In 2007, Richmond, California, was ranked as the ninth most dangerous city in the United States.
That year, with a population of 108,000, the East Bay city saw 47 homicides. Traditional policing methods were clearly not working. That same year, the city hired DeVone Boggan, a nationally recognized leader in community violence intervention, to lead the city’s new Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS). There, he invested in community violence intervention (CVI) strategies.
“CVI is really straightforward: Making sure that the community has a say and a significant role in facilitating the work that can help us responsively check and address retaliatory gun violence,” said Boggan.
This is often by engaging with those who know the community best and have experienced gun violence themselves. “For us, that typically means formerly incarcerated individuals, who themselves have had gun charges in their backgrounds,” said Boggan. “We equip these individuals with the skills and discipline to transform conflict and interrupt gun violence.”
Today, gun violence in Richmond has taken a remarkable turn. So far this year, the city’s had two murders. That’s still two too many, but it shows that taking a community-first approach to urban gun violence is powerfully effective.
Boggan and Jason Corburn, UC Berkeley professor of public health and city and regional planning, explore the approach that Boggan developed—first through Richmond’s ONS and then through Advance Peace, a nonprofit he founded in 2016 to advance his CVI work—in a new book from MIT Press, Advancing Peace: Ending Gun Violence in Urban America Through the Power of Redemptive Love.
The authors make the case that not only is the Advance Peace model effective at reducing urban gun violence, it can be replicated in other cities. In fact, it’s already shown great success in Stockton and Fresno.
Their analysis shows how a healing-centered, accountability-grounded, non-punitive model—fueled by intensive mentorship, life coaching, and community investment—can reduce shootings, increase public safety, and restore dignity to communities.
“For me this is a natural trajectory for my research, which has always been about action,” said Corburn.
“This is a public health issue,” said Corburn. “The actual violence has an impact, the trauma on people, the loss of life, the injury, the life of disability, and the damage that does to families and communities, and entire cities.”
“My space is urban health and community health. There is no community in a violent place. When we retract from those public spaces, something fills that void. Those social connections break down in a gun-violent community.”
And the root causes of urban gun violence include racism, discrimination, redlining, and eugenics.
“Even with these root causes, not everyone who is poor and lives in a segregated neighborhood becomes a shooter,” said Corburn. “But we know hurt people tend to hurt other people. It’s a small number of folks who often don’t get the resources or support and tend to turn to gun violence.”
“We’ve already solved 99% of the problem,” said Boggan. “Less than 1% of a city’s population is at the center of driving gun violence. Structural inequities fuel the conditions where violence can take root. Unchecked violence fuels its own cycle, independent of those inequities. Gun violence is driven by gun violence. Until we learn to respond to it in healthy, human ways, the cycle continues. That’s what Advance Peace and Advancing Peace is all about.”
Boggan and Corburn hope that policymakers pay attention to their analysis of Richmond’s remarkable turnabout in gun violence—and put the Advance Peace methods to work elsewhere.
“I hope future policymakers read the book,” said Boggan. “Because I think we need to be much more educated as a society about what works and what doesn’t work. I think we all struggle with change and embracing new paradigms…even when it’s clear that current approaches are far less effective. Law enforcement, increased surveillance, more arrests, and increased incarceration hasn’t helped solve this problem and in many cases has made it worse.”
“We need to see our communities and leaders healing and achieving greater justice—greater access to the basic life supports that we all deserve,” said Corburn. “We measure that. We measure the improvements in mental health and basic life supports: food, shelter, clothing, opportunities to have hope, and to have some money in their pocket, to live a dignified life. Of course we want shooting to go down and gun homicides to be eliminated. But that’s a means toward an end. Health is not the end. It’s a means towards living a fulfilling and happy and joyful life.”
