by Jeffrey Butts
July 9, 2025

Activists today are working to mitigate the harmful enforcement of the gender binary. I want to draw attention to another destructive binary, one that shapes our knowledge about community violence interventions (CVI).

Public agencies and private foundations devoted a lot of funding to CVI programs in recent years. They tended to adopt one of two positions in the CVI binary: either evidence or understanding. We need to bridge the divide and join forces to reduce the harmful effects of this binary.

As funding expanded, the sort of programs in the CVI portfolio grew to include traditional strategies like law enforcement and social services, but the original CVI concept drew on the resources and leadership of neighborhood residents and community organizations. This latter group — often called the public health approach — is incredibly valuable.

A public health, community-led approach to CVI mobilizes the capacity of communities to organize themselves and implement strategies to prevent violence without relying on the bureaucracies of the State to detect, treat, and punish individuals already involved in violent behavior. However, research to establish the efficacy of the public health approach is not yet strong enough to convince skeptics. Note: There are always skeptics.

To generate more reliable proof of effectiveness, we must confront the CVI binary.

1) Evidence. One side of the binary emphasizes statistical precision over all other concerns. It values “evidence-based” programs with compelling evaluation results. Adherents of this side of the binary naturally focus on policing and social services because programs to change the behaviors of specific individuals are more easily evaluated and more often generate powerful statistical effects. Individual-level programs may fail to harness the public health power of community resources and social norms, but researchers can measure inputs and outcomes in detail with controlled experiments or well-matched comparison samples of people who either do or do not receive an intervention. This half of the binary reflects the centuries-old theoretical perspective that a community’s public safety problems are simply the aggregation of behaviors by its problematic individuals.

2) Understanding. The other half of the binary appreciates the social origins of violence. It values community knowledge and favors programs that shift safety conditions with neighborhood-level mechanisms. Program staff and volunteers promote prosocial norms and work with residents to improve mutual respect and conflict mediation skills without identifying or stigmatizing individuals as problematic clients. Evaluations of community-level interventions are inherently challenging. They typically involve comparisons of only a few geographic areas and produce less statistical power. Many program components cannot be measured directly. Advocates on this side of the binary rely instead on “voices of the community” and the “lived experience” of residents. Governments and foundations are encouraged to fund CVI programs with evidence no stronger than pre-post comparisons and single-sample trends.

As long as funding kept flowing, the CVI binary was not inherently harmful. But when governments change (and oh my, they can change!), a less exacting base of evidence makes the public health model vulnerable to political attack.

To confront the CVI binary, qualified researchers must partner with community leaders to design, measure, and document the public safety effects and socio-economic benefits of public health approaches. We could have accomplished this during the Biden-Harris Administration’s expansion of CVI funding, but we failed to act decisively. Communities were certainly helped by CVI funding over those four years, but researchers did not create enough credible evidence to protect the model.

The CVI binary is harmful. A community-leveraged, public health approach to CVI is likely the best, most cost-effective strategy for building safe and healthy communities. But, evidence for the approach is not yet durable. It is just flimsy enough to be cast aside by conservative lawmakers and unimaginative funders dazzled by decades of research on the more easily proven, individually-oriented approach to public safety.