Richmond, 2006: A man is shot in the face at the funeral of a teenager who was gunned down. The City Council is on the verge of declaring a state of emergency. Comparisons to Iraq are drawn by a state senator. The year sees 42 homicides and will go on to see 47 more in 2007.
Richmond, 2023: Eight homicides, the city’s lowest number since they started keeping record.
The city was home to one of the nation’s worst homicide rates. What happened?
Richmond implemented Advance Peace in 2007, a program that treats urban gun violence as a public health crisis. Its model consists of an intensive strategy called the Peacemaker Fellowship, an 18-month mentoring intervention for young people involved in gun violence.
Oakland’s Ceasefire program also focuses on high-risk individuals, but Advance Peace goes one step further to create pathways to healing from trauma.
The backbone of the Richmond program are the community-based violence intervention workers, people from the community with the same lived experience as the youth they work with. They mediate conflict in the neighborhood in real-time and — here is where the public health approach comes in — are trained in trauma-informed care. They don’t just stop youth from committing violent acts but actually help adolescents at the margins of society to understand their trauma — and to heal.
Just 10 years after implementation, Richmond saw its lowest number of cyclical and retaliatory firearm assaults and homicides in more than four decades. Some could argue that this is due to other anti-crime initiatives. However, no other city experienced a similar drop despite the existence of those same programs. One major difference is Advance Peace.
Sacramento, Fresno and Stockton have experimented with Advance Peace, but none has committed to this proven route to violence reduction.
Sacramento’s gun violence was reduced by 22% after its first 18 months in 2019 and by 39% in Del Paso Heights, an area known for prevalent gun violence. Sacramento also went two full years without suffering a single youth homicide.
Despite these outcomes, the city of Sacramento ceased funding Advance Peace in December 2021, thus experiencing a significant uptick in gun violence in 2022 and 2023.
Stockton gun violence was reduced by 21% over its first two years of implementing the Peacemaker Fellowship and by 47% in Council District 1. Stockton and Fresno still have Advance Peace operations, but their local governments do not give the program full funding support.
Let’s call on these cities to follow these strategies that work and institutionalize funding to Advance Peace. The funding is now independent in these cities, mostly from the state and one-time grants. One-time funding will not give the same results as ongoing consistent funding.
Richmond’s standout success lies in institutionalizing Advance Peace into the city budget like any other public safety program. Advance Peace is actually housed in a government agency called the Office of Neighborhood Safety — the nation’s first city office dedicated exclusively to gun violence prevention. Richmond is the model of what other cities could accomplish by putting sustainable funding into policy.
This does not mean replacing police but a complimentary expansion that also offsets costs. Police investigations, emergency services, court time and other government services lead each shooting to cost Stockton taxpayers $962,000 and each gun homicide $2.5 million. Investing in Advance Peace can disrupt these costs. For every dollar spent on the program, the public received $47-$123 in return in Stockton and $18-$41 in Sacramento.
Imagine the change if these cities gave real support. This would be a huge step in building the sustainable and community-based public safety infrastructure that we know works and that California cities need.
Elinor Simek is a masters in public health candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.