Sheyla Delgado, deputy director for analytics at John Jay College and a researcher for the Cure Violence evaluation, says the comparisons offer promising evidence in favor of the program’s public health approach to violence reduction. She says what seems to make Cure Violence different from comparable programs that work to reduce violence is that it humanizes all of its participants.
Causal relationships are difficult to identify in complex and multi-part initiatives, but New York City’s falling rate of gun violence suggests that recent community initiatives may have helped to sustain previous gains.
Jeffrey Butts, Shadoe Tarver, and Jessica Mofield explain how many communities in New York City are working with Cure Violence groups to reduce shootings.
CBS2 in New York City profiles the Cure Violence programs operating throughout the city, including the fact that a 2017 JohnJayREC study found the program can work.
Cure Violence helped reduce shootings in the South Bronx by sixty-three per cent, according to a study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
A rigorous test of the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety indicates that New York City’s effort to improve the safety of public housing communities was beginning to show benefits by the end of 2019 and could be considered a promising intervention.
Cure Violence may be one of the few models that has been shown to successfully make highly violent communities a lot less violent without using the tools of arrest, force, and incarceration.
Those supportive of reform may be quick to reverse themselves out of fear of being cast as soft on crime, so new initiatives need to be protected with solid evidence. If a city wanted to radically reduce expenditures on policing, Butts said, “I would totally back it, but I would be terrified we would squander all the good energy by not being fully prepared.”
