Jeffrey Butts, a researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, likens it to the decades-long — and eventually successful — campaign to end smoking. “So can that strategy be used to reduce the incidence of gun violence? And that’s the big question,” Butts said.
As the city added more Cure Violence programs in pre-pandemic years, gun violence and deaths declined, said Sheyla Delgado, the deputy director of analytics at John Jay’s Research and Evaluation Center. “Can we say that is solely due to the appearance of these programs? Absolutely not,” Delgado said. “But they’re certainly a factor to consider.”
“There’s a whole garden of approaches, with different styles and modalities and theories of change,” says Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “What’s new, or seems new, is that we’ve reached the point that relying on law enforcement for all of our public safety problems became too obviously problematic.”
“The things that cause crime to go up and down are largely societal, structural,” said Jeffrey Butts, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It’s about employment, poverty rates, drug abuse, types of drug being abused, neighborhood conditions.”
Professor Jeffrey Butts, the director of John Jay College’s Research and Evaluation Center, said that in some respects conservatives and liberals are on the same page with gun control. “The far left and the far right are actually pitching the same story,” he said.
The key, we heard over and over again, is to have cops work in tandem with community-based “violence interrupters” — credible messengers from troubled communities who have the savvy and connections to quietly intervene at critical moments and persuade gang members, dope dealers, and other weapon-carriers not to resort to violence.
