In the summer of 2005, Richmond, Calif., was at a turning point. The city’s gun violence rates were among the highest in the country. The City Council was set to declare a state of emergency that would have brought increased surveillance and law enforcement presence into high-crime neighborhoods.
But other city leaders, including Mayor Irma Anderson and the City Manager Bill Lindsay, were wary of such a heavy-handed approach. They brought in a team of consultants to explore alternative responses. One of those consultants was DeVone Boggan, who spent a year studying the issue, speaking to Richmond residents, and observing potential strategies in other cities.
“One of [our] recommendations [was to] create this new institution inside city government called the Office of Neighborhood Safety, the first office of its kind in the country … And I was asked to run the office after it was ratified in July of 2007,” Boggan recalled.
In this role, Boggan developed a new model of gun violence prevention that was independent of law enforcement and centered around providing intensive mentoring and material support to the small number of residents driving much of the city’s gun conflict. In 2018, with the help of longtime collaborator and University of California Berkeley professor Jason Corburn, Boggan brought the strategy to other cities via his newly-created nonprofit, Advance Peace.
In their new book “Advancing Peace: Ending Urban Gun Violence Through the Power of Redemptive Love,” Boggan and Corburn share how they developed and scaled this model, which has been credited with driving down gun violence in multiple cities while bringing healing and hope to affected communities.
“We felt like more and more people needed to hear about this, about this important work, about how there are demonstrably effective ways to make gun violence rare and non-recurring in some of our most impacted cities without increasing law enforcement budgets,” Boggan said.
The book arrives at a critical moment as the federal government cuts funding to community-based violence intervention and sends the National Guard into cities like Washington D.C. and Chicago under the pretense of fighting violent crime. Boggan and Corburn’s experiences offer a clear and timely alternative for sustainably reducing gun violence in urban communities.
DeVone Boggan and Jason Corburn, authors of new book “Advancing Peace: Ending Urban Gun Violence Through the Redemptive Power of Love” (Photo courtesy of Nicholas DiSabatino)
Loving the ‘Shooters’
Like many researchers who have studied urban gun violence, Boggan soon realized that only a handful of Richmond residents — 25 or so in a city of 100,000 — were responsible for most of the city’s gun violence.
But what set his approach apart was his belief that they could change, not through threats of incarceration or death, but through unconditional love.
“It’s all about seeing these individuals’ potential, despite themselves and what they’ve done. Ultimately, we see them as human beings,” Boggan writes in his book.
Such an approach required a change to the status quo in Richmond, as many of those at the center of firearm violence were not being reached by the existing social service infrastructure.
“It became clear to me early on, with these facts in front of me, that we had to create a new system of care, specifically to focus on this particular individual and the experiences that these individuals brought to the table, and that new system of care became the Peacemaker Fellowship,” Boggan said.
The Peacemaker Fellowship invites active firearm offenders into an intensive 18-to-24-month mentoring program. Fellows maintain daily contact with their mentor, a “credible messenger” from their neighborhood who was once involved in the cycles of gun violence they are now tasked with stopping. The program also provides fellows with tailored social support services, like cognitive behavioral therapy or job training, as well travel opportunities and a financial stipend.
The fellowship is a key pillar of the Advance Peace model — a reflection of Boggan and Corbun’s belief that many of the young men they identified were living with unaddressed trauma.
“The mentorship, the engagement, the what we call ‘triple A’ always available adult in these young people’s lives, when they’ve often had very uncertain upbringings and experiences in their community … we know that that can radically alter and address traumas that people are carrying with them,” Corburn said.
Like many other community violence intervention strategies, Advance Peace workers also engage in street outreach and conflict mediation. The same individuals who provide mentoring for the Peacemaker Fellows, known as Neighborhood Change Agents (NCAs), are also responsible for intervening in any brewing conflicts that could turn violent.
The statistics suggest the model is working. Studies have found that Advance Peace contributed to a 55% reduction in gun homicides and assaults in Richmond, a 22% reduction in Sacramento, California, and a 24% reduction in Rochester, New York.
Of the 627 Fellows active across ten Advance Peace cities between 2021 and 2023, 84% reported no longer using a gun to resolve conflicts and 83% reported having improved mental health. 92% said they had a trusted adult in their lives, up from 18% at the beginning of the fellowship.
The stories of the Fellows and NCAs the authors share bring these impacts home.
Julian was a former gang leader from Stockton, California who joined Advance Peace as an NCA after being released from prison. When he joined Advance Peace, many in his community were skeptical that he could change, including a member of the police department’s gang unit who said he was one of the most violent individuals in the city. But Julian was determined, motivated by the desire to be a better role model to his nephew than he was to his son, who was in prison for murder.
Corburn and Boggan also tell the story of one fellow who had just taken an Advance Peace trip with a member of a rival crew who was also in the Peacemaker Fellowship. He arrived home to the news that one member of his crew was shot, likely by a member of his rival’s crew. His crew were anxious for his go-ahead to retaliate. Instead, reflecting on the bond he had just made with his rival, he told his crew to stand down.
All politics is local
Boggan and Corburn believe Advance Peace’s explicit focus on active firearm offenders sets it apart from other community violence intervention (CVI) models like Cure Violence or hospital-based violence intervention. Rather than viewing themselves in opposition or competition with those models, however, they believe the strategies can work alongside each other.
In fact, Boggan said they often receive calls from other cities that are already implementing other violence intervention models.
“We’ll ask them … ‘Why are you reaching out to Advance Peace when you already have this?’” Boggan said. “The answer we get most often is, ‘Yes … and we believe those [models] are doing great work. But here’s the issue: we don’t believe they’re reaching [the shooters].’”
Reflecting on the status of the CVI movement as a whole, Boggan and Corburn said that recent turbulence at the federal level means the onus and focus should be on local governments. President Trump’s Department of Justice recently reversed funding to these groups provided under the Biden administration.
“Tip O’Neill, the late congressman back in the day said, ‘all politics is local.’ CVI is local. And it must sit in our local governments that are impacted by retaliatory gun violence,” Boggan said.
“That’s where the rubber hits the road. That’s where the spending is or isn’t happening,” Corburn added. “And I think if we can address that, in some ways the federal, either investment or lack thereof, may be less important, if we can really get action at the local level.”
That means getting local governments to be more intentional with how they use their budgets. When Richmond first created the Office of Neighborhood Safety, the budget was just $750,000 per year.
“I tire of hearing local policymakers say, we just don’t have the money. No, you do have the money. You’re just making the decision to do something different with the money,” Boggan said.
Corburn and Boggan argue that the budget excuse is particularly unconvincing when considering how much cities are willing to spend on policing. New York City, which is often held up as a model for CVI investment, spends about $100 million on its violence intervention program, which has yet to expand into all of the most impacted communities. In comparison, it spends $5.8 billion on policing.
As the saying goes, city budgets are not just numbers, but a reflection of a city’s values. Boggan and Corburn hope their book will show policymakers why they must value CVI by making it a permanent part of their city’s public safety expenditures.
“It is time that CVI becomes much more than piecemeal, much more than an experiment, much more than, you know what, that’s a nice thing to do. It’s got to become a permanent public system investment,” Boggan said.
Shannon Chaffers is a Report for America corps member and 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.