Will Mamdani hit his target on gun violence prevention?

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For decades, New York City’s Crisis Management System (CMS) members brokered peace and prevented shootings in the neighborhoods most impacted by gun violence. Now, they wait for one man to pull the trigger on a major boost to their efforts.

If Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers on his campaign promises, CMS, the city-funded network of community-based violence prevention organizations, could substantially grow. In his public safety plan, Mamdani pledged to expand the system by increasing funding by 275% and moving it under a new Department of Community Safety (DCS) for larger coverage and organizational restructuring.

Almost a month into his term, how Mamdani will implement his public safety promises remains to be seen. When the AmNews asked the mayor if he still planned on increasing CMS funding by 275%, he explained that any funding changes would be made clear in his preliminary budget, which is expected in February. “We’ll be sharing more specifics around the budget with the preliminary budget,” Mamdani said.

Meanwhile, the creation of DCS, which comes with a projected $1 billion price tag, likely depends on the City Council passing legislation. City Councilmember Lincoln Restler said he will be reintroducing the bill to that effect in the coming weeks. He did not provide an exact estimate for when the bill might be passed, but said it was a high priority for the Council.

“We hope to have a hearing on this legislation to create the Department of Community Safety as soon as possible, and we hope to see it passed and signed into law as quickly as we’re able to get that done,” he said.

Still, CMS organizations are optimistic that this potential boost in funding and the move to a new DCS could greatly enhance their violence prevention work. The city is currently experiencing record lows in shootings, part of a nationwide trend of declining gun violence.

A.T. Mitchell-Mann, founder of CMS organization ManUp! Inc and former gun violence prevention czar under former Mayor Eric Adams, said he recently met with Mamdani alongside other CMS leadership, and came away feeling positive.

“People don’t realize that the Mamdani administration has an opportunity to make us whole,” he said. “To date, we still do not work 24 hours a day. We do not work seven days a week … we only work five days a week, eight hours a day, and that’s it. Most of the time when violence is happening, it happens during the hours that we are not even on the clock.”

CMS officially dates back to 2012, when Public Advocate Jumaane Williams championed its formation while serving on the City Council. The network grew out of legislation to contract nonprofit organizations, largely based on the Chicago-bred Cure Violence model, which approaches gun violence prevention as a public health issue.

Many groups predate CMS itself and stem from grassroots efforts by local residents following deadly neighborhood shootings. In the last fifteen years, the system’s funding has ballooned from $4.8 million to nearly $100 million annually.

At the heart of this work are violence interrupters and outreach workers, often people from the neighborhood who have past experiences with gun violence and deep ties in their catchment area. They serve as credible messengers and engage individuals who are at “high risk” of becoming a perpetrator or victim in a shooting.

“They’re the ones in the trenches every single day, speaking to community members who are seen, and those who aren’t seen, keeping a firm understanding of what’s happening in the neighborhood to see when tides shift and things start to happen that we can prevent,” explained Anthony Rowe, project director at Neighbors in Action, which oversees CMS sites in Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

CMS groups also provide wraparound services to these at-risk residents, with offerings including mental health services, education assistance, and job training. Some even boast emergency medic training.

Although it is difficult to measure the causal effects of CMS, researchers have found that these sites have contributed to lower rates of violence. The NYC Comptroller’s Office credited the system with potentially preventing 1,567 shootings between 2012 and 2024, pointing to an average reduction of 7.4 gun violence incidents a year in precincts with an active, registered organization.

“If we say we want to increase safety without increasing incarceration, if we want to increase safety without increasing over-policing … then we would want to look toward community-based, community-created solutions,” said Dr. Talib Hudson, a violence intervention researcher and founder of The New Hood, a public policy think tank focused on Black and Brown neighborhoods.

Working with Mamdani

Last April, then-State Assemblymember Mamdani’s mayoral campaign unveiled his proposal to consolidate and bankroll the city’s many non-police public safety initiatives under a newly-formed DCS. Beyond the funding boost, his plan also called for additional CMS sites in neighborhoods with high rates of violence. Right now, CMS is only active in 29 of the 77 precincts.

Several CMS proponents joined Mamdani’s transition team this past winter. LIFE Camp Inc. founder Erica Ford brings a three decade legacy in anti-violence work and previously organized alongside rap great Tupac Shakur. Community Capacity Development founder and CEO K. Bain (real name Kristofer Bain) previously worked under Williams when his council office established CMS, and was also tapped by the Biden administration to tackle federal gun violence issues.

Dana Rachlin — who co-founded violence prevention org We Build the Block with Hot 97’s Shani Kulture and the late Michael K. Williams, star of the HBO series “The Wire” — is also on the committee. Brooklyn College professor Alex Vitale, a notable police critic who has praised CMS’ impact, is as well.

While they could not speak on the transition team specifics, Bain and Vitale expressed optimism about CMS’s future. “It’s encouraging that the Mamdani administration is talking to people on the ground doing the work,” said Vitale.

“We did trainings in his office when he was an assemblymember on ‘people-powered’ public safety,” added Bain. “He has professional experience and personal experiences connected to the work — he’s been a benefit of what happens when a group on the ground is allowed to do diplomacy, community engagement and prevent shootings from happening in some of the most historically challenging areas in New York City. He walks into this with his own testimony of how this work is effective.”

Current state of CMS

While the city has increasingly turned to violence interrupters as first responders, CMS remains largely an informal, patchwork system rooted in a labor of love. CMS workers often hit the same frontlines as police and EMTs, armed with nothing but their words and reputation in the neighborhood.

“My view is that we need to put the anti-violence movement and this overall Department of Community Safety on an equal footing with the police department,” said Vitale.

Part of that work means addressing challenges that the system experienced under Eric Adams. Under his administration, CMS moved from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice to the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), an agency best known for running the Summer Youth Employment Program.

The move was designed to help CMS by placing it in a department that was experienced working with youth and issuing contracts to non-profits. But as a recent comptroller report highlighted, many groups experienced payment delays from the city, which disrupted services and organizational capacity.

Cheikh Gueye, director of operations at Project ECHO in East Flatbush, said his group was affected by these delays.

“We’ve been lucky enough to be able to … be very resourceful when times get thin like that. But we are looking to our mayor, to this new administration, to find ways [to address this],” Gueye said. “Because, you know, people’s lives are at stake. This is not just something that can be put off for another day, right? We’re talking about public safety, and public safety is a priority that should be taken very seriously.”

Groups also expressed a desire for a better relationship with the NYPD. To maintain their credibility, CMS organizations do not provide information on the people they work with to the police. But they are open to receiving information from the police on shooting activity in their catchment areas.

“Under [Mayor] de Blasio, we had a [memorandum of understanding] with the police department that clearly defined how we would interact with them,” said Rev. Wendy Calderón-Payne, executive director of Bronx Connect. “We were given notices on shootings almost weekly … I think if we can get that back with the police, that would be helpful.”

Gueye said that Project Echo has built a strong relationship with the NYPD leadership in their precinct, but that this respect does not extend to all officers working on the ground.

“We tend to see that we run into situations where there’s an incident on the ground, and sometimes those officers that are responding are not as open as some of the leadership who comes later on,” Gueye explained.

Public Advocate Williams fears CMS faces stagnation despite increased funding due to such barriers. A frequent critic of the Adams administration, he felt civilian responders like violence interrupters lacked a full seat at the table for the city’s public safety efforts despite the former mayor’s “lip service” over the past four years.

“We’ve seen CMS [funding] balloon, which I’m grateful for,” said Williams. “But without the infrastructure of how it really ties into public safety, I don’t think it has the desired effect … one of the things that has been missing is the coordination with interagencies in specific neighborhoods, and the department of community safety should be able to be really good at coordinating [that].”

A peace of the pie

Beyond these structural reforms, CMS stakeholders hope that an increase in funding can lead to more transformational changes for the system.

Calderón-Payne wants CMS groups to be able to operate seven days a week, and be open for eleven hours. Currently, most organizations operate five to six days a week for eight hours. She suggested additional funding could be used to hire more staff to make that a reality.

“Nurses do this all the time. There are nurses who work four days a week [with] long shifts. What if we had two teams like that? You only work four days a week, but you work a very long shift,” she said.

Iesha Sekou, CEO of Street Corner Resources, said she would also like to see the salary of current staff salaries increased. Right now, she says Street Corner’s violence interrupters earn around $40,000 per year — a figure she would like to see increased to at least $50,000.

“For the people who go into the street, having a living wage is very important because I don’t want them to sacrifice their own safety and life and [not] get paid [to] where they can pay their bills,” she explained.

Mitchell-Mann agreed, explaining that many CMS employees work after hours to mediate conflicts.

“A lot of them are going out there after work hours because they care, because that’s their community, and they love their community. But it’s unfair to us that we are asked to do more with less,” he said.

He also underscored the importance of ensuring violence interrupters are properly trained before heading towards potentially deadly conflicts.

“Just like the police department has an academy, the fire department has an academy, [there should be] an academy for the credible messengers who are coming into this line of work with their influence,” he said.

Beyond the blue

To be clear, CMS will not replace the police. Nor will Mamdani’s DCS draw funding from the NYPD budget. Instead, he plans on generating the cash from existing city money and a proposed state wealth tax.

But police reform advocates see civilian gun violence interrupters as key players in reducing an overreliance on law enforcement, and a carceral approach that regularly funnels young Black and Brown men into the criminal legal system. The NYPD relies on practices like the Criminal Group Database and specialized units to forcibly get guns off the street, often leading to allegations of racial profiling and harassment. And while such policing addresses the supply, CMS addresses the demand.

“The ground is fertile for this now,” said Williams. “Ten to 15 years ago, you were about convincing people of why this work is important and why we can’t solely rely on police … people always say that they’re ‘tough on crime,’ but we need to move from being ‘tough on crime’ to being serious about safety. And this model [is] actually more serious about safety than the ones that came before.

“The ‘tough-on-crime’ models that came before are literally us trying to arrest the children of the people we arrested 20 years ago without changing any modality.”

Bain does not employ the terms “violence prevention” or “cure violence” when describing the work, and emphasizes that shootings are a symptom of the broader issues plaguing the Black and Brown communities where CMS organizations operate. Instead, he uses the terms “human justice” and “people-powered public safety,” which confront the root causes of gun violence, like poverty, employment and access gaps in education and health care.

“Our communities are not intrinsically violent,” said Bain. “Our communities are not violent, so [the term] community violence intervention could perpetuate some of the things that have been harming us historically. Because it’s a misnomer. The less than 1% of individuals in communities that are actually engaged in violence does not mean that we are violent communities. But there is a problem of historical disinvestment, and we know when human needs are not met, the outcomes are predictable.”

So Mamdani’s broader affordability agenda can also play a role in preventing gun violence. Just having keys to your own place can make all the difference, said Mitchell-Mann.

“His priority areas of focus, with affordability, free [bus] transportation, universal childcare, all of those things [do] have an impact and an effect on the communities that we also focus on,” he added. “It has a way of bringing down crime.”

Shannon Chaffers is a Report for America corps member who writes about gun violence for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.