California city identified potential shooters and paid them to stay out of trouble
The city of Richmond, California, wanted to reduce gun violence that was so pervasive the city council considered asking the governor to call in the National Guard.
Instead the city created an Office of Neighborhood Safety that decided to pay youths to stay out of trouble as part of a mentoring and counseling program. The approach worked, according to the director of the office, Devone Boggan, who wrote an article about the effort in the New York Times.
Boggan’s office identified youths who were most likely to shoot others or to become shooting victims. The young men were invited to a meeting where they were told they would be eligible for payments of up to $1,000 a month if they participated in mentoring and meetings and stayed out of trouble. They had to keep the commitment for six months, and would receive the money for no longer than nine months.
Staffers called “change agents” worked with about 150 youths a year, offering daily mentoring, coaching and companionship.
According to Boggan, in the first five years of the program, the number of homicides in Richmond dropped by more than half, and firearm assaults fell by a similar proportion.
“Not all of our fellows become model citizens overnight,” Boggan writes, “but the results go beyond fewer shootings. More are in school or in jobs; there is more parenting, less drug use.”
