Scores of American cities have implemented the National Network's strategies with powerful impact over nearly two decades. Substantial research and field experience has proven that these interventions are associated with large reductions in violence and other serious crime.
The National Network welcome interviews and other media requests related to the work we advance and the cities we support.
The National Network's approach has attracted significant media attention over twenty years. This page features the most recent coverage of our work and a searchable archive of media about the National Network's projects around the nation and abroad.
The National Network convenes regular conferences, working sessions and webinars to discuss and promote developments in its core areas of operation, showcase innovations, and set research and development priorities.
April 2019 | Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners Office
Chairwoman's Policy Council for April 16, 2019
March 2019 | The Trace
In communities across America, the relationship between the public and the police is deeply fractured, and researchers believe this can lead to more violent crime, and to fewer crimes being solved.
Tags: Individual Gun Violence InterventionIntimate Partner Violence Intervention
March 2019 | Criminology & Public Policy
The November 2018 issue of Criminology & Public Policy includes the policy essay “What Works with Gangs: A Breakthrough” (Howell, 2018). In this essay, Howell addressed, in part, the Group Violence Intervention, or GVI, the dominant current name for a portfolio of “focused deterrence” interventions that began with “Operation Ceasefire” in Boston more than 20 years ago and that has since been developed, refined, and seen wide implementation (Braga, Weisburd, & Turchan, 2018).
March 2019 | Recordnet.com
STOCKTON — Police leaders were joined Tuesday morning by two community activists during a live coast-to-coast online broadcast sharing their efforts and insights into building back the critical trust between law enforcement and the public that is a vital component of creating a safer, less violent city for every resident.
Tags: Reconciliation
March 2019 | The Crime Report
It’s no secret that America’s most disadvantaged communities have long had troubled relationships, at best, with their local police. But when the Urban Institute shared just how negatively six U.S. communities with the lowest income and highest crime levels felt about their respective police forces, some jaws dropped among police brass attending a Tuesday conference at John Jay College.
Tags: Reconciliation
March 2019 | George Mason University
Join us for the 2019 Mastrofski Lecture featuring Professor David Kennedy for his talk on "Closing the Book on the President’s Crime Commission: Toward a Theory and Practice of Problem-Oriented Public Safety".
Tags: Group Violence InterventionIndividual Gun Violence InterventionIntimate Partner Violence Intervention
July 2018 | The American Prospect
To improve relationships with communities of color, a reconciliation movement has begun in several cities, in which police brush up on their history, admit past mistakes, and listen to frank talk and hard truths.
Tags: BirminghamLos AngelesStockton National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice Reconciliation
June 2018 | John Jay College of Criminal Justice
When a parent looks down at their newborn child, they’re filled with hope. A hope that if this child works hard in life, he’ll be successful. It doesn’t matter where he was born, how much his parents make, or his ethnicity. That hope is there. It’s a hope we pride ourselves on as a nation—we’re the “Land of Opportunity.” But in today’s America—where many black and brown children are often looked at with more suspicion and less empathy—we have to start asking ourselves a tough question: Do we give every child the same opportunities?
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June 2018 | BBC
In a bid to regain the trust of the public and reform their profession, more working police officers are learning to do their own research. Meet the police pracademics.
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June 2018 | ABC News
In order for any “zero-tolerance” policy to take effect and stop people from committing crimes, the criminals have to know that such uniform consequences are handed out, David Kennedy, a criminal justice professor at John Jay College, told ABC News.
“If zero-tolerance or any other law enforcement policy is designed to deter than it can’t possibly work until people know that that’s what’s waiting for them,” said Kennedy, who also heads the school’s center for study on violence prevention, called the National Network for Safe Communities.
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June 2018 | New Haven Register
City police Lts. John Healy and David Zanelli are trying to open a dialogue with the communities they serve.
Healy and Zanelli are district managers for the Dwight/Chapel and Fair Haven districts, respectively, who engaged with residents in an event this week in an effort to build bridges between two communities often at odds. It was held by Project Longevity New Haven and the Urban League of Southern Connecticut’s New Haven office.
June 2018 | The Advocate
With the arrival of summer's notorious bloody months and the now-defunct anti-violence initiative BRAVE in the rear-view mirror, Baton Rouge's law enforcement officials are embracing a new method for violence intervention: showing up unannounced to the homes of those they believe are linked to the violence.
These home visits, coined "custom notifications" by researchers with the National Network for Safe Communities based in New York, are set up to demonstrate to these people — on a very personal level — that law enforcement is aware of their ties to potential violence, to warn them of the consequences of such violence and to offer them support if they choose a different path, said Baton Rouge Police Deputy Chief Herbert "Tweety" Anny.
Tags: Baton Rouge Group Violence Intervention Custom Notifications
June 2018 | The Toronto Star
Community outreach programs were part of the successful Operation Ceasefire in Boston, where police teamed up with religious ministers and social activists to engage with at-risk youth and gang members.
The project, implemented between 1996 and 2000, was credited for a decline of 63 per cent among youth murders in Boston, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The model has since been replicated in other jurisdictions across the United States and Canada.
June 2018 | CNN
Instead of incentivizing police to go after the money and property of people they merely suspect of having drugs, they should be incentivized to pursue dangerous abusers.
Over 70% of sheriff's offices serving 25,000 or more residents participated in a drug task force in 2007, the most recent year for which data was available. Imagine if those sheriff's deputies were assigned to a domestic violence team, investigating abusers, serving protective orders, and following up with the most dangerous repeat offenders.
June 2018 | Orlando Sentinel
Central Florida should be looking to High Point, N.C., a town of just more than 100,000 people outside Greensboro, where police have come down hard on perpetrators of domestic violence and sharply reduced the number of related killings. In the five years before starting the crackdown strategy, High Point saw 17 domestic violence-related murders. In the five years since the program has been in place, that number dropped to six.
June 2018 | Fox
A unique idea is about to become reality for Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo.
Chief Arradondo came up with the position of “community navigator” and asked the City Council to approve the budget for it. While Chief Arradondo wanted two dozen positions, the council gave him four.
The chief hopes a Minneapolis Police Department community navigator can help create a better connection with people in the city.
“We are not going to be able really to arrest these problems away, nor do I as chief want to see our department in any way shape or form criminalizing some of these conditions that effect our city,” said Chief Medaria Arradondo.
Tags: Minneapolis National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice
June 2018 | The Crime Report
On May 21, the White House issued a statement that repeatedly used the word “animals” to describe people involved in the MS-13 gang. Two days later, at a public forum on Long Island, this language was repeated and reinforced.
MS-13 (the initials for Mara Salvatrucha) originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s through a complex interplay of people fleeing El Salvador’s civil war, Mexican gangs in southern California, and US immigration policy.
Tags: NNSC International
June 2018 | The Washington Post
The Washington Post has identified the places in dozens of American cities where murder is common but arrests are rare. These pockets of impunity were identified by obtaining and analyzing up to a decade of homicide arrest data from 50 of the nation’s largest cities. The analysis of 52,000 criminal homicides goes beyond what is known nationally about the unsolved cases, revealing block by block where police fail to catch killers.
Tags: Chicago
June 2018 | York Dispatch
Two years ago, York City officials responded to persistent street violence with a multi-pronged initiative modeled after a nationally renowned criminologist's work in Boston decades ago.
The premise of Group Violence Intervention is relatively simple: A small number of people in any city commit most violent crimes, so police need to identify and target that group of people, who are often involved in gangs, the drug trade or both.
June 2018 | NPR
David Kennedy, a criminal justice professor at John Jay College, tells NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro what we know about the international criminal gang MS-13 compared with President Trump's statements.
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June 2018 | The New York Times
For years, she slept with a gun under her pillow, living in fear of a boyfriend who beat her, controlled her life and threatened to kill her and her children. Domenica, who came to this country illegally from Mexico in 1995 and became part of the booming immigrant community in Houston, said her partner was a United States citizen, and often reminded her that she could be deported if she went to the police.
“He told me nobody would help me, because I don’t have papers,” said Domenica, 38, who has a son and daughter with her boyfriend, and asked that her last name not be used in order to protect them. “I was with him like that for a pretty long time. I felt like there was no help for me.”
May 2018 | MLive
Less than half of one percent of Kalamazoo residents are involved in more than half of the city's homicides and shootings.
People who disproportionately commit violent acts and suffer from them often are associated with street groups, police said. It's why the city's department of public safety is committed to a program to reduce gang violence, an initiative beginning to yield results.
"Groups" are described by police as loose affiliations of people, who may be in gangs but are not necessarily formally organized.
According to statistics provided by Chief Karianne Thomas during a May 29 City Commission work session, shootings involving members of groups identified by police decreased from 18 to 3 between 2014-17
May 2018 | The Advocate
Baton Rouge law enforcement, community and human services leaders met Wednesday with academics from the National Network for Safe Communities, beginning a partnership aimed at decreasing youth gang violence and domestic violence in the capital city.
Representatives from the New York-based John Jay College of Criminal Justice shared their violence intervention framework, hoping to jump-start the same strategies used in the now-defunct BRAVE program — which Baton Rouge leaders hailed for years as a success before its disgraced end in 2017 and have since revived in the Truce program — but also to pilot a revolutionary way to address domestic violence offenders.
Tags: Baton Rouge Group Violence InterventionIntimate Partner Violence Intervention
May 2018 | The New York Times
Researchers with the Boston Reentry Study were one year into their interviews, following 122 men and women as they returned from prison to their neighborhoods and families, when they asked the kind of question that’s hard to broach until you know someone well.
They prompted the study’s participants to think back to childhood. “Did you ever see someone get killed during that time?”
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May 2018 | Social Forces
This study tests the claim that police legitimacy affects the prevalence of homicide. The analysis suggests that police legitimacy has a substantial, negative association with homicide rates, consistent across different sources of homicide data and controlling for a variety of economic, political, and demographic variables.
Tags: NNSC International
