As part of its partnership with the Department of Justice, LISC supports practitioners and policy makers with best practices and overcoming challenges facing community violence intervention (CVI) work in American communities. An article from the National Criminal Justice Association highlights the many voices represented during a recent webinar for nearly 1,000 attendees, led by on-the-ground experts in violence intervention, researchers and DOJ leaders. The webinar is now part of a robust online resource center hosted by LISC and the DOJ’s Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative.
The excerpt below was originally published by:
'Still Evolving' Violence Interventions Need Breathing Room: Panel
By Mark Obie, National Criminal Justice Association (NCJA)
Despite an unprecedented federal investment in community-based violence intervention (CVI) programs in the past few years, such work is at risk of failing to meet expectations about how quickly and conclusively it can help reduce everyday gun violence, a panel of experts said in a Department of Justice webinar on Monday.
It’s unrealistic and unfair to expect newly funded programs to show strong results in a short period of time when the public-safety challenges they tackle have roots in systemic social problems and when there are too few resources devoted to formally evaluating the effectiveness of the CVI programs, the panelists said at a program produced by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs.
The program, moderated by LISC's James Stark, marked the launch of a resource center connected with DOJ’s primary funding mechanism for local programs, the Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative. A video of the panel discussion is posted to the LISC Resource Library.
Eddie Bocanegra, a veteran CVI practitioner from Chicago and senior advisor to OJP, likened the situation today to a cancer hospital that must apply different types of treatments for cancer cases ranging from Stage 1 to Stage 4, but where the medical staff has just begun getting trained.
Just because the staff will lose some patients, especially when they take on the toughest cases, does not mean that the government’s new investments have already failed, he said. “The field is still evolving,” Bocanegra said.
“You’re not going to see sustained reductions in violence” or the evidence that these programs work unless the programs become part of a broader effort to address the disinvestment and social disadvantages that breed gun violence in our most challenged communities, said Dr. Shani Buggs of UC Davis.
Bocanegra’s boss, Assistant Attorney General Amy Solomon, opened the webinar by touting the Biden administration’s funding of CVI programs: nearly $200 million in the past two budget cycles, and a new round awaiting congressional approval for fiscal 2024. While far short of the more than $5 billion the administration vowed to seek when it came into office but failed to win from Congress, that two-year infusion of grant funding into a host of local community groups is part of a federal anti-violence program that DOJ said totaled $4.4 billion in fiscal 2023, including anti-violence programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods and the Public Safety Partnership.