Mission

The National Network for Safe Communities supports cities implementing proven strategic interventions to reduce violence and improve public safety, minimize arrest and incarceration, strengthen communities, and improve relationships between law enforcement and the communities it serves. The National Network is committed to building a community of practice that operates along a set of guiding principles:

First do no harm

Strengthen communities’ capacity to prevent violence

Enhance legitimacy

Offer help to those who want it

Get deterrence right

Use enforcement strategically

Strategies

Group Violence Intervention

The Group Violence Intervention (GVI) reduces violent crime when community members join together with law enforcement and social service providers to focus an antiviolence message on highly active street groups.

Drug Market Intervention

The Drug Market Intervention (DMI) eliminates overt drug markets by bringing together community leaders, law enforcement, and service providers with street-level drug dealers and their families to make it clear that the dealing must stop.

Intimate Partner Violence Intervention

The Intimate Partner Violence Intervention (IPVI) aims to identify and deter the most serious intimate partner violence offenders, reduce intimate partner violence, and reduce harm to victims.

Prison Violence Intervention

The Prison Violence Intervention (PVI) aims to enhance safety and security in prisons for both staff and inmates, and create the conditions necessary for treatment, rehabilitation, and effective reentry.

Individual Gun Violence Intervention

The Individual Gun Violence Intervention (IGVI) is designed to reduce gun violence by individual offenders.

Swift, Certain, & Fair

The Swift, Certain, and Fair (SCF) approach to community supervision reduces reoffending, arrest, and incarceration by replacing unpredictable and high-level sanctions for probation violations with swift, certain, but small penalties.

NNSC International

NNSC International is focused on applying NNSC's violence reduction framework to contexts outside the U.S.

Innovations

Reconciliation

The process of reconciliation involves law enforcement partners and communities directly engaging with one another in order to address past and present harms, air grievances, and address narratives that keep both sides from moving toward their shared goal of improving public safety.

Custom Notifications

Custom notifications are an innovative way to communicate quickly, tactically, and directly with particular high-risk people.

Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis is a mathematical method to describe the structures of street groups. It is increasingly helpful in identifying high-risk individuals to engage with community-based interventions.

Strategic Prosecution

The National Network’s evolving model for strategic prosecution aims to reimagine the role of the prosecutor’s office in contributing to violence reduction goals.

Support and Outreach

The National Network has begun to frame a new "support and outreach" structure carefully tailored to the core street population, its situation, and its needs.

News & Updates

  • American Police Must Own Their Racial Injustices

  • John Jay President Karol V. Mason

  • Police geeks trying to win over old-school cops

  • ‘Zero-tolerance’ approach not very effective, experts say

  • New Haven Project Longevity, Urban League hold community conversation

  • Baton Rouge officials ramp up custom home visits hoping to intervene in group violence

  • American Police Must Own Their Racial Injustices

    July 2018  |  The American Prospect  

    To improve relationships with communities of color, a reconciliation movement has begun in several cities, in which police brush up on their history, admit past mistakes, and listen to frank talk and hard truths. 

    Tags: BirminghamLos AngelesStockton National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice Reconciliation

  • John Jay President Karol V. Mason

    June 2018  |  John Jay College of Criminal Justice  

    When a parent looks down at their newborn child, they’re filled with hope. A hope that if this child works hard in life, he’ll be successful. It doesn’t matter where he was born, how much his parents make, or his ethnicity. That hope is there. It’s a hope we pride ourselves on as a nation—we’re the “Land of Opportunity.” But in today’s America—where many black and brown children are often looked at with more suspicion and less empathy—we have to start asking ourselves a tough question: Do we give every child the same opportunities?

    Tags:

  • Police geeks trying to win over old-school cops

    June 2018  |  BBC  

    In a bid to regain the trust of the public and reform their profession, more working police officers are learning to do their own research. Meet the police pracademics.

    Tags:

  • ‘Zero-tolerance’ approach not very effective, experts say

    June 2018  |  ABC News  

    In order for any “zero-tolerance” policy to take effect and stop people from committing crimes, the criminals have to know that such uniform consequences are handed out, David Kennedy, a criminal justice professor at John Jay College, told ABC News.

    “If zero-tolerance or any other law enforcement policy is designed to deter than it can’t possibly work until people know that that’s what’s waiting for them,” said Kennedy, who also heads the school’s center for study on violence prevention, called the National Network for Safe Communities.

    Tags:

  • New Haven Project Longevity, Urban League hold community conversation

    June 2018  |  New Haven Register  

    City police Lts. John Healy and David Zanelli are trying to open a dialogue with the communities they serve.

    Healy and Zanelli are district managers for the Dwight/Chapel and Fair Haven districts, respectively, who engaged with residents in an event this week in an effort to build bridges between two communities often at odds. It was held by Project Longevity New Haven and the Urban League of Southern Connecticut’s New Haven office.

    Tags: New Haven Group Violence Intervention

  • Baton Rouge officials ramp up custom home visits hoping to intervene in group violence

    June 2018  |  The Advocate  

    With the arrival of summer's notorious bloody months and the now-defunct anti-violence initiative BRAVE in the rear-view mirror, Baton Rouge's law enforcement officials are embracing a new method for violence intervention: showing up unannounced to the homes of those they believe are linked to the violence.  

    These home visits, coined "custom notifications" by researchers with the National Network for Safe Communities based in New York, are set up to demonstrate to these people — on a very personal level — that law enforcement is aware of their ties to potential violence, to warn them of the consequences of such violence and to offer them support if they choose a different path, said Baton Rouge Police Deputy Chief Herbert "Tweety" Anny. 

    Tags: Baton Rouge Group Violence Intervention Custom Notifications


NNSC Impact

41%

reduction in group member-involved homicide

Cincinnati

23%

reduction in overall shooting behavior among factions represented at call-ins

Chicago

55%

reduction in drug offenses

Nashville

22%

reduction in non-violent offenses

Rockford

44-56%

reduction in drug offenses in all 4 neighborhoods

High Point

32%

decrease in group member-involved homicides

New Orleans

34%

reduction in homicide

Indianapolis

32%

reduction in victimization among factions represented at call-ins

Chicago

27%

reduction in shootings among notified violent groups

Boston


  • Who we are
  • Mission
  • Staff
  • Leadership
  • Join the Network


  • Contact
  • National Network for Safe Communities
    John Jay College of Criminal Justice
    555 West 57th Street, Suite 1140B
    New York, NY 10019

    (646) 557-4760