A city-led effort to reach potential shooters has produced encouraging results, Philly officials say

A city-run initiative that aims to provide services to those at risk of shooting someone or being shot has shown encouraging results in its attempts to help address the city’s gun violence, Philadelphia officials said Tuesday.

An evaluation conducted by a University of Pennsylvania researcher said the approach, known as Group Violence Intervention (GVI), helped reduce gun violence among targeted groups of young people by as much as 50% during a nearly 30-month period ending last spring.

Similarly promising reductions could be seen in neighborhoods where the initiative took place, the evaluation said. And although gun violence has remained at troubling levels citywide — with shootings still occurring at nearly their highest level in decades — city officials nonetheless said they were pleased by what they viewed as positive results from a promising approach they intend to expand.

“This is incredible work that has the power to transform and save lives,” Mayor Jim Kenney said at a news conference to discuss the program and its evaluation.

Deion Sumpter, GVI’s director, said: “Through this unique partnership with city staff, law enforcement, and community members, we are building a coalition that increases city government and community capacity to address the gun violence crisis.”

The report stood in contrast to recent headlines around some city efforts to use new tactics outside of traditional law enforcement to address persistent gunfire.

Earlier this month, an Inquirer report revealed that eight police officers had improperly received tens of thousands of dollars in city antiviolence grant money. And last fall, a different evaluation of another community-based antiviolence program said it was disorganized and struggling to accomplish basic goals.

Gun violence has also remained stubbornly high, with police statistics showing nearly 70 people killed in homicides through the first two months of this year, the vast majority by gunfire.

Still, many in attendance at Tuesday’s news conference were steadfast that GVI had become a valuable tool by focusing on an important branch of violence: Shootings by and between young men in loosely affiliated street groups, who often open fire over perceived rivalries or beefs.

“It’s working,” said David Kennedy, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a national expert on the strategy. “There aren’t many good days if you do this work. But this is a less bad day than most.”

GVI’s approach calls for law enforcement to identify a small population of people most likely to shoot or be shot, then to have police, social workers, community members, and GVI case managers encourage them to put down the guns. The GVI team offers access to social services to help encourage people to stay off the streets, and warns of criminal consequences if they or their suspected group members are found to have committed crimes.

It launched in August 2020, and received $1 million in city funding this fiscal year. Vanessa Garrett Harley, a deputy mayor who helped guide its launch, said it also had received additional money from the state and through grants.

Variations of the approach have led to gun violence reductions in cities such as Oakland, Boston, and Indianapolis, proponents say. And a similar strategy, then called Focused Deterrence, was deployed in South Philadelphia a decade ago but fizzled out, in part due to leadership changes in key areas of city government.

Many of those other iterations relied on “call-ins” in which program leaders would gather members of suspected groups and tell them to stop the violence. But Sumpter said the GVI team modified that approach due to the pandemic, which made group gatherings impossible, and began doing house calls for young men who were considered at risk of becoming involved in violence.

Such visits were done on Saturday mornings starting in August 2020, Sumpter said. And he said they were often enhanced by the presence of mothers who’d lost loved ones to homicides — several of whom spoke at the news conference about the importance of building community connections.

“Trust is big in our community,” said Kimberly Burrell, whose son Darryl Pray was fatally shot in 2009. “We build trust.”

The evaluation of GVI, conducted by criminologist Ruth Moyer, said visits by the mobile teams led to “significant” reductions in violence among contacted groups: about 38% after one visit, and 50% after two.

Still, the scope of the strategy, and the study, was limited: It said 276 people were contacted by GVI over 29 months, but that further research was needed to determine how effective the strategy was in convincing those individuals to steer clear of violence, as opposed to studying the impact on larger groups.

The study did say that 73 shootings happened over the evaluation’s time frame in which a GVI contact was wounded or killed.

City officials said they now plan to expand the number of GVI case workers from eight to 15, and expand the police districts in which the initiative will be in practice.

Movita Johnson-Harrell, a gun violence activist who began advocating for GVI as a state representative before she resigned due to a theft conviction in 2019, was credited by many Tuesday as a driving force behind the strategy’s implementation. She said she believed GVI had already begun turning around some young men’s lives.

“It’s working — and we knew it was going to work,” she said.