Peace Talks Radio
Gun Violence
Paul Ingles: Today on Peace Talks Radio, we learn about community-based violence intervention programs.
Chico Tillmon: That’s really what CVI is about, individuals who are paying it forward so that their children, the elderly, their spouses can have an opportunity to live in a community where they don’t have to worry about dying every day. That’s not a civil right, that’s a human right. Children have a right to go to school without thinking about how to navigate to get to school without being shot. That’s really what CVI is about.
Paul Ingles: Stay with us for a discussion on gun violence prevention from people doing the work. That’s today on Peace Talks Radio.
This is Peace Talks Radio, the radio series and podcast on peacemaking and non-violent conflict resolution. I’m series producer Paul Ingles today with correspondent Emily Cohen.
The United States has one of the highest rates of gun violence in the world. Many years of late, gun violence has been the leading cause of death for children in the U.S., yet few issues are as politically polarizing as gun policy. While a few specific policy proposals garner bipartisan support, the partisan divisions on other proposals and even whether gun violence is a serious national problem at all have grown wider over the last few years. How can we find common ground over common sense solutions to gun violence? What solutions are already working to address this devastating problem?
On today’s Peace Talks Radio episode, correspondent Emily Cohen explores solutions to gun violence. Speaking with people working to address this issue on the streets, in academia and in policy advocacy. We hear from Rodney Phillips, Billly Deal, James Mitchell and Nyedra Turner of the Metropolitan Police Initiatives about their outreach work in the community violence intervention space on the streets of Chicago.
Later we’ll speak with Nick Wilson, the Director of Gun Violence Policy at The Center for American Progress.
Nick Wilson: We need to rethink accountability because just locking people up for a long time doesn’t seem to be working. We need to look at how to do restorative justice and healing. There is so much pain and trauma in these communities that are plagued by gun violence. We really encourage everyone to come to the table and put everything out there from accountability to prevention.
Paul Ingles: Wilson gives perspective on the national trends around gun violence and where we are seeing the most promise around reforms and public safety.
First, we’ll hear from Dr. Chico Tillmon from the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab. Dr. Tillmon is the Director of the Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy which trains people working in violence intervention in cities across the U.S. Dr. Tillmon came to his work to try to change his community in a positive way. He speaks about the mission of violence intervention and the way it interacts with other institutions including policing.
Chico Tillmon: Community violence intervention is a complimentary strategy to policing and a complimentary component in the public safety ecosystem where we deal with individuals at the highest risk prior to them committing a violent act.
Emily Cohen: Can you talk about the gap that you are trying to fill with police departments?
Chico Tillmon: When you think about situations in communities, most violent crimes happen because of personal conflicts, however if police are called during an interpersonal conflict, typically when they arrive, they tell the individuals to disperse. What’s problematic about that is that the issue is not resolved and typically it surfaces again as soon as the police pull off. At Community Violence Intervention, we work with those individuals to resolve the conflict so that it doesn’t result in a shooting or a homicide.
Emily Cohen: How do the interventionists get introduced into the community? What is that dynamic?
Chico Tillmon: Well, the key is when we recruit individuals to work in this field, we recruit individuals from the community that we service. CVI is place base, so we work with individuals in vulnerable communities and we recruit individuals from those communities that already have influence and relationships with individuals in the community, so it’s not a new individual coming into the community trying to establish ties, it’s people already in the community that already understand the community, the culture of the community and have relationships with people throughout the community.
Emily Cohen: One of the challenges around community violence intervention has been professionalizing the field. Can you speak to that?
Chico Tillmon: Many individuals start at community-based organizations because of a cataclysmic event; someone in the community was murdered, their child, a loved one, a spouse and individuals are tired of the violence in the community, and they are moved to do something. What’s problematic is, even though they have access to individuals, and they are moved to do something, if you haven’t been equipped to run a business or run an organization, there will be challenges around the organizational and operational parts even though you have access to this hard-to-reach population.
Emily Cohen: You just launched a leadership academy for community violence prevention and will be working with 21 cities. Can you talk about this program and how you selected those communities?
Chico Tillmon: One of the beautiful things about working at the University of Chicago is that we are urged to be on the cutting edge of innovation and always searching for gaps in the field. I was selected to be part of the Biden/Harris transition team in terms of helping with a small group of people to find racial and equity leaders who could go throughout all departments. When that happened, there was an onslaught of mass shootings. With that came the [inaudible 06:25] that was dispersed to every city, county and state throughout the United States. The problem with that was every city, county and state was not familiar with CVI or violence prevention tactics, so therefore we needed to create an institution that would equip them with the knowledge to even be able to start a program.
Emily Cohen: Can you walk us through an example of what community violence intervention actually looks and feels like in practice?
Chico Tillmon: I think the most important thing that people need to know is that 90% of our work is done when there is no incident. If you think about it, I often use this analogy, if you want to stop smoking in the bathrooms at a high school, who would be the best people to hire? The students. Why? Because the students already know who is smoking in the bathroom. They can go directly to those smokers and say, “No more smoking in the bathroom. I’m the bathroom monitor. Don’t come in my bathroom smoking.”
When we hire interventionists, the interventionists already know who the individuals are in their community who are at the highest risk. They access them, they love them and give them opportunities to transition to a prosocial lifestyle by doing an assessment to see what they really need. Are they having challenges with housing? Is education an issue? Do they need a GED or want to enroll in college? Do they want a trade or a job? Do they have mental health issues? After the assessment, we connect them with someone in the ecosystem who specializes in the particular need that they might have.
Emily Cohen: So, you’re trying to provide social support for people at risk because the theory is that the lack of those resources is at the heart of violence?
Chico Tillmon: The whole community is at risk of being shot. In communities like the Austin Community or Englewood where there are 100 to 200 people shot a year, everybody in the community is at risk of being shot because it’s so normalized that people shoot in the community, but the highest risk are less than 1% of the drivers of the violence! I want to say that again, the highest risk are less than 1% of the drivers of violence. Sometimes we overmagnify the problem and make it appear as though it is everyone in the community. No, it’s less than 1%. We are hyper focused on that less than 1% to getting them services and getting them in enrolled in programming such as cognitive behavior intervention to change the way they think about situational decision making so that they can make nonaggressive resolutions to problems and challenges.
Emily Cohen: The question on a lot of minds is the easy access to guns. What role does that play and are you trying to address that on any level?
Chico Tillmon: That’s a complicated issue because we believe in the Constitution, so we don’t infringe upon individuals’ 2nd Amendment rights, but we don’t condone illegal use of guns, individuals who are not supposed to have guns. The challenge with dealing with individuals at the highest risk who live in vulnerable communities, typically they have a pass. Even if they are enrolled in a program and trying to change their lives, the people who they might have had conflicts with may not be in the program. So what we advise people to do is to limit their use of guns, limit the people the number of people that they hang around who are involved in those types of activities and utilize different resources so that they don’t put themselves in situations where using a gun has to be an option.
Emily Cohen: There is a new White House Taskforce for Gun Violence Prevention. What are your hopes for this?
Chico Tillmon: It’s super emotional, this whole thing because this is something that we have been fighting for since the inception of the Biden/Harris Administration. The main thing I want them to accomplish is the permanency of CVI within the ecosystem of public safety. Four things that they said they would do would be to expedite the implementation of the bipartisan Safer Communities Act. This is super important. Identify different ways that the President alone can take Executive Actions to advance gun violence prevention or CVI or reduce gun violence.
Also, they said that they would use their platform for coalition building not only with local cities, but across states. I think that’s huge in terms of standardizing practice across how not only how we do the work but how we measure the work, creating metrics.
Lastly, improve support for communities that are impacted by gun violence. I think this is huge. I think it sends a message to the rest of the country; the importance of the people who do this valuable work. I think now it’s time really for cities to galvanize people who do this work and figure out ways that they can work with other components of the public ecosystem to move the body of work forward.
Emily Cohen: Are there any cities that you would point to that have done a particularly great job with community violence intervention?
Chico Tillmon: Yes, that’s a great question. Anywhere that you institute a CVI component correctly, there will be a decline. It’s not rocket science, it’s simple math. If you think about ten people who are at the highest risk, three of them are tired, fatigued and want a different option. That is without a lot of work, so there is going to be a decrease. They have opportunities to get a job, to change their identity.
What is critical is if we look at the work that is done in New York in particular and California, at one point in the ‘90s, New York, LA and Chicago all had violence at around 1,000 or more. New York went all the way down to 200 homicides a year and they have seven million people, three times the number in Chicago. LA went all the way down to 300 from 1,400.
The thread that we see is that they had a consistent flow of investments to CVI throughout the entire time that they implemented it and they saw results because what CVI does is work with individuals prior to something happening and where police work with situations that have reached a level of crime, attacking it from a preventive and responsive way.
Emily Cohen: Can you talk about the uptick in community violence since the pandemic? What pivots did you have to make as a result? Violence dropped in 2023 fairly precipitously in many places, but what lessons did you learn during the spikes of 2020 and 2021 and how did your program change?
Chico Tillmon: First of all, let’s look at this, the world has changed since the pandemic. Most people went from the way they work in person to remote. A lot of things went remote and never came back. It was a big shift in the way the country does its day-to-day work. Also, being limited in things you can access changed the way people maneuver in society.
Many of the people that work CVI had to shift the way they work because many of us were asked to support the CDC and push the adherence to the guidelines more so than stopping violence. The preeminent and most important thing at that time was stopping the pandemic. We spent a lot of time getting people vaccinated, teaching people about wearing masks, getting people to adhere to social distancing and less about getting them into programming. That was secondary, CBI, cognitive behavior intervention to change the way they do situational decision making.
Now since the pandemic has died down, we are shifting back to focusing on violence prevention but along with that was the uprising that came from the challenges with George Floyd. We had two or three dynamics going on at one time and now we’re starting to see, such as in Chicago, a decline in violence since we have solely focused on stopping shootings and homicides.
Emily Cohen: How did you come to this work? What is your story?
Chico Tillmon: That’s a beautiful question. I am a person that the system impacted. I served 16 years, three months in prison. Unfortunately, 13 years was excess under a draconian crack sentence.
However, many people search for their purpose, but in my case, my purpose found me. I had no idea that me being in federal prison and developing relationships with individuals at the highest risk from all over the country would become an asset. When I came home, there was a gang war going on in the Austin community and I knew both of the individuals involved, both of the groups from prison. One of the guys was my cellmate and another guy I grew up with and had spent some time in prison with.
When I resolved the issue, the euphoria, the feeling I had of saving lives and stopping people from dying was something that I had never experienced. It was at that point that I had an epiphany and realized that this was the mission that God had for me for my life.
Emily Cohen: When was that?
Chico Tillmon: That was in 2012. I came home in 2011. In 2012, I moved back to Chicago and that’s when I figured out what I was destined to do.
Emily Cohen: Since then, you’ve gone back and gotten an education.
Chico Tillmon: I got a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a PhD in Criminology Law and Justice.
Emily Cohen: Is there anything else that you want to add or that you want listeners to know about this work?
Chico Tillmon: I think it’s so important that you appreciate individuals who are unarmed, but each and every day walk into situations where they can lose their lives in order to make their communities safer. That’s really what CVI is about, individuals who are paying it forward so that their children, the elderly, their families can have opportunities to live in communities where they don’t have to worry about dying every day. That’s not a civil right, that’s a human right. Everybody deserves to live in a healthy community where they are not concerned about dying. Children have a right to go to school without thinking about how they can navigate to get to school without being shot. That’s really what CVI is about.
Another thing that I want to say that is critical is CVI is not averse to policing. We respect policing. We understand the need for policing. We understand that police have a role. We want police to understand our role as well, working with individuals prior to them committing a violent act so that they fortunately don’t have to have interactions with the police in the first place. It’s our hope that police can be hyper-focused on situations that need their attention and involve high volumes of violent crime.
Emily Cohen: That’s an important point to make. It’s probably something on many people’s minds, especially with a lot of talk in the last few years about defunding the police.
Chico Tillmon: Let me address that. Defunding police or abolitionist is really a social work term. Many of the people that adhere to it are individuals in school who are thinking theoretically. I taught yesterday at the police lab. I said, “The biggest challenge or why people talk about defunding the police is some way police have been removed from the fabric of communities.” We have to realize that policing is a job, it’s not a person. It’s a job, a profession. We have to humanize the people behind the badges and understand that these are people in the community. Where we see that done the best is in small suburbs where police know people by their first names because they grew up with these people. The way they police is different, but if police see themselves as something not part of the community, that’s when it becomes problematic. We have to bring police back to being part of the fabric of the community so that everyone works together collaboratively the same we did with COVID to quell violence in our most vulnerable communities.
Paul Ingles: That was Dr. Chico Tillmon of the University of Chicago’s Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy on Peace Talks Radio today. You can learn more about Dr. Tillmon and conflict resolution at www.peacetalksradio.com online.
Coming up, we’ll hear a segment from a new podcast called Streets, Beatz and Peace on gun violence prevention efforts in Chicago. Hosts Billy Deal and Rodney Phillips talk with guests James Mitchell and Nyedra Turner of the Metropolitan Peace Initiatives about outreach work in the community violence intervention space. Host Rodney Phillips said he hopes to use his platform to educate people about CVI, community violence intervention and reach people that he might not otherwise encounter in his work on the streets.
Rodney Phillips: Today we’ll be talking about a day in the life of outreach work. We know in the field that no two days are alike. Today we will be featuring two of our best outreach workers, Nyedra and Little James. They both come from the West Side communities and they both are graduates of The Peace Academy, and they are also field managers. They are essential players in the community violence intervention field or CVI space. Their efforts directly help to deescalate confrontations, provide trauma-informed services and most importantly, create lasting change in our communities. They’re here today to talk about their typical day to day, how they got into street outreach work and the efforts that they see in real time.
Hello to both of you all. Welcome to Streets Beatz of Peace. Thank you for being here.
Nyedra Turner: Good afternoon. I’m happy to be here.
Rodney Phillips: What I want you all to do is describe in detail a typical day in the outreach field because we know that no two days are alike.
James Mitchell: Canvassing is basically us walking the neighborhood. We are intentional about where we go. We try to go to where there has been a shooting or high crime areas. Those are the places we canvass. We get out and let people know that we’re out there. We want to let the neighbors know that we’re out here for support. We build relationships by letting people see us besides when things are going bad, but when they are going good. We’re real big on canvassing, getting out there and letting people know who we are and that we are there to support.
Usually in the morning for street outreach guys, for some of the guys in Austin, what we do is come in in the morning and check in. Check-in’s usually look like us talking with each other and figuring out where to go, who we need to see and if we can get a hold on a situation, who has participants in that area, who has the best relationships in that area. It’s like a debriefing. We do that.
We also check on each other because this is a high stress job. This is dangerous and stressful work. You want to make sure the team is good because we go out. We check in with each other, man. We make sure everybody is alright and then we hit the streets.
If there was an incident yesterday, a shooting, then today we will canvass that neighborhood and try to figure out what happened, get connections to the family, find out the types of services people need and figure it out. That’s what a morning looks like.
Nyedra Turner: We also go through the schools, the public schools and high schools in the community and try to get those high-risk youth that’s up in the school system causing problems, fighting, meeting up after school, so we show our presence there as well. We try to build relationships and deescalate the conflicts that we can there.
Rodney Phillips: One thing I know about this work, I was an outreach worker for 15 years, it ain’t your traditional job. You have to be referred in. Crucial to the work is having a LTO, a license to operate. Tell me, how did you all get into the work? Who referred you and mentored you in this work?
James Mitchell: Before I started doing this, I was incarcerated, in the joint, in prison. I called home and talked to two of my friends who are like brothers, and they were doing the work. Initially, like everybody else, I knew I didn’t want to go back out and do the same things. I had friends, people I love who were dying and the ones that ain’t dying are going to federal prison. I was like man, I got to do something, but what? They were telling me about what they were doing, and I didn’t see it at first. I was like no, it ain’t real. It don’t work.
I got out of prison and there was a shooting at a gas station. I remember I called them and told them I was out, and they said, “Man, we’re at this gas station where someone got killed yesterday. You should come check it out.” I went to see them, and I saw the effect they had and how happy people were to see them. These were people who they knew would take care of the community. People saw them in a different light.
I was like alright this is what I need to be doing. I’ve done so much to help contribute to the problem, more than my share. I just knew I got kids, people are out here dying, these young boys are out here dying and killing each other. I don’t think you have a right to say, “This shouldn’t be happening. This shouldn’t happen to my kid,” but then you don’t make an effort, especially somebody who helped cause it.
Paul Ingles: That was a clip from Streets, Beatz and Peace, a podcast on gun violence prevention in Chicago. One of the notable things that the clip highlights is how violence prevention work is led by people from within the community. It is often people who were once involved in violence themselves who are now working to make things better for others.
There is more about everything in our episode today at our website, www.peacetalksradio.com. I’m series producer Paul Ingles today with correspondent Emily Cohen.
Coming up after the break, Emily speaks with Nick Wilson of the Center for American Progress. Wilson sheds light on the national trends around gun violence and where he is hopeful for common ground around gun policy reform.
Before we close this part of the show, from our Peace Talks Radio Peace Music Archive, here is a bit from Mark Erelli’s cut with a host of his friends called By Degrees. He’s singing mournfully, you can get used to anything when it happens by degrees, including sadly rampant gun violence in the U.S. He’s hoping his song will shake us out of our apathy.
By Degrees, Mark Erelli
I've seen every head bowed down
As if lost in private prayer
I've seen the phones in every hand
Seen the long and vacant stares
Of souls gone numb
Thumbing through each ceaseless changing feed
You can learn to live with anything
When it happens by degrees
I've seen talking heads shout back and forth
Across some great divide
Against a map of red and blue
Points of view so cut and dry
But when you look into the mirror
What color country do you see?
Well, you can learn to live with anything
When it happens by degrees
Paul Ingles: This is Peace Talks Radio, the radio series and podcast on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution. I’m series producer Paul Ingles today with correspondent Emily Cohen.
We’re here with part two of Emily’s exploration of how we can find common ground and common-sense solutions to gun violence. Here is something about solutions that already working to address this devastating problem in the United States. This time Emily speaks with Nick Wilson of the Center for American Progress. Wilson sheds like on the national trends around gun violence and where he is hopeful for common ground around gun policy reform.
Nick Wilson: If you had asked me two years ago, I would have said that probably not much progress can be made in our polarized Congress because the role of money and the gun lobby is so strong, but we saw a year ago that a bipartisan group of senators were able to come together and pass the first significant gun legislation in over 30 years, the Bipartisan Safter Community Act. That really took a holistic approach to reducing gun violence. It strengthened some gun laws. It closed some loopholes. It also invested in the root causes of gun violence, more mental health counselors, more resources for students in schools as well as more money for community violence intervention.
When we focus on any one individual policy, it’s easy to politicize it, but when we look at so many gun policies that are supported by a majority of members of both parties and gun owners, I do think that more progress can be built upon the Bipartisan Safer Community Act to strengthen some existing gun laws and allocate more money for community violence intervention, supporting gun violence survivors to break the cycles of violence and making sure that schools and students have the resources that they need to prevent violence before it starts.
Emily Cohen: You mentioned mental health. Research shows that only about 4% of violence in the United States can actually be attributed to mental illness yet there is seemingly a lot of talk about this as a solution by addressing mental health after mass shootings and other types of violence. What do you say to that?
Nick Wilson: Certain politicians, whenever they are confronted by gun violence tragedies, they will scapegoat people with mental illness and say that that is what needs to be addressed. These are some of the same leaders that then defund all mental health services in their states and don’t support those investments.
I don’t think that spending all of our time focusing on mental health will get us the reductions that we need, but I’m not going to say that there isn’t a problem with mental illness in this country, whether it’s after a gun violence incident where people are traumatized and impacted and need supportive services. It’s such a difficult time to be a young person, so we do need more of those supportive services. Some of those services may prevent a young person from taking their parent’s gun and committing an act of violence, but really, that’s not enough.
If we really want to reduce gun violence and make it so that we’re not the number one country with gun violence, it’s going to take stronger gun laws, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. It’s going to take strong background checks. It’s going to take looking at the root causes of violence whether it is poverty, structural disadvantage or other lack of opportunities and resources.
We want to do it all. President Biden and Vice President Harris announced several thousand new mental health counselors. Whether or not that affects gun violence, it’s still something that is great for our schools and students because those supportive services are needed for them to be successful in life.
Emily Cohen: Do mental health and CVI go hand in hand?
Nick Wilson: The cities that have the highest levels of gun violence, there is so much existing trauma. Talking to people like Chico and people on the ground, everyone in these communities knows someone who has been lost to gun violence, someone who has been incarcerated, someone who has struggled to get the services that they need. There is a type of trauma reduction that we need to do. We work with advocates to make sure that everyone who is impacted by violence or trauma has supportive services. It definitely goes hand in hand.
It’s important also that we look at gun violence not collective but at the different types of gun violence. Domestic violence gun violence has a much different set of policies than youth suicides or mass shootings. We look at the different polices and programs that have been successful. Community violence intervention programs are a promising way in black and brown communities to really change the dynamics of violence and break those cycles.
Emily Cohen: Since 2019, firearms have been the leading cause of death in the U.S. for youth. A lot of this is due to access to guns, this is what the facts tell us. But the facts and data behind gun violence don’t seem to be changing hearts and minds or outcomes. Is that a fair assessment? Why are we ignoring what the data tells us?
Nick Wilson: I think one thing we hear a lot after a mass shooting is “I can’t believe that happened to us. I never thought that would happen here.” I used to work in Maine and every year we would go to the legislator and say if we don’t pass basic foundational gun laws, we will have a mass shooting. We are not immune. People wouldn’t take us seriously and then sure enough there was a terrible mass shooting and manhunt in Maine. People were finally listening. Congressman Jared Golden, a democrat who was against every gun law including assault weapons ban took the remarkable step of saying that he was wrong. Unfortunately, we can’t wait until every Congressperson has been personally impacted by gun violence before we take action.
A lot of times advocates like us talk about how for every dollar we spend on prevention, we may get ten to 15 dollars back. Those economic costs work when we talk about other issues, but for gun violence, for some reason, people really just buy into the gun lobby myths that guns make people safer. If that were the case, we’d have the lowest levels of gun violence because we have more guns than anywhere, but that is just not the case.
The younger generation is not falling for these gun lobby lies. They see right through the lies and are calling them out. I think we’re building momentum and putting pressure on Congress to do something, but in this polarized state, it’s really hard to get anything done in this Congress.
Emily Cohen: Speaking of the gun lobby, Wayne LaPierre is stepping down from the leadership of the NRA. Does this change the influence that the organization has politically?
Nick Wilson: The NRA has been on a steep decline since 2016. They put in $50 million to help elect President Trump, a senate and to influence the Supreme Court. A lot of what they were pushing for decades very strategically is now mainstream, these myths of needing a gun for protection. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the other major gun lobby would hire PR firms on Madison Avenue to promote sale of guns to women. The way they did that was to make women afraid and tell them that the only way to protect themselves from getting attacked is to have a gun. Let’s talk about all the White Supremacists who have guns, promoting sale of weapons to African Americans. These scare tactics are alive and well in this country.
Emily Cohen: Something else that we aren’t often talking about, but many people are aware of is that gun violence in the United States is nearly entirely perpetrated by men. Eighty percent of homicides are committed my men. Ninety-eight percent of mass shootings are committed by men. Even shootings by law enforcement are a majority men. Why are we not talking about that more?
Nick Wilson: If you talk to any gun violence prevention advocate that has worked at a State House or at the local level, they will tell you that there is extreme toxic masculinity that is happening. I’ve been in State Houses where they will film you, spit on you, try to provoke you while wearing their “Guns Save Lives” t-shirts with assault weapons on their backs. It’s hard to engage in civil debate. People are rightfully scared to speak out.
At the same time, if we know that there are going to be layoffs at the shipbuilding yard, we will send suicide prevention advocates because we know that there could be an uptick of men going into the woods and having hunting accidents, taking their own lives.
The roles of men are changing, especially older men. We need to have a conversation about what the role of firearms is and what is going on with these men. Even with young men, a recent poll showed that more younger men are becoming more conservative and diverging from Gen Z women. That’s something that we really need to think about.
When we talk about America, there are five or six different regional cultures with their own backgrounds. We need to meet people where they are, understand the cultural dynamics, the local dynamics and whether it’s mental health or economic opportunities or rethinking the role of men in society, we need to have that conversation.
In the meantime, we need to encourage gun owners, if their friend is going through a divorce, a layoff, a tough time, you don’t need to call the cops, we don’t need police to confiscate weapons, but maybe you could hold onto their guns for a while. “I can put your guns in a safe with mine and when you’re feeling better, we’ll go hunting.” It can’t just be passing strong gun enforcement laws and asking law enforcement to handle everything, we need to have peer to peer, family member to family member taking away lethal means while difficult issues are worked through.
Emily Cohen: That gets to my next question. So many people in the U.S. own guns and probably many people listening to this interview own guns. If there is one piece of advice you would want to give to a gun owner, what would that be?
Nick Wilson: That’s an excellent question. We talk a lot about what is a responsible gun owner. I was raised as an Eagle Scout. I used to run rifle ranges. I’ve always kept my firearms locked in a gun case. Sure, locks are fine temporarily, but I think having a real safe is much more important, making sure that the ammunition is stored separately, that the gun is not loaded.
Making sure, especially if there are children in the house, that children don’t know how to access firearms. There have been so many tragedies of one, two, five-year-olds finding their parent’s guns and having an unintentional shooting.
Those are the real basics, but I would say that a responsible gun owner goes further and goes through training, understands the gun laws and how they are changing, makes sure when cleaning a gun or handing it to someone that there is not a round in the chamber. That is a fatal mistake that we see a lot. A responsible gun owner makes sure that they don’t sell or give a gun to someone who may be prohibited from owning a firearm. Go through a background check, even if it is not required in your state, to make sure you’re not arming someone who wants to cause harm to the community.
Emily Cohen: With gun reform largely stalled in Congress, several states are looking to tighten their gun laws through ballot initiatives this November. Can you talk about the role of ballot initiatives in addressing gun control and why there is this shift?
Nick Wilson: You are right, a lot of the action and excitement is really happening at the state level. We are seeing two Americas emerge. States that already have foundational or decent gun laws are building upon those and passing even stronger gun laws. States like Colorado jumped up in the rankings of stronger gun laws very high this year by passing multiple gun laws. Places like New York and California continue to strengthen their gun laws. Places like Alabama and Georgia keep removing the few gun laws they did have such as now in the those states, you don’t need to have a background check or a permit to be able to carry a concealed weapon.
Elections really do matter. We see in places like Minnesota passing strong gun laws and seeing their gun violence rates go down. Ballot initiatives were really popular for a few years after Sandy Hook around 2016. There were a few ballot initiatives that failed either at the ballot box or in implementation, especially in Nevada and Maine with their background check campaigns. We had not seen a lot of action until Oregon recently passed several really important gun laws including a permit to purchase weapons at the ballot box with the ballot initiative. We’re seeing a lot more renewed interest in ballot initiatives, but they are expensive, and they take a lot of work. You have to make sure you word the policies correctly because it is hard to change them later.
We’ve seen that ballot initiatives are one way to cut through the money that the gun lobby spends to purchase politicians. We can take the issues straight to the people, the voters where all of the gun laws that we advocate for here at The Center for American Progress have a majority support by members of both parties, by swing voters, by gun owners. That’s why the ballot initiatives are so important, taking the issues directly to the voters where the gun lobby does not have as much sway.
Emily Cohen: Are you seeing ballot initiatives from both the gun rights side and the gun reform and control side?
Nick Wilson: We haven’t seen as many significant ballot initiatives from the pro-gun side. That could always change, but the gun lobby has been more successful at co-opting these state leaders. I don’t think that it is the most effective way. We encourage states to go through the democratic process that has been built and focus on winning gun safety majorities to pass these through.
Sometimes even when it’s done the right way, governors or speakers of the house will stop it and then you have to go to the people. I am encouraging Maine this year to go through the process some of the legislators after their mass shooting and promise to take another look at the weak gun laws in the state. If they are unwilling to do that and represent the will of the majority of Maine voters, then it should be taken directly to the people. That’s an extra tool in the toolbox.
Emily Cohen: Is there anything else that you would like to add for listeners to think about in terms of the progress that is being made or that can be made to find common ground to address gun violence in the U.S.?
Nick Wilson: For so long it was considered third-rail politics, something that would be talked about in the primary but not general election. It wouldn’t be brought up when politicians’ careers are on the line. Just looking at President Biden and Vice President Harris, they are all in on talking about gun violence as a pillar of this election season. We are seeing so many not only federal officials but senators and governors talking about the need to support gun violence survivors. I think it’s really changing.
So often, people get caught up on just one policy issue and look at things in isolation, but we really encourage people to look at gun violence across an accountability and prevention framework. We need to invest in community violence intervention programs. We need to invest in communities. We need to invest in our young people.
We also need to hold the people who are driving violence accountable and hold law enforcement, courts and others accountable to do their jobs to enforce the laws. We also need to rethink accountability because just locking everyone up for a long time does not seem to be working. We need to look at doing restorative justice and healing. There is so much pain and trauma in these communities that are plagued by gun violence.
We encourage everyone to come to the table and put everything out there from accountability to prevention. That is the only way that we will be able to continue to keep gun violence going down.
It’s encouraging that after two years of the media cycle rightfully being concerned about a large spike in gun violence, last year we saw one of the largest declines year over year in gun violence. Cities and states that have invested in prevention and strengthening gun laws are seeing a much deeper decrease in gun violence than the states that are weakening their gun laws. Evidence shows that what we are doing is working, we just need to continue to pass it state by state until there is enough pressure on Congress to finally close all the loopholes and make sure we have strong foundational gun laws across the country.
Emily Cohen: That’s a really important point. This past year we saw a very steep decline in gun violence in many cites and communities across the country. Can you speak to why that is and the combination of forces through CVI or changes in state laws that may have contributed to this trend?
Nick Wilson: Actually, there is forthcoming research from The Center for American Progress that looked at the 300 largest cities in the country. Gun laws written on the state level, the gun lobbyist prevented cites from being able to pass their own gun laws. Cities that are in states with stronger gun laws and that have invested in prevention saw about a 19% decrease in gun violence whereas cities and states that have not increased their gun laws and have F ratings on their gun laws only saw a 5% decrease.
We’re really seeing this growing diverge between the cities that are doing the right things, cities like Baltimore that have invested a lot in community violence intervention, New York that has invested in victim compensation so that when someone is victimized, they can get hospital and healing services that they need. California passed a tax where a percentage of all tax revenue from ammunition and firearms is going towards prevention and helping law enforcement close cases.
We are really encouraging states not to rest on their laurels. This one-year drop is really encouraging. We’re showing that it’s working. We continue to encourage states to strengthen gun laws in this legislative season because otherwise we will have a blue America that is much safer and red America where gun violence continues to be rampant, not only at the city level, but the rural level where we see eight out of the ten most dangerous counties are rural places like in Arkansas.
Emily Cohen: Any final thoughts for listeners? Is there anything that you want to add?
Nick Wilson: The last thing that I would add is that one of the most exciting things in the gun violence prevention movement is this massive federal investment in community violence intervention and prevention programming. This is not a new program. Since the ‘50s and ‘60s especially in African American communities there have been credible messengers that are helping to reach young people who might be involved in violence and in showing them a different path.
It wasn’t until about the year 2000 when we started putting more money as a public health approach and then just a couple years ago, we’ve seen a massive federal investment whether it’s through ARP [American Rescue Plan] money or through the Bipartisan Safer Community Act, but a fiscal cliff is coming, and a lot of this federal money is going to dry up. We need to find other ways to support programs working on the ground to prevent gun violence, making sure that they are well-paid, well-trained, well-supported so that when this money dries up, we don’t have to close these programs that are having an impact and then seeing gun violence increase.
We really encourage individuals to talk to their policymakers and elected officials. “Community Violence Intervention” is still a new phrase and we’re trying to demystify it, but if people listening to this feel moved, they should really talk to their local, state and federal officials about how to provide more sustainable funding for years to come.
Paul Ingles: That was Nick Wilson, Director of Gun Violence Prevention at The Center for American Progress. You can find out more about their work and Nick and all of our guests at www.peacetalksradio.com.
Lastly, we’ll close out today’s show with another segment from the Streets, Beatz and Peace podcast on gun violence prevention in Chicago. Hosts Billy Deal and Rodney Phillips talk with guests James Mitchell and Nyedra Turner of The Metropolitan Peace Initiatives about outreach work in the community violence intervention space.
As we mentioned earlier, one of the most powerful aspects of this program is how these outreach workers were themselves once perpetrators of violence in their communities, but through the combined efforts of the justice system and community violence intervention, they have transformed their lives to improve their communities and help others.
Rodney Phillips: We know that being in the streets can sometimes put you in compromising situations. We know that it’s really dangerous out there. We’ve had outreach workers shot, some killed on the job, some that we know. Why do you do this work?
Nyedra Turner: The violence needs to stop. I saw a lot of it. The street that I lived on, I used to walk out the door and a body would be laying right in front of the crib. I’ve seen a couple people get shot. My friends’ kid is dead. My kids’ friends are getting killed out here in these streets. I do the work to try to uplift the other kids and encourage them that it’s not about violence all the time. They can go to school, get their education and become one of the peace initiatives like we are. I try to keep these kids and people in the streets off the streets from doing violence, killing families. That’s why I do this work. I love the work that I do, and I love to help and support.
Rodney Phillips: How would someone else get into this field? Say somebody wants to do this work but they don’t have the connections that you had to pull them in. How would someone get into this? Do they see you all in the field and say they want to do that work and get involved? How would somebody get involved in this?
Nyedra Turner: A lot of people that get involved need to have a LTO in your area.
Rodney Phillips: For the people that don’t know what LTO means, what is it?
Nyedra Turner: LTO stand for license to operate. That’s connections to the community where you’re from. You can start off as a participant, getting their self together. They have support from us. The majority of the participants be from the community. They see what we’re out here doing, and they want to change. We start them off a little slow. We have a program called FLIP, flatline violence inspire peace. They can start off as a FLIP worker and police their own community. You are the one the people in the community walk up to who can deescalate conflicts. They’re policing their own community trying to keep the police out of the community and keep the peace. They can start off being an outreach worker and from there work their way up.
Rodney Phillips: On the news, they show the violence every day, but they never highlight the good, they don’t highlight the work that you all do. From both of you all, I want to hear some success stories you’ve all had in doing this work.
James Mitchell: I’m one of them. It’s a bunch of people like me and Nyedra. We’re not just two special people who have been changed by the work. There are a bunch of people. Two participants, one was a targeted individual, a victim of violence and also a driver of violence. He got so used to it that one day he said, “Man, I’m going to die doing this.” I said, “You don’t have to.” I said, “Look at me. I ain’t dead.” I got him to start, man. I got him into FLIP. He started off as a FLIP worker like Nyedra was saying and it gave him a chance to police his own community and he liked it. He liked being the person that people came to. After he ended up graduating from FLIP, we came up with a plan, an assessment. He wanted to be able to make money and take care of his family. He liked to drive, so he came to the program, and we got him into a CDL class. He graduated and got his license. We supported him all the way through. He’s now driving for Pepsi, right now today!
Rodney Phillips: That’s dope!
James Mitchell: There are a bunch of stories like that. I’m pretty sure Nyedra has some too.
Nyedra Turner: Yes, I have one man who started as a participant who became a FLIP worker. He did well and got promoted to an outreach worker. He had just got out of prison after serving 20 years and came back on the right track for his community. He became an outreach worker. He entered the NPA class and from there he continued to do good, be great, work on his issues that he learned from the academy. Now he is the supervisor for the street outreach team. The work is working. It’s all about individuals out here in the streets being that support system and showing people that it can be done. It is working. We’re out here doing the work.
Rodney Phillips: That’s dope.
I’ve got one last question for you before we rap up. You were actually in the hornet’s nest doing crisis response. You were one of the people who got maced. How difficult was it for you to remain focused and stick to the script after being maced by those kids down there?
James Mitchell: It was definitely a challenge. I’m not a robot. It was definitely a challenge. These are kids, somebody’s kids. I know the things that go on with trauma. We understand CVI. These classes and tools give us tools to deal with things like that so although I was upset and half blind, I still know we had a mission which was to get the kids home safe.
Paul Ingles: That was a segment from the Streets, Beatz and Peace podcast on gun violence prevention in Chicago.
You can get more details on all of our guests on this topic today as well as find links to their work, their organizations at www.peacetalksradio.com. You can hear all the programs in our series dating back to 2003. You can see photos of our guests, read and share transcripts, sign up for our podcast and make a donation to keep this program going into the future.
I’m series producer Paul Ingles. Today’s episode was produced by correspondent Emily Cohen with support from supervising producer Jessica Ticktin. Our work is made possible by listeners like you. Additional support comes from the Albuquerque Community Foundation Ties Fund. Nola Daves Moses is our nonprofit executive director. Ali Adelman composed and performs our theme music. For cofounder Suzanne Kryder and the rest of our team, I’m Paul Ingles. Thanks so much for listening to and for supporting Peace Talks Radio.