A comprehensive guide to the National Network's Group Violence Intervention strategy. This guide covers all relevant steps to the strategy from initial planning and problem analysis to enforcement actions and call-in implementation, and further considers issues of maintenance, integrity, sustainability and accountability to offer interested parties a step-by-step guide to successfully implementing GVI in any jurisdiction.
The National Network for Safe Communities has assembled guides to support communities implementing two crime control strategies: the Group Violence Intervention (GVI) and the Drug Market Intervention (DMI). GVI reduces violent crime when community members join together with law enforcement and social service providers to focus an antiviolence message on highly active street groups.
GVI combines the best of law enforcement and community-driven approaches to improve public safety, minimize arrests and incarceration, and foster police-community reconciliation. The purpose of these guides is to offer comprehensive tools to practitioners - whether they are community members, law enforcement, or government officials - who seek to bring the strategies to their communities, build a partnership of stakeholders, operationalize the strategies, and sustain their results.
Each guide lays out the important elements of a strategy and recommends a general path along which communities should proceed. The particulars of the strategies, however, are adaptable. The National Network recommends that practitioners use this guide to ensure that all the elements are in place, tailoring the execution to the local resources and personnel available. If communities stay close to the spirit of these approaches and remain faithful to the fundamental principles, they will see dramatic improvements.
