Creation Of A New City Department Resulting In 70% Drop In Homicide

In 2007 Richmond California had one of the highest murder rates in California. This is a story of how five people willing to innovate outside the lines of conventional thinking were able to help a community change the equation.

The backstory of how this happened is hardly known.

Mayor Gayle McGlaughlin had just become the highest elected Green in the US, winning the Mayor's race by 300 votes on a mandate to reduce the historic level of violence and poverty.

The community approached her with an idea to put neighborhood peace keepers out ont eh streets, a notion redolent of the "Red Berets" of the 1970's, community volunteers who would occupy the streets and keep them safe by standing guard. The Mayor directed her staff to come up with options to execute such an idea. Given the level of tension and danger on the streets the idea of volunteer neighborhood peace keepers was a bit out of step with the kind of outcomes that were needed. Staff was quite dubious and searched for a better idea, given whatever the solution it would have to be funded and approved by a vote from the City Council with the support of City Management.

The City Manager, Bill Lindsay, deserves great credit for being willing to try new things and consider radical notions.

The idea that staff came up with was remarkably simple: Create a brand new city department who's only mission and function was to focus on crime prevention by focusing on the top 50 people in and out of prison, and creating alternative pathways for livelihood for them instead of the recidivist trend of returning to a life of crime. Why? Other than the police who were a reactive force, there was nobody in the City who's job was to prevent violence and crime.

Creating a new city department was a tall order. In fact, our calculation was it would cost tax payers $1 MM per year to create a department and staff a program to intervene in cyclical patterns of violence, in a city that was already under serious financial constraints .  The proposal was immediately controversial, and many elected officials privately sought to kill it, given there was no precedent - nothing like this had ever been done.

 Aside from the community the heroes of the story are the city manager Bill Lindsay and the Finance Director, Jim Goins, who both agreed to support the proposal in the face of opposition and the doubts put forward by reluctant city council members. The other heroes of the story were the local community, who came out to support the Mayor's proposal and demanded that the city council approve it or offer a better solution. The proposal passed, largely on the basis of support from the Finance Director, Jim Goins, who pledged to find the money ,and without whom, it was dead on arrival. 

The next crucial step was finding a director for the new Office of Neighborhood Safety. Enter Devone Bogan, who was hired and put together his own study, which confirmed the research previously conducted by the Mayor's staff. 

As a true innovator, Jim Goins had already been experimenting with paying community members who had a history of involvement with crime to become role models for peace, in what came to be pay for performance agreements that create economic and social incentives to maintain peace on the streets. ONS staff were remarkably effective at intervening in community violence and halting revenge shootings, by engaging those individuals directly and appealing to their better senses. What this meant was the usual cycle of violence, a shooting on the weekend which would invariably lead to retalations and more shootings by the end of the week, was effectively interrupted.

The program has since received awards, been to the White House and Mr. Bogan has sought to replicate it in other cities through an initiatve called Advance Peace.