can be terminated without explanation. How do we expect staff at these community-based organization to be fully committed to the long-term project of reducing gun violence when every year their employment is in jeopardy? 

What motivates violence interruption

These are some of the real challenges of doing the work, and they come out in the pages of “In These Streets.” The book weaves many voices into a tapestry: scholars (including myself), policymakers, practitioners and community members. But the most important voices are from the outreach workers themselves.

In my dozens of conversations with CVI workers, I’ve detected a common thread that ties them together. They are almost always from the neighborhoods where they work, which gives them credibility and trust in the community because they have often watched many of the young people they work with grow up and they know their families. These neighborhoods are often the same neighborhoods that CVI workers will admit they contributed to destroying through violent crime (e.g., armed robbery), drug-selling or both. Many have established reputations as shooters. Also, most of the violence interrupters that I worked with have a previous history of involvement with the criminal legal system.

Add it up, and violence interrupters have a real stake in — and feel genuinely accountable for — being agents of change in their communities.

This profession, like so many others, is changing. I’ve seen an increasing number of violence interrupters who have no history of having been incarcerated, who have never been a shooter and who have never committed a violent crime or sold drugs. Several of these newer-breed violence interrupters have also completed college. What they nevertheless have in common with their peers is the intimate lived experiences of growing up in communities marked by high rates of gun violence. They have family members and close friends who committed violent crimes, sold drugs and were known shooters. They have watched numerous people in their families and community experience early violent death, incarceration and drug addiction. 

A teacher or a nurse or a cop can do the job for decades, either moving up the ladder or staying on the rung where they began. Community violence intervention, as it’s been structured to date, is different: It has a shelf life. It’s often a terminal position.

Many CVI outreach workers are now in their late 30s, 40s and 50s. Yet many of the young adults with whom these interrupters work were not even born when the interrupters established their reputations for crime, violence and hustling in their neighborhoods. 

The disconnect matters. Older interrupters may not understand or appreciate the ways social media drives gun violence and the desire for clout among today’s high-risk youth. For older violence interrupters, the code of the streets that framed violence during their era no longer exist.

So how do we create a deeper bench of younger street outreach workers? It’s an urgent question. Roy’s story, as told by Bates in “In These Streets,” underscores the need for training centers such as the CVI Leadership Academy (CVILA) founded by Dr. Chico Tillman in Chicago. CVILA provides the tools and training for street outreach workers to move from the streets to program directors to leaders of organizations. Leadership academies can also provide training for former street outreach workers to become social entrepreneurs, launching their own consulting companies and non-profits, in the CVI space.

Flies in the ointment

Significant sums of federal, state and private dollars are now being invested in CVI programs across the country. While this is welcome, we cannot have an honest conversation about this evolving field without discussing “poverty pimping.” The recent infusion of large sums of money may well attract, even among the many well-intentioned organizations, some individuals who lack a serious commitment to gun violence reduction. I have witnessed this in DC, and I expect this is not isolated to the District. Recently, a District of Columbia councilmember was federally indicted for taking bribes from a community-based violence intervention organization to ensure that the CBO’s contract was renewed.

Clearly, the overwhelming majority of CBOs and CVI workers are committed to the work, but there are also some CBOs that should get out of the field. We need to get better at identifying the pretenders, who stain the reputation of the honest operators. 

There is also a need for more in-depth reporting on hospital-based programs. A systematic review conducted by Webster and I has shown that the jury is still out on whether these programs are truly effective. A recent qualitative study found that hospital-based violence interruption programs under the University of Maryland Medical System caused more harm than good to violently injured Black men.

Another CVI model which I think deserves considerably more attention are homicide and shooting reviews. Homicide reviews bring together multiple stakeholders to understand the social determinants of homicide and the social context of victims and perpetrators of fatal and non-fatal gun violence. Going forward, it should be mandatory that CVI workers participate in homicide and shooting reviews. Their voices are critical to identifying potential touch points for intervention.

One last note: Many scholars were referenced in this book, and precious few of them, like myself and my colleague, Dr. Shani Buggs, are Black. This is not a criticism of the author, but it points to the lack of knowledge among journalists and academics regarding the work of Black and brown gun violence researchers. Black and brown gun violence researchers are significantly less likely to be awarded NIH grants than their white counterparts, which affects their publication record, which ultimately impacts their visibility. I hope this book will serve as a starting point for a discussion on the talented yet often marginalized pool of Black and brown gun violence researchers, like those of us who are part of the Black & Brown Collective for Community Solutions to Gun Violence.

There is no one-size-fits-all model for doing community violence intervention work — each city and neighborhood must adopt their own model that is culturally responsive to their communities. What works in Chicago may not work in DC. Josiah Bates is to be applauded for offering up detailed narratives from the streets. This kind of reporting, providing a humanistic, nuanced and layered understanding of what the work looks like from the trenches, fills an important gap in the literature. It is my sincere hope that “In These Streets” inspires more narrative change about our communities.