In Baton Rouge, a public safety experiment could help to answer a critical question: Do community efforts to reduce street violence work?

New York Times
by Mark Obbie
Photographs by Dean Majd
Baton Rouge, LA
April 22, 2024

… [I]n 1999, a Chicago epidemiologist named Gary Slutkin picked up an old idea of using outreach workers to mediate street disputes. Framing the problem in public health terms, he argued that retaliatory violence was like a communicable disease and that outreach workers — he called them violence interrupters — could mimic an immune response. Groups more or less modeled after Dr. Slutkin’s organization, which came to be called Cure Violence, popped up in other cities.

… These ideas had an instinctive appeal. Violence was not about bad people, but about behaviors that could be changed. And violence interruption, in particular, gave agency both to members of a stricken community and people who regretted their own violent history. Overall, these methods emphasized prevention rather than punishment.

… But money wasn’t flowing to studies of community-based programs like violence interruption. Those studies require taxing, time-consuming design, said Jeffrey A. Butts, a violence researcher and the director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He lays some fault on researchers who prefer the easier work of analyzing police data.

Much of the research that has been done on community prevention programs is not sufficiently rigorous, Dr. Butts argues. He has studied community interventions for decades and supports systemic responses to violence, but criticizes organizations that champion their success without sufficient data. “I see it becoming a faith-based movement,” Dr. Butts said. “There has to be really transparent professional research in order to stand up in public and say this works.” When it comes to community-based interventions, he added, “we are nowhere close to having that.”

What troubles him most is that governments and foundations will walk away from programs that lack consistent and replicable evidence. This, he fears, will lead cities to rely only on strategies that have strong evidence — like policing.

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