Pittsburgh is in the early stages of its GVI implementation. Under the leadership of Project Manager Rev. Cornell Jones, the Pittsburgh GVI team has participated in peer exchanges in preparation for their first call-in, which is scheduled for fall 2017.
Pittsburgh is also one of the pilot sites for the work of the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice. The NI focuses on issues of procedural justice, implicit bias, and reconciliation with the goal of improving relationships and building trust between law enforcement and those it serves.
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.
Through Tuesday afternoon, the city had seen 14 non-fatal shootings in 2018, Cmdr. Joseph said, compared to 31 through the same period last year — a 55 percent decrease.
He attributes the decline to the bureau’s Group Violence Intervention [GVI], a strategy that aims to reduce gang-related gun violence by targeting the city’s most violent gang members while also offering social services and support to those who agree to stop shooting.
In this op-ed for The Hill, two Pittsburgh Bureau of Police officers involved with the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice explain why they feel it's important for police to understand the history of race in America (and how police departments are perceived by marginalized communities). "By addressing concrete aspects of local and national history, procedural justice training places each officer’s identity and perceptions into the context of a broader historical perspective."
Jason Lando is the commander of Zone 5 — once known as the Fighting 5th — the toughest police precinct in the city. But after years of community distrust culminating in the controversial arrest of student Jordan Miles — Lando has tried to set a new tone.
“It’s literally about winning people over one person at a time. You do that by treating people with respect, checking up with the guy on the corner, letting people know you care,” Lando says.
"Pittsburgh’s newest strategy is a major recognition of what recent research seems to confirm — that violence behaves like infectious disease and is better treated when approached like an epidemic. This methodology can trace its roots to the work of David Kennedy, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who laid the groundwork for almost every successful program to reduce violent crime today."
Pittsburgh Police Chief Scott Schubert: "[With Community policing], you get the familiarity with the officer and you build that relationship, you build that trust. It's going to help in the end by helping partner the officers with the community and hopefully reduce crime, reduce disorder and bring us together.”
Aseante Hylick, formerly of the NNSC, reflects on her experiences facilitating police-community reconciliation in cities around the US.
"The survey found that while residents of these neighborhoods are distrustful of police, they nevertheless want to cooperate and partner with police to make their communities safer. A door-to-door survey in high-crime neighborhoods of six cities found that less than a third of residents believe police respect people’s rights, but the vast majority believe laws should be strictly followed and many would volunteer their time to help police solve crimes, find suspects, and discuss crime in their neighborhood."
"Pittsburgh’s acting Police Chief Scott Schubert assured a group gathered in Larimer Wednesday night that he would follow through with former chief Cameron McLay’s vision for the force in improving community relations."
CREDIT SARAH SCHNEIDER / 90.5 WESA
"During his tenure, short-lived as it was, McLay worked to alleviate racial tensions between the police force and Pittsburgh’s minority communities, made police more visible to the community and pushed for officers to undergo implicit bias and other new types of training."
