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.
According to Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, about 80 percent of those charged with gun crimes in 2016 pleaded guilty, with the remainder of the cases going to trial. Only about 30 percent of the defendants whose cases were decided by a judge in a bench trial were convicted, while juries convicted about 42 percent of the gun crime suspects whose cases were brought before them, Foxx told the editorial board.
"It's an embarrassing number," Foxx said.
"Communities across the country are demanding a criminal justice system that advances safety and justice – and prosecutors are stepping up to heed the call."
The new Progressive Labour Party government will have its plate full with a wide range of complex issues. Among them will be the deeply disturbing trend of gun violence, believed to be gang-related, which seems unstoppable despite numerous efforts by previous governments, police, community leaders, and cries from various sections of public life that something needs to be done to halt what could become a nightmare for every Bermudian who desires a safe and healthy society.
Acting Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) Chief Medaria Arradondo, who is taking over for recently resigned Chief Janee Harteau, has been on the force for 28 years, and has been instrumental in MPD's work with the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice.
"Over half of the killings of American women are related to intimate partner violence, with the vast majority of the victims dying at the hands of a current or former romantic partner, according to a new report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today."
IPVI Director Rachel Teicher, on the power dynamic between victims and perpetrators of intimate partner violence: "We often forget that, besides there being a very powerful dynamic of power and control, there can be love. There can be very intense feelings of love or fidelity that can bleed into neediness or dependence once you’ve become incredibly isolated.”
New Wilmington Police Chief Robert Tracy believes that "every officer should function as a community police officer." He also plans, with guidance from NNSC Director David Kennedy, to implement a violence reduction strategy that draws from the concepts behind the Group Violence Intervention.
Institute for Innovation in Prosecution Executive Session members Mark Gonzalez, Kim Ogg, and Kim Foxx are among a new breed of prosecutors who are "eschewing the death penalty, talking rehabilitation as much as punishment, and often refusing to charge people for minor offenses."
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.
York City is off to a good start with its new Group Violence Intervention initiative. So says the national advisor for the organization that created the program on which it’s based, who notes the local stakeholders have “gone beyond lip service.”
"There are a couple pieces (to the initiative) that cities can get right — right out of the gate — that are really important," said Louisa Aviles, associate director of the National Network for Safe Communities' group-violence portfolio. "Some cities nail them, and other cities take longer to get them in place."
Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and Police Chief AJ Perez have pledged to re-emphasize Project Longevity, Connecticut's statewide implementation of the Group Violence Intervention.
To tamp down Chicago’s gun violence, officials are trying things such as more youth mentoring and more cops. They are also talking about another approach: getting shooters employed.
“The best anti-crime program is a job,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said last fall in a heavily hyped speech about the city’s violence. “It’s that simple.”
During the early years of NOLA for Life, the number of homicides in New Orleans declined to its lowest rate since 1971. Since then, however, violence has steadily increased.
The tech giant’s philanthropic arm will grant $2 million to fund gun violence prevention programs in communities of color in 10 American cities. Most of the investment will go to programs that follow the model of Ceasefire, a violence-reduction strategy that coordinates law enforcement, community stakeholders, and social services to drive down shootings. The grants will also establish job-training programs for gunshot victims and perpetrators, and workshops for law enforcement on anti-bias policing.
"People of color in the United States, particularly young black men, are often assumed to be guilty and dangerous. In too many situations, black men are considered offenders incapable of being victims themselves. As a consequence of this country’s failure to address effectively its legacy of racial inequality, this presumption of guilt and the history that created it have significantly shaped every institution in American society, especially our criminal justice system."
David Kennedy: “Low clearance rates mean people have low confidence in the police, which leads to reluctance to cooperate, which leads to low clearance rates. At the same time, low clearance rates mean that there isn’t legal accountability for serious violence, which leads people to take things into their own hands, which leads to high levels of violence and low clearance rates. It’s a spiral of decline.”
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, speaking to recruits: “Because violence most often affects those in disadvantaged neighborhoods, due in part to the disparity we desperately need to fix, we also find ourselves interacting more often than not with African-Americans and other people of color. Many of you will start your careers in these areas, and it’s important you understand the history that created the conditions in those neighborhoods.”
Somewhere in Chicago's 11th district, a microphone has picked up the percussive sound of a bullet and sent a signal, via California, to the police station, which is where Kim Smith hears about it.
Ms Smith, a data analyst from the University of Chicago, works at one of the city's new Strategic Decision Support Centres, where data, technology, and old-fashioned police work are being combined in an effort to control a sudden surge in gun violence.
Fort Myers police Chief Derrick Diggs implements new tactics to strengthen the relationship between community members and law enforcement. Through efforts to collaborate with consultants, the minority community, institutions, and his own police force, Diggs enacts a progressive reform to his department’s practices in order to focus more heavily on restorative justice, to build trust with the community, and to change the mindset of his police force.
The restorative healing circle at the Parents of Murdered Children meeting is one of the new approaches Fort Myers police Chief Derrick Diggs is taking to heal the broken relationship between the minority community and police. The group has been in existence for just under a year, but it adopted the circle because of restorative justice consultants who have been working in Fort Myers to address the underlying issues of distrust.
Diggs seeks a progressive approach to law enforcement, a change from past chiefs who had more of a heavy hand and zero-tolerance policy — especially when it came to communities of color.
Diggs, who was hired in August, inherited a department that was understaffed to police a city where gun violence became a common event and solving homicides a rarity. Forty-eight homicides went unsolved over a five-year period.
One analysis of mass shootings from 2009 through 2016 concluded that at least 54 percent of mass shootings — or 85 out of 156 incidents — involved a current or former intimate partner or family member as a victim. Other research has found that those who abuse their domestic partners are also more likely to abuse children and animals, and that 68 percent of men in a sample of batterers exhibited other “problem behaviors,” such as fights, previous arrests or drunken driving.
Analyzing 183 hours' worth of body camera footage from the Oakland Police Department (OPD), a team of Stanford researchers found that police officers tended to be "less respectful, less polite, less friendly, less formal and less impartial" towards black drivers during traffic stops as compared to whites. Responding to this report, OPD Deputy Chief Leronne Armstrong pointed out that the data used was from 2014. Since that time, the entire department has undergone a series of trainings related to procedural justice.
Former Dallas Police Chief David Brown, on how society should address crime and violence: "You have to find a way to peel back the layers, and find root causes, and mitigate the root causes where they occur, whether that’s mental illness, drug addiction, job training, opportunities in the community, or economic development. You have to find those root causes to have a really clean sense of what would make us safer, what impacts these communities. We criminalize poverty, we criminalize mental illness, we criminalize drug addiction, and those are treatable things that we can resolve with policy. Handcuffs are not the solution."
"Along with a growing number of hospital-based violence intervention programs, the new [trauma recovery] centers acknowledge the link between violence and public health, as well as the insidious ripple effects that untreated trauma can have on public safety. The likelihood of becoming a victim of violent crime — and a repeat victim — increases exponentially for low-income people of color underage 30, the very population least likely to seek help."
In encouraging news for critics of the "stop-and-frisk" policing era presided over by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the racial disparity in street stops by NYPD officers narrowed between 2013 and 2015. This discovery came from a report filed in federal court by the court-appointed monitor overseeing the Police Department.
