Newburgh began working on its Group Violence Intervention in 2014 with the assistance of David Kennedy and the National Network for Safe Communities. Under the guidance of Project Manager Isabel Rojas, Newburgh held its first call-in in October of 2015. Ms. Rojas has worked closely with Newburgh's support and outreach coordinator and the two established a support and outreach subcommittee that met for the first time in December, 2015. City partners are also developing a strong process by which they will deliver custom notifications to impact players.
In this opinion piece for the New York Times, Tina Rosenberg highlights the NNSC's group violence prevention work across jurisdictions.
In Pittsburgh, homicides hit a 12-year low in 2017; the mayor credited Ceasefire. Detroit’s homicide rate hit a 50-year low in 2017. Its police chief, James Craig, said in an interview that the city had started Ceasefire in two high-crime precincts in 2015 and has gradually expanded it. “I wasn’t much of a believer when I first got to Detroit,” he said. “But what we have in place now is probably one of the better-working Ceasefire models. It has had a profound impact on sustaining violent crime reduction.”
In Newburgh, statistics in a voluminous New York State report show shootings are way down (See pdf, page 1202) — from 55 victims in 2015 to 17 last year. Violent crime, especially firearm crime, has plummeted. In 2012, the year Oakland began its current version of Ceasefire, it was the third-most dangerous American city, with 126 murders. Last year it had 74. In 2017, Oakland had 277 nonfatal shootings — down from 557 in 2012.
Violent crime in Newburgh continued to fall last year as the city waits for the state to determine if former Beacon police Chief Doug Solomon is eligible to lead its department, City Manager Michael Ciaravino said on Monday.
The combined number of aggravated assaults, homicides, rapes and robberies in 2017 fell by 14 percent from 2016, Ciaravino told the City Council. Part 1 crimes, which include violent crimes along with arson, burglaries, car thefts and larcenies, were down almost 15 percent, he said.
There were six homicides last year, the same as in 2016, but the overall number of people injured by gunshots dropped significantly last year, from 48 to 17, Ciaravino said.
“This was the lowest crime rates in over 10 years,” he said.
Before Joe Alvarez landed a job welding for renowned sculptor Frank Stella, and before the Newburgh native founded the grassroots organization behind many of the city’s positive initiatives, he was “Florida Rock.”
Alvarez is one example of how teenagers and young men mired in drug dealing and violent crime can turn around their lives. That philosophy drives one of the core missions of Group Violence Intervention, an approach to violent crime based on a proven national model.
