Cities Are Undermining Promising Violence Intervention Programs

In four years of violence intervention work in Minneapolis, Saaundre Burns has been through the peaks and valleys. When it’s going right, he’s seen the immense impact his efforts can have on curtailing bloodshed. When it isn’t, daily disputes can quickly turn deadly, sometimes triggering retaliatory cycles of violence that tear at the fabric of entire neighborhoods.

Burns is a team leader for T.O.U.C.H Outreach, a violence prevention organization that launched in 2020. TOUCH employs around 20 violence interrupters who are embedded in the community, working to resolve conflicts before they become violent. The group’s impact hinges on their ability to build relationships and credibility, Burns told The Appeal. And continuity is the key to their success, as people tend to distrust outsiders who may only parachute periodically.

“We’ve been boots on the ground for quite some time now,” said Burns. “We gotta keep doing the work and we got to stay consistent.”

Fostering this trust isn’t easy: TOUCH faces hurdles due to misconceptions among the public, criticism from other professionals who work in the community, including law enforcement, and, of course, a lack of consistent funding. Perceptions can be improved over time and the same goes for side-eyes the violence interrupters may get from police. But all of this work requires money, which the group recently learned can be pulled with little notice.

Earlier this year, Minneapolis’s Neighborhood Safety Office, which oversees funding for a variety of violence prevention and intervention programs, faced controversy amid accusations of financial mismanagement, fraud, and a lack of oversight. The city is also facing a lawsuit accusing officials of using an improper process to award grant money to violence intervention programs. The Neighborhood Safety Office declined to comment on allegations of money mismanagement but in a statement said that they have more than 70 contracts with service providers and that they support the vision for safety and security in the city. 

Amid the chaos, TOUCH and several other violence prevention groups reported their staff went months without payment. Funding for police, fire, and EMS staff, which are also under the Office of Community Safety, was not affected. 

“When you’re worrying about your job and whether or not you gonna have it next week, it takes your whole focus away from the mission,” Burns said. “Our mission is saving these youths and saving the community. It should never be about money.”

What happened in Minneapolis is just one example of how cities across the country are undermining the work of violence prevention organizations due to inconsistent funding and commitments, poor organization, and a fundamental misunderstanding of how these programs achieve results.

For TOUCH, the consequences of the pause in funding were immediate, said Executive Director Muhammad Abdul-Ahad.

“If there’s gaps in services, that means we don’t have the resources that we need to continue to be out there,” Abdul-Ahad told The Appeal. “When … we pull our guys off the streets, that can lead to [violence] starting back up.”

In Ward 9, which includes neighborhoods where TOUCH operates, police measured a more than 60 percent  increase, as of late September, in gunshot victims this year compared to the same point in 2023. Abdul-Ahad attributes the rise in violence in part to the suspension of street outreach after TOUCH was forced to halt operations earlier this year.

In May, the city council approved a new round of funding for violence prevention organizations, following a heated debate. But much of the damage had already been done. 

The recent disruption in Minneapolis is indicative of a broader problem that community-based violence intervention programs face in many cities: The work of these organizations generally isn’t viewed with the same legitimacy as other services like police or EMS, which are typically among the first to respond after a violent incident.

As a result, some city leaders have been quick to threaten funding cuts for these groups, even as they have shown to be successful at preventing that violence from happening in the first place—all at a fraction of the cost of other public safety approaches involving policing and incarceration. Cities like Richmond, Buffalo, and Detroit, have all experienced a decrease in shootings and homicides attributed in part to the efforts of community-based violence intervention organizations, which typically involve engaging high-risk individuals to mediate conflicts and guide clients away from activities often associated with violence. 

“If you talk to those on the frontlines, they feel like they should be treated like the police and like firemen because they are part of the public safety ecosystem, but they don’t see themselves getting the same level of respect,” Joseph Richardson, Jr., a gun violence prevention researcher and professor at the University of Maryland, told The Appeal. 

This lack of respect for what these projects achieve manifests itself during budget conversations. In Philadelphia, where gun violence significantly declined this year, violence intervention programs spent years suffering from whiplash due to inconsistent commitments. In 2021, officials in Pennsylvania were all in on funding. Two years later, programs had the rug pulled out from under them when state lawmakers slashed violence intervention funding. 

In Washington D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser recently approved a 54-percent cut to the 2025 budget for violence intervention initiatives overseen by the city’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE), while increasing the police budget by approximately 14%.

These actions point to a reversal of recent momentum in favor of violence intervention and other outreach programs, which advocates in many cities had successfully touted as an alternative to policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The drawback underscores how difficult it can be for this work to gain a stable foothold. Although there is plenty of evidence bolstering the effectiveness of these programs, much of that success relies on proper implementation and strategy, including—at a bare minimum—providing them with consistent funding.

The precarious nature of this space only makes it harder for frontline workers to build robust relationships, effectively setting programs up for failure, said Kentral Galloway, program director for Next Step, a city-funded hospital-based violence intervention group that operates in a handful of Minneapolis area facilities. 

“Most of our organizations are living on a whim of, do we get this grant? Are we gonna get this funding?” Galloway said. “Then our staff are under stress. Am I gonna have a job? Sometimes people do get laid off or organizations can’t make payroll.”

The financial instability is largely a function of a lack of political will among elected officials, said Aqeela Sherrills, a violence prevention expert and co-founder of the Community Based Public Safety Collective, a national organization that helps neighborhoods build viable community-led public safety models.

“A lot of our politicians are risk-averse in terms of introducing new strategies into the [public safety] zeitgeist,” Sherrills told The Appeal. “It’s a complex situation, but we need to make [community violence intervention] a permanent part of our public safety system.” 

Financial commitments aren’t the only issue for violence prevention organizations. In some cities, initiatives have also gotten caught up in arguments over how programs should be organized, implemented, and led—and who should be in charge of making those decisions. When St. Louis announced a $7 million investment in Cure Violence in 2019, community leaders were excited. They later withdrew their support following accusations that city officials had ignored community input during its rollout.

In Washington, D.C., the ONSE has been without a permanent director for over a year. The lack of stable leadership has exposed the agency to further criticism around perceived accountability issues and left it without a dedicated advocate to communicate successes to the public.

“I don’t think that city governments do a very good job of uplighting the visibility of [community violence intervention],” said Richardson. “There are so many people that have no idea what it looks like.” 

Many of those on the frontlines of violence prevention work also say they feel hamstrung by an unfair level of scrutiny, which often forces them to demonstrate impossible results before they can get consistent funding. 

“People always say, ‘Why is this necessary? Are you really doing any work? Show us numbers that prove it.’ They want us to end gun violence in a year or two and that’s just not going to happen,” Galloway said. “Can we reduce it? Yes, but how does that show up? We have to make sure people are living healthy lives and that takes time.”

While data from various cities, police agencies, and academic institutions have all shown that violence interruption can be effective in reducing gun violence, Galloway also points out that some naysayers still refuse to believe the work is evidence-based. “We already know this work is credible—it’s been proven over the last 20 to 25 years that what we’re doing works,” he said.

Burns, from TOUCH in Minneapolis, believes the criticism is deeper than a simple “evidence” issue. 

“They only complain because it’s a group of [Black people] receiving money that taxpayers are giving them,” Burns said. “Half the people that’s complaining about it, they don’t want to come out here and build relationships. They only judge from afar.”

As community-based violence intervention groups have fought for funding in recent years, their portrayal as an alternative to policing has also created challenges.

“A lot of our politicians are very afraid of their law enforcement lobbies,” Sherrills said. He views the law enforcement lobby as “the most powerful lobby in the country and some of them believe we’re proposing [community violence intervention] as a way to replace cops.”

This is a misconception, Sherrills clarified, calling violence intervention programs a “complementary strategy” to policing. But conversations around “defunding the police” amid the George Floyd uprising put law enforcement groups on heightened alert, even though police budgets were not impacted in any meaningful way.

In Minneapolis, for example, the city’s police department budget increased from about $169 million to about $216 million between 2021 and 2024. The Neighborhood Safety Office’s budget for violence intervention work, meanwhile, grew from around $9 million to around $23 million in that same time—a sizable increase, but still a fraction of police spending.

Violence interrupters on the ground are quick to note that they differ from police in key ways. They’re unarmed, and have no legal authority to enforce laws or arrest people. Their ability to resolve conflicts is a function of the respect they’ve earned in the community, not due to the threat of a gun and a badge. 

To Sherrills, there is plenty of room for both violence intervention groups and police. These community-led organizations are not asking for police budgets, they’re just asking for city leaders to show them consistent support, like they do for law enforcement.

“This work is really dangerous and it’s very difficult. We have to pay people livable wages for leveraging their relationship capital in neighborhoods to intervene in immediate conflicts,” Sherrills said. “If we’re going to pay cops $80,000 plus benefits and life insurance then we need to come up with something fair for community violence practitioners.”

This summer, TOUCH hosted its fourth annual Stop the Violence Community Cookout at Martin Luther King Park in south Minneapolis. More than 16,000 people showed up.

Local stakeholders and community leaders attended, along with politicians and law enforcement. Even residents who had conflicts with each other came to be part of the gathering. No guns drawn. No shots fired.

On the surface, the event might appear to be a diversion from the daily, face-to-face outreach work required for effective violence prevention. But large-scale events like cookouts, basketball tournaments, or school supplies giveaways all share a purpose of positively bringing the community together and building credibility and trust. Abdul-Ahad hopes that when people think of his organization and their work, they think of the cookout.

“It was all fun and smiles. Nothing but love,” Abdul-Ahad said. “When we talk about a public safety ecosystem, that’s what it can look like.”