The Work That Saves Lives

After a mass shooting or a spike in violent crime, the public response tends to follow a familiar script. Officials hold briefings. Experts offer commentary. Reactionary measures are floated. Even when little changes in practice, the performance of response is meant to signal control.

What receives far less attention is the work that happens outside these moments, often quietly and well before violence becomes visible. That work focuses not on responding after harm occurs, but on reducing the likelihood that it happens at all.

Over the past several decades, that approach has come to be known as Community Violence Intervention, or CVI. It is not a single program or ideology, but a set of prevention strategies grounded in a simple premise: violence is not random, and when risk is concentrated, prevention can be targeted.

At its core, CVI operates through partnerships among community organizations, people most affected by violence, and government agencies. The aim is to identify individuals and situations at the highest risk of harm and intervene early, using support rather than punishment as the primary tool. Programs often connect people at risk of committing or experiencing violence, or both, with trained staff whose credibility comes from shared experience and/or long-standing presence in the community.

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The models vary by city and circumstance. Hospital-based violence intervention programs place specialists in trauma centers and emergency rooms, engaging survivors immediately after injury, a moment when the risk of retaliation is especially high. Street outreach and violence interruption programs rely on community-based interventionists to mediate conflicts, respond to shootings, and provide sustained support. Group violence intervention programs bring together law enforcement, service providers, and trusted community messengers to identify individuals most connected to cycles of group-related violence and offer a combination of accountability and assistance. Other efforts focus on environmental design, investing in lighting, green space, and the rehabilitation of vacant lots to reduce crime by improving the physical conditions of neighborhoods.

Despite their differences, these approaches share a core assumption: prevention is most effective when it is timely, relational, and sustained.

In recent years, as gun violence has driven homicide rates upward in many parts of the country, CVI programs have produced measurable results. Evaluations of group violence intervention strategies have found reductions in homicides and nonfatal shootings of as much as 60 percent in the areas where they are implemented. Cities including Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago have reported declines of more than 30 percent in shootings and killings after adopting Cure Violence–based models. In Oakland, sustained investment in community violence intervention was associated with a roughly 50 percent reduction in gun violence over a seven-year period.

Some results are even more narrowly defined. Chicago’s CRED program, which combines street outreach with counseling, workforce development, and advocacy, reported a 50 percent drop in gunshot injuries among participants within 18 months of enrollment. These outcomes did not come from a single intervention, but from layered, consistent engagement over time.

That consistency, however, is also what makes CVI vulnerable. The work rarely produces a singular, headline-grabbing moment. Its effects accumulate gradually, one prevented conflict or stabilized life at a time. As a result, these programs have often operated with limited visibility and unstable funding, even as evidence of their effectiveness has grown.

That fragility became more apparent this spring, when the Trump administration rescinded more than $800 million in federal grants supporting violence prevention, domestic violence assistance, and substance use intervention programs. Hundreds of grants were terminated, many of them supporting community-based initiatives that cities had relied on to help drive recent declines in violent crime. The immediate consequences included layoffs, reduced services, and uncertainty for organizations already stretched thin.

The Department of Justice characterized the canceled grants as misaligned with administrative priorities. In practice, the cuts fell hardest on programs operating in the very communities bearing the highest burden of gun violence. The decision did not trim excess; it removed support from places where lives were most at risk.

Gun violence in the United States falls disproportionately on communities of color and young people. Black Americans represent a relatively small share of the population but account for a majority of gun homicide victims. Young people between the ages of 15 and 29 experience nearly half of all gun homicides, despite making up a much smaller portion of the population. These disparities are shaped by decades of disinvestment, limited access to housing, employment, education, and health care, and the destabilizing effects of incarceration.

CVI programs are designed with these realities in mind. By focusing resources on the people and places most affected by violence, they aim to reduce harm at its source rather than relying on punitive approaches that often deepen instability. In doing so, they not only lower violence overall, but also help narrow the racial and generational gaps that define the country’s gun violence crisis.

For younger generations, the contrast between visible security measures and effective prevention is difficult to miss. Many have grown up surrounded by surveillance cameras, metal detectors, and active shooter drills, even as access to counselors and community-based support has remained limited. At the same time, programs with clear records of reducing violence have struggled to secure stable funding.

Community Violence Intervention offers a different way of thinking about public safety. It treats prevention as a long-term investment rather than a crisis response. It assumes that communities are not simply sites of violence, but sources of expertise about how to reduce it.

If the goal is fewer shootings and fewer lives lost, the evidence suggests that CVI deserves a central place in the country’s public safety strategy. Treating it as expendable risks undoing gains that took years to achieve.

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