The recent spike in violence across the Bay Area is an urgent call to action for our communities. Research and experience demonstrate that violence diminishes when young people perceive that their community and the criminal justice system share a common set of norms, and that violent behavior is squarely at odds with their community’s values.

As the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund turns its attention to the growing problem of youth violence in San Francisco and Oakland, we have identified strategies that have succeeded in other cities. The purpose of this paper is to describe a model that has worked well in cities from Stockton to Boston and to stimulate dialogue about its potential for curbing youth violence in the Bay Area.

PARTNERSHIPS THAT SAVE LIVES, BUILD FUTURES, AND STRENGTHEN NEIGHBORHOODS

In Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and a handful of other cities in California and across the country, community partnerships are testing and refining new and strikingly successful approaches to addressing youth violence. These approaches provide high risk youth with meaningful opportunities to choose alternatives to violence and engage communities to support youth making these choices – notably, they do so in a way that enables these cities to achieve near-term and community-wide reductions in violence, making streets safe for residents and friendly to community revitalization efforts.

There’s nothing mysterious about this work. The case for it rests on a growing body of evaluations showing solid results. What’s more, the work can be implemented without new funding streams. Instead, success requires commitments from public agencies and community groups to work closely together and a willingness to make concrete changes in the way these groups use data, communicate with youth, and connect highest risk young people with employment and education opportunities.

CHICAGO AND HIGH POINT: BUILDING THE CASE FOR CHOICE AND OPPORTUNITY

Though tailored carefully to local priorities and resources, the approach in both cities was straightforward. Invite young men at high risk of violence to short meetings with a range of partners that might include community members, young people formerly involved in violence, service organizations, criminal justice agencies, family members, and faith leaders. The meetings are held in a variety of settings, including community centers, courtrooms, and churches; participants may sit in a circle and no one is preached-at. Young men are engaged in the following way: First, members of the group assure the young men they are loved and valued, and the community deeply wants them to succeed but emphasizes that their current choices are destructive to community life. Second, the group ensures that service agencies are at the meeting and ready to help with drug treatment, education, and employment. Criminal justice officials share a powerful message: we want to work with you to find a solution to this problem that breaks the all-too-frequent cycle of arrest and incarceration, while echoing the community’s message that the status quo isn’t acceptable – and emphasizing they would, as a last resort, intervene with enforcement to protect the larger community.

The results have been dramatic. In Chicago, researchers from the University of Chicago, Yale, and Columbia found that this approach reduced gun violence by 37%. In addition, the evaluation design enabled researchers to attribute much of the reduction specifically to these meetings. Last summer, San Francisco had early success piloting a similar approach. In High Point, dangerous drug markets and the violence that went with them evaporated and did not return. A formal evaluation is in process but the High Point work just received a Ford Foundation Innovations in Government award from Harvard University.

THE ROAD MAP FOR IMPLEMENTATION

The work of these cities – which builds on successful earlier work in Boston and other places – has helped develop clear implementation milestones. But implementation isn’t necessarily easy and requires moving beyond vague commitments to collaboration; success requires the full range of partners to make well-defined changes in the way mostly existing resources (programs, people, and funds) are invested.

• Build mission-driven partnerships: Each effort organized partnerships among community-based organizations, resident leaders, human service providers, and criminal justice agencies. Because these alliances had to be rooted in trust and common goals, they often took considerable effort to assemble – but their effects were profound. What made the above efforts groundbreaking was the powerful influence that alliances of community leaders had in altering the self-destructive ideas that young people held about their own future and the norms and values of their community.

• Directly and respectfully communicate with youth: All the cities employed face-to-face conversation with youth at the highest risk of violence, usually in the group meetings described above but also through well planned community-level strategies using outreach workers, public agency representatives, the faith community and community leaders. The key was to respectfully acknowledge the power young people have to make choices while equipping them with reliable information — both positive and negative — about the consequences those choices would bring. The power of this message was amplified and intensified by the depth and breadth of the partnership not through threats or intimidation.

• Root the approach in a commitment to opportunities for youth: For young people at highest risk of violence to feel confident they have a future they need intensive support. This requires workforce agencies and their partner agencies to work with community groups tackling neighborhood violence. These agencies can only have area-wide impact by concentrating some portion of their efforts on the very highest risk young people. Building these agencies’ capacity to reach out specifically to these youth is critical.

• Redefine the partnership between communities and criminal justice agencies: This approach can’t work without the help of criminal justice agencies. Criminal justice agencies – whether local, county, state, or federal – need to make reducing violence in partnership with communities a priority. In addition, enforcement measures need to be coordinated with the broader work of these partnerships. Many communities have found that merely intensifying law enforcement efforts — escalating arrests, tightening enforcement, widening confrontation with more and more youth and communities — is more likely to damage communities than make them safer. As with restorative justice, much of the power of this approach lies in harnessing the authority of criminal justice agencies to strengthen the values and norms of the community in the eyes of young people at risk of violence.

WHAT SUCCESS WOULD MEAN AND WHY IT MATTERS

The purpose of these partnerships is to achieve near-term, community-wide reductions in violence (as measured by decreases in shootings). No less important is the need to build partnerships between communities and public agencies committed to ensuring opportunities for young people at highest risk of violence. Therefore, success also means highest-risk youth are demonstrably better connected to skills, jobs, and education. If there is urgency to this work, it is because California’s toughest neighborhoods need more effective and affordable tools for reducing gun violence – making streets safe for family and community life – without sending more and more young men to prison. This could be one of them.

THE FUND'S COMMITMENT TO SUPPORTING PARTNERSHIPS

The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund comes to the challenge of curbing youth violence primarily from its longstanding commitment to improving life chances and opportunities for low-income families and revitalizing the neighborhoods where they live. Violence is not only a human disaster for each individual offender and victim; it is a barrier to social and economic development for the entire community. Our intent, in working with others and investing in more effective community partnerships against violence, is to bring about a measurable, near-term reduction in violent crime and, in the longer term, help communities foster an enduring atmosphere of opportunity and responsibility for their youth.

This ambitious effort calls for strong, sustained political leadership to marshal the sometimes disparate priorities of the partners. Policymakers and funders need to build on a growing awareness among criminal justice agencies that new methods of prevention strategies, such as community policing, hold out significant hope. At the same time, activists and community groups must be persuaded to overcome their distrust of the criminal justice agencies and to agree that law enforcement is justified in focusing on very violent youth offenders.

Collaboration among youth, their communities and the criminal justice system is a critical component of any effective violence-reduction method. Community partnerships must be reinforced by informed public policy that is based on a realistic understanding of the young people who are involved in gangs and other forms of violence. For the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, success in this endeavor would mean not only that rates of homicide and aggravated assaults are lower - though that would be a critical indication of effectiveness - but also that the highest risk youth are better connected to skills, jobs and education in diverse, safe and thriving neighborhoods.

August 2008

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Stewart Wakeling, Senior Program Officer for Strengthening Families at the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, guides the Fund’s work on violence prevention. Before joining the Haas, Jr. Fund, Stewart served as Executive Director of Community Partnership for Families of San Joaquin, California where he created a successful community collaborative devoted to improving economic and education opportunities for low-income children and families. While working in San Joaquin County, Stewart also created a strategic partnership among community groups, social service and criminal justice agencies that reduced youth homicide by 80 percent in Stockton. Before that, he worked on community approaches to justice while with the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.