Shortly after the city made headlines for a dramatic reduction in homicide numbers, city and community leaders discussed Cure Violence’s preventative work over the last two years.
“It’s a hard job to do, but if you place the right people in the right positions, I feel like it would be a big step for the whole city.” —Juan Williams
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones was joined Jan. 13 by her public safety director, Dan Isom, in virtually meeting with representatives from the three neighborhoods where the Cure Violence prevention program was put in place.
Cure Violence is a national program that seeks to prevent gun violence using the methods and strategies associated with disease control: detecting and interrupting conflicts; changing behavior; and changing social norms by connecting residents to services and embedding staff directly in neighborhoods.
On Nov. 8, 2020, Mayor Lyda Krewson announced the St. Louis Department of Health would lead the local Cure Violence program, which was set to receive $8 million in city funds over the next three years.
The programs’ first location, in the Wells Goodfellow/Hamilton Heights neighborhood, opened in June 2020 and was implemented by Employment Connection, which annually assists about 2,000 people with finding employment and focuses on reducing recidivism.
Later on, in August 2020, Employment Connection was tapped to open another Cure Violence location in Dutchtown.
Sal Martinez, CEO of Employment Connection, told Jones and Isom the Wells Goodfellow/Hamilton Heights neighborhood’s program has conducted 376 “de-escalation sessions,” where employees disrupt conflict situations before escalating. The neighborhood is located in District 5, an area that saw a 27% decrease in homicide and firearms rates between 2020 and 2021, according to the mayor’s office.
“These staff persons see guns every day while they are in the community,” Martinez said. “… They’re not in the office 80 or 90% of the time, working on their computers. They are in the community, they are in the hotspots, they are in the areas where people are committing illegal activities risking their lives to make the community a safe place.”
The Employment Connection has also been able to help a lot of the people contacted by Cure Violence find gainful employment, he said.
As for the Dutchtown location, staff have de-escalated 168 conflicts since its creation. Dutchtown is divided into Districts 1 and 3, which saw a 16.3% and 6.2% drop in homicide and firearm rates respectively from 2020 to 2021, according to the mayor’s office.
Mujaa Williams represents the Dutchtown site and spoke during the Zoom meeting. He focused on the interruptions the staff have participated in across all three sites—602 in all combined.
“This mission right here has been challenging, but we are up for the challenge,” he said. “In Dutchtown, we have virtually contained the area where we don’t have any incidents, period. Now the incidents have really gone to the borders of our catchment. So, we no longer just patrol our catchment, we go outside of our catchment now because we don’t really have anything to engage with in our catchment.”
The Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis operates the Cure Violence site within the Walnut Park neighborhood. The Walnut Park catchment area program engaged in 58 disruptions, and is in District 6, which saw a nearly 3% decrease in firearm and homicide rate from 2020 to 2021, according to the mayor’s office.
Juan Williams is a native of Walnut Park and runs the Cure Violence program there. He told Jones and Isom it makes it easier for him to approach people in situations because they know who he is. He also noted, like Mujaa Williams said, the area is contained, and so staff are focusing on the neighborhood’s borders and just beyond them.
“It’s a hard job to do, but if you place the right people in the right positions, I feel like it would be a big step for the whole city,” he said.
St. Louis recently made local and national headlines for its homicide rate, which in 2021 decreased by a jaw-dropping 25% as compared to its record-setting spike in 2020, making it the nation’s few large cities that bucked the trend of increasing homicide rates since the pandemic began. More than two-thirds of the country’s 40 most populous cities saw more homicides in 2021 compared to 2020, according to a CNN analysis.
During the Jan. 13 meeting, Jones said bringing down the homicide rate will take an “all hands on deck” approach.
“We’re focused on deterrence, intervention and prevention and Cure Violence is a key piece of that but it’s not the only piece,” she said. “It’s also some of the work that is being done in the police department under the leadership of Chief [Jon] Hayden along with Dr. Isom with our deployment strategies. Cure Violence isn’t a silver bullet, it was never built to be a silver bullet, but it is one piece of a larger holistic approach to address violent crime and intervene where necessary to deter people when applicable and prevent whenever we can.”
