Hi and welcome to Inside Louisville, where we introduce you to the people, places and things that make up Kentucky's largest city.

This week, we take a closer look at violence prevention efforts in our city.

Earlier this year, Mayor Craig Greenberg announced the Safe Louisville Plan.

This is a comprehensive set of strategies and action items that address community safety from three different angles prevention, intervention, and enforcement.

Now, part of that is group Violence intervention, or Gvi.

This is how the city reaches groups who have, or perhaps are on a path to committing violence, and they try to stop it before it happens.

It's described as a collaborative, focused deterrence strategy involving police, government, and trusted or faith based community members.

It is those community members sometimes known as Louisville's peacekeepers.

You'll meet later in the program.

Those stories have been spotlighted in a new project from the Louisville Story program.

But first, I sat down with the new director of Metro Louisville's group, Violence Intervention, Josh Crawford.

Well, thank you so much for being here in our Louisville studio today.

So Metro Louisville's group Violence Intervention Gvi is is not new.

It's been around for a while.

So explain what it is, this program, what you do.

>> Yeah.

Well, thank you for having me.

And essentially what we do is identify the groups and individuals in the city that are driving gun violence.

We then work to get messaging to them in one of two forms, either a direct one on one contacts through what we call custom notifications, or larger group contacts that we call call ins.

And we deliver three messages to those individuals.

All with the goal of stopping gun violence from those groups and individuals.

The first is that we know who you are.

We know what you're doing, and if this gun violence continues, you will be arrested, prosecuted and incapacitated accordingly.

The second is, if you want to leave this lifestyle behind, we have the entire suite of resources available to through Metro government and our nonprofit partners available to you.

If you need simple things like diapers for a child, if you need more complex things like job training, if you ultimately need any kind of resources, really that the city offers, we have those available to you.

Please take us up on those things.

And finally, there's what we call a community moral voice component.

These are individuals, typically mothers or fathers, who have lost loved ones to gun violence, who communicate what that loss is like, what their parents would go through should they lose their lives to gun violence.

And all of this is sort of wrapped in this singular message that regardless of what makes you stop, if it's a moral awakening through hearing a mom talk about losing her son, if it's a desire to do better through services, or if it's fear of enforcement, the gun violence has to stop.

>> So this has been around a couple of years.

So statistics show that homicides and nonviolent shootings have gone down in Louisville.

But I would think it is hard to measure how you prevent prevention or intervention.

So how do you measure the success of Gvi?

>> Yeah.

So we measure both sort of outputs.

So things like contacts with individuals, the number of call ins or custom notifications that we have done.

And then we measure all types of crime statistics.

So we look at at homicides and shootings.

We look at recidivism of individuals.

And we are looking at recidivism of entire groups as well.

It's theoretically possible to prevent recidivism in an individual, but have somebody else just pick up where that individual left off and perpetrate that gun violence.

We're interested in having gun violence go down overall.

And so we we track the entire group.

>> So this is a part of your naming in this agency.

Gvi is part of a strategic reorganization, sort of as part of the Mayor's Safe Louisville plan.

What is that broad plan and why do you think it is a good approach to what's happening in the city?

>> So it is a whole of government approach to driving down violence in our city.

And its goals are basically at every level of criminal involvement for individuals.

So there's a strong enforcement component.

There is an intervention component.

We exist sort of at both of those.

And then there's a prevention component as well, trying to keep youth in particular, from ever picking up a gun and being involved in serious violence.

It utilizes law enforcement.

It utilizes social services and agencies that you wouldn't ever necessarily think of.

It involves the the built environment of our city and things like code enforcement.

We've known for a long time in the criminological literature that place matters a great deal.

And things like abandoned buildings, overgrown vacant lots and adequate street lighting, lots of things of that type can encourage crime and violence.

And so the Safe Louisville Plan takes into account all of the elements that can ultimately nudge individuals towards or away from criminal offending, and leverages all of government to to try to stop it.

>> Tell us about your background and what brought you to this position here.

>> So I have spent the better part of the last decade in think tanks, both here in Kentucky and Atlanta, Georgia, and working with some organizations across the country.

I've had the opportunity to work with policymakers and police departments across the country, and a key component of that work has always been focused deterrence strategies, group violence reduction strategies.

What we here call gvi.

It is one of the best practices in the country when it comes to reducing gun violence among gang and group members.

It works when it's implemented properly with fidelity to the model.

It drives down violence in serious ways, in environments that look very different on their face.

But but ultimately has the same impact.

>> You mentioned targeting youth in our city, and we have seen so many young people involved in violent crime.

Why is that?

Why does that happen?

And how do we reach those those young people?

>> Yeah, crime has always sort of especially serious and violent crime has always been the province of the young.

Not necessarily juveniles but but young adults and sort of later adolescents.

In recent years, both here in Louisville and across the country, we're seeing that age ticked down some in a in a concerning way.

What what you would have used to encounter from a 16 or 17 year old you're now encountering, encountering from a 14 or 15 year old.

That's problematic.

I think some of that is the way that some of these crimes, like carjackings, have been influenced by social media.

And that poll, some of it is pressure from adults towards juveniles, both monetarily and through force, to commit various crimes because they feel that the juvenile justice system is inherently more lenient.

And so a juvenile who commits a crime will not face the same penalties as an adult.

And so jurisdictions have adopted laws to to try to mitigate that sort of transfer from adult to juvenile.

And the the leverage points that we have on adults are just somewhat different than we do for juveniles.

And so it's a serious concern here in the city.

And it's something that that we're doing at Gvi to address that is that we're actually splitting what we do.

Part of that reorganization that you mentioned earlier is that we're going to keep the the Gvi initiative, that group and gang focused work, but we're also expanding to include something called Jvi Juvenile Violence Intervention.

This will be an attempt to reach juveniles who are involved in gun violence.

In a broader sense, carrying firearms, that kind of thing, but don't necessarily or aren't necessarily involved in either the group context or the priority groups that we have identified, so that we can try to reach some of these young people.

>> What's your experience, too, with going to these people who have committed crimes and trying to urge them not to continue in this lifestyle?

Yeah.

What are some of the things that you hear and how does it how does it pan out with these people?

>> The earlier we can intervene, the better, especially as it relates to young people.

There are some interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy and things like that, that if we can get a young person who has some group involvement, has some involvement in gun violence, but especially if they haven't yet been involved in a shooting or a murder or something like that, that has been demonstrated time and time again to to put somebody back on a positive life course.

And so the earlier that we can intervene with some of these young people, the better.

But the wonderful thing about the Gvi model is we're we're rather agnostic as to why you stop shooting.

If you stop shooting because you are convinced that what you're doing is morally wrong, or if you stop shooting because the services have put you on a trajectory in which you've become a productive member of society, you now have a job and a family.

Or if the only reason you stop shooting is because the threat of force from law enforcement is greater than it once was for you.

We're sort of agnostic as to as to what it is, but what what we have found across the country and the places that have tried this is that one of those three things tends to resonate with groups.

And for for some individuals, it is just that fear of repercussion.

But for others it is either a sort of moral awakening or a they they become more productive.

They get that job training, they get the the skills necessary to be successful in those jobs and can really turn their lives around.

>> And I would imagine it comes even.

More fold with community stepping up and members of the community becoming involved in this process.

How do you all work with all of these other groups out there?

To all you know, with the goal of the same mission?

>> Yeah, we have a number of nonprofit and community partners that work directly with us, but the community at large has a role to play here in place based criminology.

There's this concept known as collective efficacy, and it's essentially what keeps a neighborhood safe in neighborhoods where there are where there already is a presumption of safety.

Right?

If there's a car that is creeping around or an individual creeping around the backyard of your neighborhood or my neighborhood, you or I or one of our neighbors is likely to do something about that.

Call police in neighborhoods that are are traumatized with a high rate of violence.

That impulse still exists, but either because of fear of repercussion from the individuals when the threat of violence from the offender is more present than the threat of, or the guarantee of protection from the city, those things aren't as common.

A big part of what we hope to be able to do is to reestablish that in some of these neighborhoods, so that collective efficacy can really thrive, and so that neighborhoods can thrive and people can really take ownership of their neighborhoods without fear of repercussion.

>> Yeah, that makes a big difference.

Community stepping up.

Thank you so much for being here.

We appreciate it.

Thank you.

And a new project from the Louisville Story program is highlighting some of Louisville's peace keepers.

These are people who have been impacted by community violence.

And now some of the most involved in the community efforts against violence.

Here are some of their stories.

>> This is where we learned everything at.

We learned how to be tough.

We learned how to be smart.

We learned survival skills.

We learned sports.

We learned how to flip.

That's what I appreciate most about the hood or the neighborhoods that I'm from.

People in there are survivors.

I try to wake up every day to make sure that the world is a better place, because we're in it.

Yeah, my mission saved black boys.

I know too many people who have died and lost their life without even understanding that they needed to be saved.

>> In your name we pray.

Amen.

The guys on three, one, two, three.

The guys.

>> How do we reduce the epidemic of young black men and boys dying in our communities?

There's another way for us to do public safety in this community, and public safety across this country.

And it starts with prevention and intervention.

The peacekeeper project and the book that's coming with it really talks about community led solutions to gun violence.

We're actually looking at the men and women who love their community and love the folks who are at risk, who have come together to create strategies to say, hey, we can do this better.

>> And they wanted to know if we could do canvasing.

We started going from neighborhood to neighborhood, trying to keep people from shooting each other.

We have to look at it from a standpoint of trying to keep the next red dot from happening.

>> Resemblance of someone getting like, cut in their leg.

And then my job at the hospital is to see everyone that comes in with either a gunshot or stab wound, and be able to support the family during that time of crisis, but also to support the patient, to connect them to resources and just navigate through this difficult time.

Yeah, you can pull it, touch it.

>> I like to think of myself as a mentor.

The way I give back to them is just trying to model exemplary behavior.

I try to be straightforward, try to make them become a critical thinker.

Challenge them.

>> Let's do what we do.

Man.

This is a lot of memories over here.

Now we got a relationship with our community because we got to know our community.

We got to know folks, and folks got to know us.

>> If you don't know the language, then that's a barrier to a communication with a kid whose life may need to be saved.

And in order to know the real language, then you got to be of the people.

>> What's up Mally?

Good.

Glad you're here.

>> I'm able to get through to them simply because of my lifestyle when I was younger.

Walk that walk before.

>> This is something that not necessarily your call to do, but you start doing it and you don't know how to stop.

Yeah, yeah, I already know.

>> Okay, pull it hard.

>> We take this work very personal through and through.

I know that I have a support system in all the peacekeepers.

>> The 2000.

Now.

>> When I look back and reflect on my life, this is who I've always been.

This is my dream, peeps.

That's all I wanted, bro.

I want to be a positive face in the community.

>> Got you.

>> If we can prevent more of these issues, then you can actually get to a place where folks can breathe and then folks can really start thinking about their future, right?

Because right now folks are in survival mode, and we want folks to be in the mode where they know they have opportunities and they can thrive.

>> I hope people get an understanding that this is not a job.

That is a mission.

I love you more, man.

But when it's all said and done, it's it makes you whole.

If they can read the book and understand that the people in the book are looking for the next group to come through and pick up the torch and do what we do, then it's a win.

It's it's a complete win.

The books, the book did his job.

>> The incredible stories of 12 authors are highlighted in this new book.

You got to be of the people peacekeepers at the heart of public safety in Louisville.

This is created in collaboration with the organization Cities United.

And No More Red Dots.

And we are excited to welcome now, Anthony Smith, executive director of Cities United, and Doctor Eddie Woods, CEO of the nonprofit No More Red dots.

Thank you both for being here.

And we so appreciate the efforts that you all are taking on in our city.

Doctor woods, I'll start with you.

Since you have been doing this a very long time here, tell us about the history of No More Red Dots in Louisville.

>> Well, we started out just doing group sessions in the projects when we had six projects in Louisville that evolved into.

Name change, which became No More Red dots.

We weren't getting to the folks like we wanted to, so we decided to develop programs, and we developed programs from the participants and their parents.

So it turned out to be it is evolved into something where you you got to have a lot of partners.

You got to have a lot of folks that are paying attention to what you're doing, and you got to be really focused on the people and not so much the numbers.

>> Yeah, it's a group effort.

And I know that's part of your mission to tell us about Cities United.

>> Yeah.

So Cities United was founded in 2011 under the leadership of Doctor Bell, who runs Casey Family Programs.

Mayor Nutter, who used to be the mayor of Philadelphia, and then also Mayor Landrieu, who was the mayor of New Orleans.

They came together because they were having too many young black men killed in their streets, and there was no place for them to come and get solutions, talk about best practices.

So they created this national organization that then brought tons of mayors and community members together to talk about solutions and talk about how we create safe, healthy and hopeful communities for those who are most at risk.

So we do that all across the country.

Louisville been that place.

I used to work for Mayor Fisher when he was in the office here in Louisville, and that's when we signed up to be a part of cities.

United did not know that I would then become the executive director of Cities United.

But it's been a long journey and it's been a good journey.

And Doctor Woods has been a great partner from day one before he even got to Cities United, when I worked in the city of Louisville.

So really trying to make sure not only that we are reducing homicides and shootings, but that we're creating better pathways for those young men and women who are most at risk of being shot, like everybody is not at risk of being impacted by gun violence.

We all are impacted some way, but not directly.

There's a small group of people in this community who will be either shot or shoot somebody.

>> And targeting those people and making sure that they have the resources that they need to get out of this pathway.

It's a multifaceted approach.

Like we talked with the the city about their efforts.

And then but these community organizations, you all are the ones who are on the ground.

And I know one of the main things that you all focus on is youth.

We have seen a major increase in the amount of violence from youth offenders.

How do you target those, those youth and why is that so important?

>> I'll just do high level and then turn it over to the expert who actually does that work on a day to day?

It's all about looking at data.

And the data tells us that young men, 14 to 35 are those who are most at risk of being impacted by homicides.

So for us, that's who you've got to work with.

That's who you got to focus on.

And as you'll hear Doctor Woods talk about it, it's not just them.

It's their families.

It's their communities.

And that's where we need to target our resources and put the right people in place and create an environment for folks like Doctor Woods and others.

Mister Norm, Miss Deborah, you can go down the whole list.

Dre, who can actually do their work of identifying, engaging and then supporting those folks who are most at risk.

Right.

So you got to look at data and then put the resources behind that data to get to the work.

>> One of the things we got to key in on is the relationships, because the whole thing of helping people that in some cases don't even know they need help.

Then we got young folks who get involved in situations and they in spirals on them.

They don't know where the exit doors are or off ramps.

So we got to go in and show them.

And a lot of them have a lot of a lot of our young people have a lot of skills that have never been tapped yet they haven't gotten a chance in a lot of cases.

So what we work on a lot is, is, is how you make a constructive, positive contribution to the community.

And that starts with the choices that you make.

You got to make informed choices that don't hurt you or anybody else.

So we're key in like that and we bring and the whole idea is to set up a service continuum that allows what's happening with our groups and so forth to happen as well in the family.

And when we're lucky, we get to school in the continuum so that we don't have gaps in service delivery.

>> Yeah.

>> Can I add something to Kelsey real quick?

When Doctor Woods talked about making the right choices, that means we got to give them multiple choices, right?

And the young men and women that we're talking about have not had options or choices.

So therefore they're doing the best that they can with what they have.

>> Is it working?

That's the question.

And I know those numbers are really hard to like you said, it isn't just homicide numbers going down or violence numbers going down.

Is is it working?

What's the trajectory, what's the momentum for people on the ground right now?

What are we seeing.

>> Can I give you where it is working.

And then Doctor Woods can talk about how it's working here in Louisville.

So if you look across this country and you look at cities like Baltimore, you look at cities like Newark, you look at cities like Toledo, you look at cities like Austin, Texas.

And you can I can go down the list.

When you invest in the folks on the front line, you see results Baltimore, Newark, Philly and other Toledo are seeing record lows in their homicides, but they're also seeing better outcomes for those young men and women who are most at risk.

So you can do both and right.

You can fully invest in your police department and fully invest in community violence intervention strategies to get to the best outcomes.

Right.

So it's working, and Louisville still has an opportunity to invest more so we can get to a better place.

Because those five year lows that you talked about earlier are still not back to pre-pandemic numbers, right?

Right.

We got work to do.

So I think it could work better here in Louisville if we were willing to invest more money in the front line.

>> I think a lot of what what we have to tune into is how how we identify the individuals who are most at risk, who are most at risk to be involved in those kinds of things like that.

So we developed a database a while back that allows us to, to identify individuals who are likely to shoot, who have access to weapons, what their affiliations are, and those kinds of things, and how we track them as well, so that we know where they are.

And we actually started doing that in 1995, and it's gotten now to where it's got a little bit more technology to it.

But but the end game is that when we get a referral on a young person who's in trouble and we ask for gun charges mostly, and, and we start with that young person at the level where they are and then check and do.

And through our intake process, we can kind of tune into what it is that they can best do, or how we can help them to turn a hobby into a career or into income.

So that particular key helps quite a bit.

The main thing for us, in terms of how we measure is if we got 55 young people that we start with in January, we're looking at them again in May, June, and they're progressing, contributing community service, those calls and things like that to not get in trouble, good grades or what have you, or decent grades better than what they were doing.

And then again in a year and they're still there.

We already know that those 55 individuals are success stories.

Yeah.

You know, and a lot of the success stories are not necessarily that tangible that you can put your hands on like that.

But some of them are over the years we've been doing it.

I mean, we've had some coaches and nurses, you know, a couple of lawyers come out of just the work, you know, so you can't curb it.

You got to just keep moving.

>> How can the community step up to better help you all in your organizations?

>> Yeah, I think some level of understanding that that these are people doing the work and that they've they've got lives, they've committed to doing this work.

And I think the idea of everybody having a part to play, and if that means put peace on your agenda, you know, even if it's if it's on your, your, your church agenda, your boardroom, wherever a bulletin board at school, even just the words so that we, we, we start to think a whole nother way.

We're in an era right now.

In my mind, that is lawless.

So we have to kind of tune into how we as people look out for each other.

>> And I think the only thing else I'll add to what Doctor Woods just said is that if you believe in this work, you should be talking to your local elected officials.

Talk to your council member, talk to your mayor, talk to the D.A.

talk to the folks who get to make decisions around what public safety is and where our public safety dollars go, because I think that's also a starting conversation to the public, can be helpful in multiple ways, supporting the organizations that are doing the work.

Talk to your council members about that support and your mayor about that support, but also just show up and volunteer.

Folks need volunteers all the time.

We don't need y'all on the front line because you're not trained for that.

But we do need folks supporting and providing volunteer to the organizations that are doing this important work.

So just show up is what I would say to folks.

>> The book you've got to be of the People peacekeepers at the Heart of Public Safety in Louisville, is out now, and the Louisville Story Program has also created a companion discussion guide that can help elevate the dialog around public safety here in Louisville and around the country.

You can find out more about the project on our website.

We've linked you up at ket.org slash Louisville.

Thanks for spending a little time getting to know Louisville today.

I hope we'll see you here next time.

Until then, make it a great week.