Violence interrupters serve Southside

Following a lengthy and sometime contentious contracting process, in March the Minneapolis City Council approved contracts with five organizations for MinneapolUS violence interrupter services. Two of them, Sabathani Community Center (SCC) and TOUCH Outreach, will serve parts of the Southside.
SCC has been awarded $708,400, for a one-year term through March 31, 2026, to provide community outreach and violence prevention services in Area 7 (Central and Powderhorn neighborhoods including along the Chicago Ave corridor between 31st and 38th Streets).
Founded in 1966, SCC is an African American-founded nonprofit that has been providing services on the Southside for decades. They offer food and clothing distribution, senior and youth services, workforce development, health and wellness, and housing.
TOUCH (Teaching Our Urban Communities Hope) Outreach was awarded $708,400 to provide services for the year in the city’s Area 8 (parts of Phillips along the Bloomington and Cedar Ave corridors between 24th and 29th Streets).
TOUCH was founded in 2020 and began doing violence prevention for the city in 2021. In a city council committee presentation in 2022, it was reported that from May through December of 2021, their violence interrupters had more than 8,900 contacts with the public and mediated more than 1,500 incidents before they became violent.
The council also approved the option to extend these contracts for two additional years. They also contracted with A Mother’s Love and Restoration Inc. to serve part of the Northside and MAD DADS to serve the Nicollet and Franklin Ave. area in Southwest.
Other areas qualified for the services based on the city’s evaluation of risk factors, but have not yet had contracts approved for violence interrupter services, such as a southside Area 6 along the Franklin Ave. corridor between 11th and 35W and the Cedar Riverside and Elliot Park area.
“I am excited to see that our violence interrupter services [are] going deeper into our neighborhoods,” said Ward 12 Council Member Aurin Chowdhury. “I am committed to working with staff to address the areas that do not have coverage yet.”
She observed, “The Cedar Riverside neighborhood where there has been a successful violence prevention effort was slated to be cut. I was dismayed to see this, and as a council we were able to discuss together how we can keep continuity of this important programming. We were able to find a way to save it using underutilized public safety state aid dollars.”

WHAT TEAMS LOOK LIKE
All the teams will be working with support from Cure Violence Global using the Cure Violence Model (CVM) to help train and evaluate the teams.
The teams will consist of five interrupters and two outreach workers, with one site supervisor and one program manager.
A team of seven people will be deployed per shift of up to 8 hours, with approximately five shifts per week. Teams will work to change behavioral norms that support violence through public education and community engagement. Data will be collected continuously to assess program effectiveness and inform strategies.
The model relies on employing workers who share the same background and come from the same neighborhood as those who need to be reached.

A PUBLIC HEALTH APPROACH
On April 1, people learned more about the MinneapolUS program at a League of Women Voters forum held at the First Unitarian Society (900 Mount Curve).
At the forum, called Public Safety Beyond an Armed Police Presence, people heard about the city’s public health approach to violence reduction from Minneapolis Commissioner of Community Safety Todd Barnette, MAD DADS Mpls Executive Director Jordan Nelson, and Candace Hanson, executive director of Canopy Roots, the company that provides emergency behavioral mental health first responders that are now available throughout the city 24 hours a day.
“The public health approach is not new,” said Barnette. “Many urban cities do this.”
Under this approach, crime and violence are considered public health problems similar to infectious diseases and accidental injuries. The process includes looking at causes in order to support prevention, as well as intervention to limit harm when prevention fails. This approach has helped reduce death and injuries from a variety of causes, including car accidents, tobacco use and influenzas. It relies on using data to test and verify potential interventions.
Barnette said Minneapolis is using CVM to help develop “an ecosystem of services” to prevent violence from occurring, to limit its impact when it does occur, and to restore, and help those who are victims or engage in it to recover. The behavioral crisis response services, as well as the community violence intervention teams, are part of that ecosystem.

CURE VIOLENCE MODEL
CVM was developed by Cure Violence Global, founded in the 1990s by Gary Slutkin, M.D., former head of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Intervention Development Unit.
The approach has shown positive results in eight evaluations and more than a dozen studies and reports. Researchers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice Research and the U.S. Department of Justice, for example, found that it has contributed to reductions in killings by 53% in Baltimore and by 34% in Indianapolis.
CVM uses interrupter workers to prevent violence by identifying and mediating potentially lethal conflicts in the community. Outreach workers help those at the highest risk to turn away from violence and get support. They also work to engage community leaders, local business owners, residents, faith leaders, and others to promote nonviolence and to shift expectations and norms around violence for the long term.
“I know a lot of people get afraid because they think violence prevention means no police,” Nelson said. “Well, they’re wrong. The reality is that the police will always be here.
“But the truth of the matter is that a lot of black and brown people aren’t always safe with the police. There have to be conversations about how communities feel safe and what safety means to them.”
The city estimates that it will cost approximately $730,000 to provide violence interruption services to each target geographic area for 12 months.
Under the terms of the latest contracts, each organization is responsible for reporting and documenting activities using a Cure Violence Database. This includes documenting daily conflict mediations, violent incidents, follow-up to previous incidents, outreach events, and other activities.
The city will also be tracking outcomes including access to support services, job placement, educational achievement and violent crime recidivism for individuals, and reduction of violent crime, homicide rate, gun violence incidents, geographic crime patterns and perception of safety at the community level.
“This work is extremely important,” said Nelson. “This work has to be invested in and if this work isn’t invested in, I don’t think we will ever fully understand what it is to be safe in community.”