Recap: Community-Based Approaches to Gun Violence
“I’ve never met a single person who has come from prison for killing someone with a gun, who hasn’t been harmed at some point in their life," said Co-Chair of the Durham City and County Taskforce on Community Safety Marcia Owens. Her comment gets to the heart of an issue surrounding gun violence. How can we as communities prevent gun violence from happening?
In a panel discussion sponsored by the Duke Center for Firearms Law and the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, speakers Dana Bazelon, Senior Manager, Quattrone Center at Penn Carey Law School, Krystal Harris, Director of Community Intervention & Support Services, Durham County, and Marcia Owen, Co-Director of Prescriptions for Repair and Co-Chair of the Durham City and County Taskforce on Community Safety discussed gun violence. The discussion touched on community-based solutions, including violence intervention, diversion programs, and restorative justice. This event was open to Duke students and the surrounding community, allowing for a broad conversation housed within the Duke University Law School.
The panelists discussed questions including how can we, as a community, give children the life skills and resources to prevent them from ever picking up a gun? What kind of programs can we place individuals who possess a firearm and would not benefit from being locked away in prison? And what is the power of community conversation and healing?
About every week in Durham, 50 people were killed last year, according to Owens. Dana Bazelon addresses similar issues in Philadelphia. She states that recidivism rates do not tell the whole story. How has their environment played a role, and how can we get deeper to solve the root of our social problems? Through their discussion, the panelists called out the importance of finding and addressing generational and other qualitative factors that create gun violence statistics.
Harris discusses two programs under her program that take this approach: a gun violence intervention program called Bull City United and a community program called My Brothers Keeper, which was modeled after a similar program developed by President Barack Obama’s administration. Through those programs, they work to identify the gaps in services for young men and boys of color and incorporated mediation and outreach methodologies.
Bazelon discussed the diversion program she worked on at the Philadelphia District Attorney's office for those who've been caught with guns but didn't have a record that warranted incarceration. In their six-month program, participants arrived in cohorts of twenty and get paired with social workers to set goals. Within their cohorts, they meet once a week for 90 minutes to discuss and practice a form of cognitive behavioral therapy. These conversations allow facilitators to assess low-level barriers to promote rehabilitation and community uplift throughout the program. “There are other metrics other than recidivism, and they can be really powerful...[when they] get people thinking about the people in your program as real human beings,” Bazelon said
Programs like this are just the beginning of the movement toward community-based solutions. As Harris noted, "[gun violence] may not be at your doorstep right now, but you can see the impacts and how it does impact you, regardless if it’s somebody in your family [or] a friend of yours.” So, above all, the panelists seek to remind society that when a community is hurt, everyone becomes the victim and urged us all to approach gun violence from a humanistic approach.