By Jerome Louison
“We gotta put our heads together, and stop the violence.” - KRS One, Stop the Violence
Safety. That’s how Black boys in New York say farewell when they respect you. When they appreciate your presence. When they hope to see you again, knowing they might not. Like most slang, it wasn’t constructed or focus-grouped. It emerged. Emerged from the conditions they face, and a deeply internalized hope for a better environment. A safer environment. For generations, that environment has not come, despite ever-increasing budgets for the United States’s main public safety tool: policing.
For the nation’s largest police force, the New York City Police Department (NYPD), annual costs exceeded $11 billion USD (including almost $700 million in overtime pay) as of 2020. This goes primarily to the hiring of over 51,000 employees, one for every 161 residents. The main alternative to policing is community-based violence intervention (CVI). In NYC, this manifests primarily through the Crisis Management System (CMS), an umbrella formation started in 2012 to coordinate the city’s violence prevention and intervention organizations (including founding orgs like Brooklyn’s ManUp Inc. and Queens’ Life Camp), providing services from mental health support to job readiness to legal advocacy. In contrast to the NYPD, CMS funding approximates $100 million annually, just short of the $130 million recommended by the CVI Ecosystem website. Despite this disparity, given the recent rise in funding and the fact that CMS predominantly consists of working-class Black people, CMS must continue to prove its worth. Most recently, the eyes of the Comptroller’s Office1 took notice.
The Comptroller’s 2025 report, The Cure for Crisis: The Power and Potential of Community Violence Intervention, begins in 2013 when the first CMS budget was approved, totaling less than $5 million. The Cure for Crisis (building on methodologies used by the New York City Council Data team and John Jay College researchers) shows that the impact of CMS was immediate, calculating a 21% reduction in shootings between 2012 and 2014. In absolute terms, this amounts to 1,567 fewer shootings. As has been consistently shown, the work of CMS orgs on the ground has a demonstrable impact in keeping community residents safer. And yet, that same analysis highlights an unresolved question: what happens when a system doesn’t behave like a system?
The report’s recommendations revolve around the deliberate construction of an ecosystem (a favorite buzzword in the field). This includes:
regular coordination meetings among CMS organizations
a “centralized, real-time data-sharing dashboard for coordinating violence intervention efforts.”
enhanced technical assistance and training
From the perspective of the New York City government, this makes sense. City agencies, ideally under the (soon-to-be) constructed Department of Community Safety, will be the centralizing hub for CMS, determining what the practice of community-based public safety looks like moving forward. Informed by public health research, the future of CMS would be simply a beefed-up version of the current CMS. But nowhere in the report does it mention “salary” or “employee benefits.” The future of CMS, then, doesn’t seem to involve better-paying jobs2. By contrast, according to the NYPD recruitment webpage, the starting salary is $60,884, increasing to $126,410 after over five years of experience (not including health insurance, retirement, etc.).
But one city, no matter how rich, is not indicative of an entire movement. Is it different at the national level?
The largest national effort to build the CVI ecosystem involves the CVI Action Plan. It is the collective brainchild of several organizations, including the Urban Peace Institute, Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI), and the Community Based Public Safety Collective (CBPS). Through conferences, working groups, and policy proposals, they have maintained the national mission of the CVI ecosystem, ensuring that their vision cannot be easily co-opted. The Action Plan starts with capacity-building, highlighting the need for “guidelines for pay and benefits” and wellness support for front-line workers.
The Action Plan also centers on the importance of independence for CVI. For instance, take the relationship to traditional law enforcement. CVI organizations have explicitly articulated the need for separation, as one Action Plan document makes clear:
“Adopting the shared language of ‘professional understanding’ with law enforcement can act as a firewall to clarify boundaries…People discussed how CVI differs greatly from law enforcement, as CVI focuses on love, healing, and redemption and law enforcement focuses on investigations, arrest, and incarceration.”3
Similar sentiments hold for the relationship between CVI organizations. Folks doing this work want more collaboration, not competition. Dozens of CVI groups across the United States have signed on to the Action Plan, showing that there is grassroots support for a new paradigm that seeks to reduce, and potentially eliminate, the role of law enforcement in keeping communities safe. And while support is necessary, it is not sufficient.
How to Plan for a Crisis
All sectors within a capitalist system adhere to a particular division of labor, devised by the capitalist class. CVI is no different. Despite efforts like the CVI Action Plan, community violence intervention groups are becoming the soft arm of law enforcement, whose main purpose is to reduce gun-related violence in urban settings. The current funding structure—consisting of grants, RFPs, and government contracts—incentivizes this, creating distortionary effects across the ecosystem. For one, CVI organizations must contort themselves to show funders that everything they do reduces shootings in their locality, or “catchment area.” Additionally, other modes of physical violence (including stabbings and general assaults), gender-based or intimate partner violence, as well as non-physical violence (emotional, financial, etc.) are by default de-prioritized. And conceptually, the connections between gun violence and these other modes are lost, where shootings are taken as a unique and distinct case.
Current funding also incentivizes competition. Instead of organizations providing complementary roles, thinking of their group as one piece of a larger puzzle, CVIs plan to gain ground over “rival” agencies. Of course, the idea of CVI organizations competing with police departments for funding is a non-starter. As critics of the capitalist system have long argued, contrary to economic orthodoxy, monopoly rules. And no monopoly is stronger than the police, undergirded by the state’s complete ownership of the use of force.
As mentioned earlier, community-based public safety is by nature a non-violent practice. Its philosophy is one of restorative justice, healing both the victim and perpetrator. It is based on public health research, treating the spread of (gun) violence as akin to the spread of disease, not simply the maladaptive behavior of individuals. As has been demonstrated in NYC (and other cities), these approaches do work in reducing violence. They are also cost-effective, a common argument for those seeking more investment. But questions remain. How will these organizations scale their work? How does a collection of 501(c)(3)s (by definition non-partisan) become a recognizable political and public safety force in the daily lives of working-class people?
It is worth challenging whether an ecosystem of CVI professionals and grassroots workers can develop using market-based incentives. In fact, an active removal of market logic from relations between CVI organizations might be the best way to work together. Otherwise, community-based public safety risks going the way of other Black-led institutions within the capitalist order, plagued by infighting and HNIC-syndrome, ultimately capping at a fraction of their potential.
Restorative instead of punitive justice. Public health instead of police. But what replaces the market? Some suggest that the organic impulse to help thy neighbor can stifle the worst effects of individualism and greed. In the CVI space, this plays out as mutual aid, the exchange of goods and services, or simply donating to those in need; core tenets of the non-profit sector. But the capitalist system has already accounted for this. According to the UK-based Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), the United States ranked sixth among nations in its 2024 World Giving Index, a measure of the amount of money, time, and effort given to helping others (most notably strangers). The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Inc., built to coordinate efforts to end police brutality and support alternatives (including CVI), received over $90 million in donations in 2020 alone. And yet the ravages of monopoly capitalism, including lack of effective police oversight, continue unabated. Considering that the U.S. was in the top five as late as 2023, it is doubtful that more altruism will have any meaningful effect.
Without a force to confront and constrain capitalist machinations, violence prevention and intervention work will remain in its current state, regardless of how much money is poured into it. That force must be built as the antithesis of market logic. And the antithesis of the market is not charity; it is economic planning, driven by modern technology and democratic principles. One particularly interesting model of planning, albeit outside the CVI ecosystem, is the dual power strategy of Cooperation Jackson, a cooperative movement based in Jackson, Mississippi. Known as the Jackson-Kush Plan, it would,
“…employ the tools and techniques of the solidarity economy to radically transform the local and regional economy by socializing the means of production, democratizing productive decision-making and resource mobilization, centering the needs of the Black working-class majority of Jackson, and serving as means toward the transition to ecosocialism.” [bold emphasis mine]
Similarly, what is needed is a CVI ecosystem that socializes the means of public safety, including (but not limited to) the following: open and crowd-sourced (i.e., non-proprietary) surveillance technology, which will exist only where it is democratically determined to be useful and non-intrusive; participatory fundraising and budgeting; rigorous, scientifically determined plans for violence reduction and social service provision (inspired by the economic plans currently put forth in China, Vietnam, and other dynamic regions). These mechanisms, in tandem, would provide a viable, sustainable socio-economic foundation for policing alternatives to flourish.
Those Black boys who say “Safety” hold a wisdom worth learning from. They recognize that public safety isn’t top-down; it’s the responsibility of everyone, even if all one has to offer is a single word of hope. We must build a system that properly reflects that wisdom.
