'It's completely unfair': Violence interruption advocates push back against DC Police Union's call to defund their programs

WASHINGTON — After Councilmember Trayon White’s bribery arrest, the D.C. Police Union is using White’s involvement to discredit the companion violence intervention programs in the District.

On the Council, White was a strong proponent of the Office of the Attorney General’s “Cure the Streets” violence interruption program.

Cure the Streets launched in 2018 and had six fully operational sites in the District by January 2020. Now, there are 10 sites across six wards, made possible by funding from the D.C. Council. The program is based on the Cure Violence Global model, a violence interruption program that has been implemented in 24 cities in the United States and many other cities across the world.

The pilot program treats gun violence as a disease rather than a recurring crime, and treats it with a public health approach instead of the police, according to the OAG’s website. The program employs outreach workers and violence interrupters to de-escalate conflicts through mediation to avoid potentially fatal shootings. These employees have strong ties to the communities they serve in and develop relationships with community members who are at higher risk of being involved in gun violence.

"I think the reality is that because of CVI work in D.C., communities feel safer, right?" Executive Director of Peace for DC Marcus Ellis said.

Peace for DC hosts the Peace Academy, which trains violence interrupters with a holistic approach similar to the one described by the OAG.

The police union disagrees that communities are safer because of violence intervention programs.

The police union chair claims the program is taking funding from the police and is saying that Councilmember Trayon White’s influence is reason enough to get rid of the program.

“Councilmember White is an unabashed antagonist of police,” D.C. Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton wrote in the statement. “His rhetoric in support of funding violence interruption programs — beneficiaries of which include the business and its owner who bribed White — called for ‘retribution’ and ‘proper penance’ to be paid by D.C. police officers.”

Councilmember Trayon White was arrested in August by the FBI on bribery charges alleging he had accepted $156,000 to use his position to pressure the renewal of city contracts for violence prevention services with companies who paid him. According to an affidavit supporting his arrest, White reportedly bragged to a person who offered him bribes about his ability to influence violence prevention-related spending.

At the end of the statement, Pemberton wrote, “If the Council is serious about addressing crime in the District, it will stop funding unproven, fraudulent programs,” referencing the violence interrupter program. He wants the city to stop funding the programs until they audit them.

"It's completely unfair. I think that, you know, while I don't have these numbers in front of me, I'm certain that there are several MPD officers that are under investigation right now for something," Ellis said. "It doesn't mean that we get rid of the police department. We address that particular person in that particular issue through due process, and then we move on with the profession that we have at hand. And so for our profession to always get questioned every time something doesn't go completely right, it's simply not fair, and it's something that we really need to stop making a practice of doing."

Recently, MPD underwent its own audit. WUSA9 shared the auditor's report last week that concluded MPD has sufficient staffing and needs to reallocate roles to better ensure public safety and serve the community.

Two weeks ago, Attorney General Brian Schwalb expressed his continued support of Cure the Streets, saying, "It is a critical part of how we have a comprehensive public safety strategy. ... Oftentimes, these are young men who have grown up and have realized they made terrible mistakes, oftentimes very tragically hurting people, and they are ready to give back and they want to give back."

Police Chief Pamela Smith has also said she believes violence interruption programs have helped to reduce crime in DC.

“This is a time where division is absolutely not what we need," Ellis said. "Lives are being lost, although the data shows that the statistics in terms of homicides are down. We all know that one homicide is too many, and so this, this just isn't the time or the place for that. We should communicate. We should be fair to learning about each other's oppositions and supports of our work, and let's move forward in a positive manner.”

But are violence interruption programs even unproven, as the police union claims?

Data collected from similar programs implemented in the U.S. before D.C. shows that these programs can work. 

In Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention evaluated the city’s “Safe Streets” program and found that between 2007 and 2022, the violence interrupter program reduced homicides by an average of 32%. Nonfatal shootings were lower in eight of the 11 sites in the program, with one site even seeing an 84% decrease. 

A similar study of sites in New York City out of John Jay College found that at a site in the South Bronx, gun injuries fell 37% and shooting victimizations fell 63% in the first four years of the program, compared to falling only 29% and 17% in a similar neighborhood nearby without a violence interrupter site.

"We know that there's a lot more work to do. We know that we are, you know, still building out this public safety ecosystem here in the District, but we we also know that there are tangible results of times where there's been interventions that really stops someone from using a gun. [I'm] not saying that, you know, this works in every instance, but what profession does always get it exactly right, right? And I think that it's just a shame that anyone will be talking about getting rid of something that is so, so helpful to our city," Ellis said.