Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • With gun suicides on the rise, a rare hotline staffed by St. Louis teens saves lives

    Kids Under Twenty One has taken phone calls from thousands of St. Louis-area youth to its 24/7 crisis hotline and has educated many more students at 60 schools in four counties. Teens staff the hotline, a rarity. KUTO counters the myth that talking about teens' suicide risks encouraging suicides. Instead, education about mental health care and gun safety promotes intervention during critical moments and reduces the stigma associated with seeking help. Missouri's teen suicide rate is among the highest in the country, but the St. Louis area, where KUTO has worked for 20 years, is among the state's lowest.

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  • Gun violence crisis: With revenge & retaliation on the rise, how police are responding

    Asheville, North Carolina, police hope to model a violence-intervention program on one in Buffalo, New York, in which police use "custom notifications" to identify people prone to violence. Those notified are given a choice between arrest or assistance in redirecting their lives, with help from social services providers. Buffalo's program is credited with a 24% decline in gun violence in 2019, before the pandemic put it on hold and shootings rose again.

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  • Next Step goes to the front lines of gun violence in Minneapolis, starting with the shooting victims

    Next Step is a hospital-based violence intervention program based at Minneapolis' Hennepin County Medical Center that counsels gunshot victims to try to help lower the chances that they will be harmed again or seek to harm others. Focusing on young adults and their families, the program starts its work when a victim is hospitalized. The counseling and connections to support services can continue for months and even years.

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  • Should Abusers Keep Their Guns? In These 13 States, Judges Choose.

    In four of the 13 states where judges have the power to deny domestic-violence abusers access to guns, arbitrarily applied standards lead to a patchwork of enforcement of the laws. A review of cases heard in Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, and South Dakota shows that outcomes depend more on the county in which a case is heard, or a particular judge's beliefs about guns, than on a consistent application of the laws' standards. In some cases, clear allegations of a dire threat did not win approval of a domestic protection order. In others, orders were granted without allegations that guns posed a threat.

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  • After shootings hit new high, Durham to spend $935,000 on an alternative to police

    Because two Durham neighborhoods using the Cure Violence method of "violence interruption" bucked the citywide trend toward higher gun violence, the city will expand its Bull City United violence-prevention program to four more neighborhoods. The additional $935,488 cost will pay for 16 employees, many of them formerly incarcerated, who will mediate disputes after a shooting, to prevent retaliation, and who will conduct outreach to people at risk of gun violence.

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  • City program sends personal message about gun violence

    Albuquerque police make house calls to deliver a carrot-and-stick message to people at high risk of getting shot or shooting others. The Violence Intervention Program's "custom notifications" target people based on their criminal record or victimization in gun violence. The message: accept the offered services that can redirect your life, or suffer the consequences, of arrest or getting shot. Of 74 people notified and helped from March through mid-December 2020, none were known to have committed a new crime. Shootings in the city are up, but more research is needed to pinpoint the program's actual effects.

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  • Homicides dropped after Philly gangs signed a 1974 peace pact. What can we learn from the org that brokered the truce?

    The House of Umoja in West Philadelphia, created in the late 1960s in response to high rates of gang violence, succeeded in helping thousands of young men through a residential treatment program, mediating disputes peacefully, and brokering a gang truce credited with lowering Philadelphia violence in the 1970s. The program was based on Afrocentric customs and family structure (its name means unity in Swahili). The grandson of the founders is now trying to revive the home as part of the city's multiple anti-violence initiatives.

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  • A Philly jobs program lost six to a year of violence. Can it still help young people thrive?

    PowerCorpsPHL and Mural Arts' Guild have notched impressive results in job placements of young people with criminal records. The programs' employment training, paid apprenticeships, and art therapy classes have all been disrupted by 2020's pandemic, social unrest, and street violence. Private grants have largely made up for budget cuts from the city of Philadelphia. But the lack of face to face training and counseling has been disruptive. Both programs and their trainees are persevering despite longer odds, with workarounds that keep the programs afloat in difficult times.

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  • Illegal Out-of-State Gun Trafficking is Fueling Baltimore's Homicide Epidemic

    When Baltimore police shifted tactics starting in 2007, away from aggressive street stops aimed at arresting gun carriers toward regulating the supply of street guns at their sources, the city's murder rate plunged. Backed by studies on effective gun regulations, the focus on tracing crime guns to their sources, firearms traffickers and corrupt gun retailers, often in states with lax laws on gun sales, seemed to have significant positive effects. That strategy was largely abandoned and an emphasis on street enforcement resumed. Baltimore's homicides went back up.

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  • An oft-tried plan to curb violent crime in Baltimore resurfaces. City leaders say better leadership will bring better results.

    In the 1990s and again in 2014, when Baltimore used a strategy called focused deterrence to reduce street violence, it showed initial promise but then failed. Those failures can be tied to how the program was managed, and to changes in leadership, not to the approach itself. The strategy offers help to people at risk of shooting others or being shot, but threatens them with prosecution if they reject the help and commit violence. The revived Group Violence Reduction Strategy has worked well in many cities, including New Orleans, where Baltimore's current police chief came from.

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