In mid-November, Peace in Our Cities organized a series of dialogues on the topic of Urbanization, Peace, and Security. These dialogues, held in Washington, DC and New York, celebrated the launch of a new paper that accompanied the network’s five year anniversary.
The atmosphere in DC and NY can tend towards the pessimistic. Focusing on trends of violence and conflict that seem to know no bounds and reinforcing a near-fatalistic malaise can make it hard to motivate already overburdened and exhausted communities towards action.
While staying clear-eyed about our common challenges, Peace in Our Cities took the opportunity to highlight some really crucial, exciting and motivating successes. In particular, I got the pleasure of doing what I don’t do nearly enough, which is to talk up some really positive trends in violence prevention from the United States.
After a spike in violence across much of the country in 2020, homicides decreased by 11.6% from 2022 to 2023, while aggravated assault decreased an estimated 2.8%. This trend has continued in the first half of 2024, with an 18% decline in gun assaults compared to the same period in 2023.
Violence prevention efforts at the city level
Those are national data points, but let’s look at what this means sub-nationally. In 69 major cities across the US, homicides dropped a dramatic 17% during the first half of 2024 compared to the last period in 2023. Violent crime has also gone down in those cities by roughly 6%.
Included in this count are cities that have long struggled with persistent violence—such as Boston which achieved a 78% reduction in homicides, Philadelphia with a 42% decrease in 2024, and Baltimore, which decreased its homicide rate by 21% in 2023 and 34% in the first half of 2024.
We should be shouting these declines from the rooftops. To the skeptics and fatalists who don’t see violence as worthy of prioritizing, to those who have written off entire populations and to those who see the only solution to violence as more violence—these results deserve attention and repetition.
Importantly, these reductions have not been a result of mass incarceration or other highly-punitive measures. Rather these declines have been largely a result of targeted, balanced, community oriented, and—crucially—well resourced efforts.
In 2020, Columbus, Ohio experienced a nearly 56% increase in fatal shootings and a 132% increase in nonfatal shootings. As a result, the Mayor officially declared gun violence a public health crisis, committing to investing millions of dollars in violence prevention. In 2023, the Columbus Office of Violence Prevention (OVP) was established.
The Columbus OVP is grounded in evidence-based strategies and collaborative partnerships to focus on violence prevention, juvenile probation, detention center management, and re-entry services, among other areas, with the goal of ensuring comprehensive support to justice-involved people while conducting community outreach and education. Columbus, Ohio had the largest percentage decline in violent crime in the nation, amounting to roughly 41% in the first half of 2024.
In Baltimore the city invested in a violence reduction strategy that combined targeted outreach to those most likely to harm or be harmed, directing messages of help and of accountability if violence continued. This required a serious investment in understanding patterns of violence, doing regular diagnostic work to ensure that the right resources were directed to the right people at the right time.
Detroit used funding from the America Rescue Plan Act to support community outreach workers and ‘credible messengers’ to target those at highest risk of being harmed and doing harm (often these are the same people), including with offers of physical and emotional support. One of the neighborhoods where efforts were concentrated achieved a reduction in homicides and non-fatal shootings of 72%—proving that organizations made up of community members with firsthand experience and knowledge can see remarkable impact if sufficiently resourced.
Preventing violence requires investing in balanced, sustained, legitimate and community-oriented solutions, not silver bullets
There are a host of evidence-informed interventions that can be heralded for these declines and are instructive in thinking about the necessary ingredients to effectively prevent and reduce violence. Central to these ingredients is starting from a place of wanting to reduce violence; not only focusing on homicide, but rather focusing on a broader set of harms brought by different forms of violence.
These reductions also came from a massive investment in community—including, but not limited to, credible messengers, hospital based intervention, violence interrupters, intensive wrap-around services, and trauma support—as well as smarter and more legitimate policing that prioritizes public safety for all.
These reductions also involved policy shifts in areas such as bail reform and progressive prosecution, diversion and reentry programs, among others. The prison-to-prison cycle of recidivism is part of the problem and providing meaningful transition services has to be part of the solution.
A key point that Peace in Our Cities has made from our beginnings is that we must not be focused on singular strategies to reduce violence and simply copy/paste from locale to locale. Rather, we should be focused on asking the right questions, starting from a place of diagnosis and then building out an ecosystem of efforts focused on reducing long-term risks for violence, addressing medium-term incentive structures that facilitate violence and acting to invest in the short-term strategies that interrupt violence.
2025 and Beyond: Staying optimistic, and grounded
While centering optimism, this work is not easy and it is crucial to be clear about challenges. First and foremost, the declines in the US context have been made possible by the people doing the work. But,it has also been crucial that both government and philanthropic organizations have made significant financial investments in community violence interventions and more balanced approaches. If these investments are reduced – as is anticipated under a Trump Administration – there are real questions of sustainability.
Further, while these reductions have been massive and life-saving, many people don’t necessarily feel safer. Just as violence tends to concentrate in certain areas or neighborhoods, so too do violence reductions. If you’re not from a neighborhood seeing declines, you may be more inclined to believe a media and a narrative landscape that typically hypes up fears of violence.
It remains a tried and true political strategy for officials vying for power to instill fear, reinforcing a narrative of violence, in order to present themselves as savior, as “the” solution to this violent, chaotic world.
Beyond divisive narratives, the US continues to struggle with a devastating and very visible challenge of homelessness, overlaid with severe economic contraction and associated crimes of economic necessity, of a broken mental health system, of continued high profile shootings. A broad sense of chaos makes it hard to believe progress is possible.
In response, across the country, voters in this last election ushered in a wave of more repressive, policing-centered measures that will bring back more tough on crime approaches that will increase rates of incarceration and make already economically fragile households even more fragile. While these strategies may feel palliative in the short term, they will do long-term harm to communities just as the country’s history of mass incarceration has shown in years prior.
That said, we can’t just tell people “violence is going down.” People need to feel safer. These must go hand in hand.
We have the proof that big investments in the things that work can lead to massive reductions in violence. This is solvable. But, crucially, the way we solve this can either reinforce more productive, safe and peaceful communities for all…..or it can reinforce inequality, marginalization and exclusion.
Rachel Locke is the co-founder of Peace in Our Cities and Director of the Violence, Inequality, and Power Lab at the University of San Diego.