Governing, a magazine for states and localities, featured Richmond in its September 2014 issue, excerpt below:
http://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-cities-new-way-gun-violence.html
Shortly after gun legislation stalled in Congress last year, a spate of local homicides prompted the city council in Richmond, Calif., to consider new municipal regulations. As recently as 2008, Richmond ranked as one of the nation’s 10 most violent cities of more than 100,000 residents. Almost all its homicides and half of its robberies involved guns. Nonetheless, Councilman Tom Butt, a self-described champion of gun control, voted against a resolution that would have studied options for new gun regulation. California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, he says, but “it’s not enough. Regardless of what kind of gun laws you have, people who really want to have a gun are going to find one.”
Seven years ago, Butt became an early supporter of a local anti-violence strategy that sidesteps guns entirely and focuses instead on the people who use them. “Illegal guns have always found their way into urban communities by some mechanism,” says DeVone Boggan, the director of neighborhood safety in the Richmond mayor’s office. “We need to find a way to get these young men not to pick these guns up, to develop the mindset that ‘I’m not going to deal with conflict by using a gun.’”
With the help of a data analyst from the police department and tips from street informants, Boggan’s office identifies young men who are suspected of being involved in a shooting­ -- but who have not been charged or convicted -- and invites them to join the city’s peace fellowship program. The perks of being a peace fellow include trips outside the city or even outside the country (destinations have included Cape Town and Dubai), plus financial rewards for participating longer than six months. While those benefits help recruit program participants, the real boon is the support services available to the city’s peace fellows. A team of older neighborhood residents -- often with a criminal past -- coaches the men on setting goals and mapping out the small, specific steps needed to accomplish everything from obtaining a driver’s license to applying for college. A caretaker accompanies the fellows through the maze of social services that they may need to stabilize their lives, from housing to drug addiction counseling. Finally, every fellow takes classes on anger management.
Boggan’s holistic approach to gun violence started in 2007. As of this past July, the program had recruited 68 peace fellows, with 25 completing the full 15 months. Fifty-seven had avoided being charged with a firearm assault since joining. All but three were still alive. The public image of the peace fellowship received a boost in January when the police department reported that 2013 saw the lowest number of annual homicides in three decades.
Since the program’s launch, other cities in California and around the country have called Boggan for advice on how to introduce a peace fellowship in their own jurisdictions. Public safety officials express excitement about the approach, he says, but by the end of the discussion they’re pessimistic about replicating the fellowship. “The challenge,” Boggan says, “is being able to go back home and sell this idea of providing positive resources to individuals who have often committed heinous crimes.”
Indeed, it’s an open question whether other cities will want to use a Richmond-style program as a road map for tackling gun violence. One of the model’s biggest assets, says Angela Wolf, a community psychologist studying the program, is long-term intensive mentoring that extends beyond the fellows’ graduation. At least two years later, former fellows still call their mentors for advice about how to handle a conflict or career decision. The model requires a major investment of time and money to turn around the lives of a small number of residents.
Nonetheless, Boggan argues that supporting a few violent residents with human resources might be the most efficient use of tax dollars. When the city hired Boggan in 2007, it faced a $24 million structural deficit, much of it driven by expenditures of $6 million per year for law enforcement. Like most cities, Richmond had responded to spikes in violent crime by hiring more officers and putting violent people in jail. That was expensive, and it wasn’t doing much to solve the problem. “If you look at most cities where the public safety budget is going through the roof, it’s justified by the actions of a relatively small group of men doing a lot of damage,”
Boggan says. “We have to identify alternative solutions that are much more responsive.”

Want to receive TOM BUTT E-FORUM and other action alerts on Richmond political and community issues delivered to your email address? Email your name and email address and/or the names and email addresses of others who would like to be placed on the mailing list and the message "subscribe" to tom.butt@intres.com. Comments, arguments and corrections are welcome.  Tom Butt is a member of the Richmond City Council   when opinions and views expressed, without other attribution, in TOM BUTT E-FORUM, they are those of Tom Butt and do not reflect official views or positions of the City of Richmond or the Richmond City Council unless otherwise noted. Visit the Tom Butt website for additional information about Tom Butt's activities on the Richmond City Council: http://www.tombutt.com.  Phone 510/236-7435 or 510/237-2084. Subscription to this service is at the personal discretion of the recipient and may be terminated by responding with “unsubscribe.” It may take a few days to remove addresses from the distribution list.

This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

To the extent that content is excerpted under the fair use doctrine from other media, I urge readers to subscribe to the print versions of these media with print versions to help support professional journalism and the businesses that publish news, and I urge readers to log in to the online versions to access additional content, related content and unrelated news as well as the advertisements that support the media. I especially appreciate local sources of news that include the Contra Costa Times , the San Francisco Chronicle, Richmond Confidential and the East Bay Express.