Shortly after the city of Columbus announced a partnership with criminologist David Kennedy to dig deep into the rising tide of homicidal violence in Columbus, I spoke with him about his decades of work in violence prevention. Kennedy is a proponent of an approach to violence-reduction that first identifies precisely who is driving the violence.
“The theory is that there is a small percentage of individuals committing the large amount of violent crime that is taking place in our community,” says Ned Pettus, the director of the city’s Department of Public Safety. That is not a new theory, or one that is unique to Columbus. In fact, it was one
The walks are just one way to get officers out of police cruisers and into neighborhoods on foot, where they can build relationships and a rapport with individuals, “to get them to trust us enough and trust the process, and believe that justice can be obtained through legal channels and not on the street,” the
I was encouraged to read two pages later the Dispatch article “Violence prevention initiative to focus on shooter,” about the violence prevention initiative involving criminologist David Kennedy of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Kennedy is well known for both his criminal justice research and his data-driven, successful approaches to addressing crime and violence.
Gun violence is at an all-time high in Louisville. Not even halfway through November, we’ve had 143 homicides — 22 percent more than the previous annual record set in 2017. More than 50 people a month are getting hit by non-fatal gunfire — double the gun violence in a typical year.
“Effective violence prevention looks a lot like contact tracing,” said Kennedy, the director of John Jay College’s National Network for Safe Communities. “Between law enforcement and community insight, it’s very often possible to understand who’s driving things, who’s at high risk. What are we going to do with this particular situation to keep it from
“We just want the violence to stop,” Gwynn said. “It’s such a cliche, but it’s true. It’s babies killing babies. They need to know that they can’t pull back that bullet.”
A new initiative to tackle the record levels of violence within the city will identify some of the key players and bring them together in a re-imagined way of freezing the gunfire. The National Network for Safe Communities has implemented its Group Violence Intervention initiative in cities across the country with many of them seeing reductions in
“My office is very blunt about this: Violence is visited with massive disproportion on people and communities of color in the United States,” Kennedy said during his address Friday as a keynote speaker at The Gazette’s Iowa Ideas virtual conference. “Black men are about 6 percent of the nation and they are about 15 percent
This is the second in a series of stories on a proven strategy deployed in communities across the globe to reduce violence and save substantial numbers of community members from prison, death and grievous loss of loved ones. As this strategy had a beginning in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2016, we offer these stories