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Melissa Harris-Perry: The Coalition to Advanced Public Safety, or CAPS, is a strategic partnership between four nationally recognized and Black-led organizations. They're all committed to ending gun violence in local communities. On February 22nd, CAPS initiated a new multi-city effort to reduce gun violence. It seeks to build, strengthen, and expand healthy local communities as a tool to disrupt this violence. Its goal, to cut homicides by 20% in 5 years. Here at The Takeaway, we were intrigued, so we sat down with some of the folks tasked with turning this goal into a reality.

Aqeela Sherrills: My name is Aqeela Sherrills. I'm the co-founder and Executive Director of the Community-Based Public Safety Collective, the Collective, and the board chair of the Newark Community Street Team.

Sateria Tate Alexander: My name is Sateria Tate Alexander. I am the founder of Agile Planning Solutions and the Executive Director of the Baton Rouge Community Street Team.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What does it mean to say combating violence in a community-centered way? What is this?

Aqeela Sherrills: Combating violence in a community-centered way, traditionally in this country, we've always had a criminal legal solution to the problem. When violence explodes in a neighborhood, we deploy police to apprehend the perpetrator but we don't deploy therapists and healers, and counselors to deal with the after effect of violence. Trauma has been allowed to ripple and fester in our communities, and it underscores most of the violence that you see happen in the neighborhoods.

Our strategy has been to utilize a public health approach, very similar to the way that they eradicated malaria in some African countries. Those who are closest in proximity to the violence have to be equipped with the skills, the tools, and the resources to do the intervention to prevention and the treatment. Our strategy is really centered around a public health model that violence is a public health issue, and that if we plan to eradicate it, we have to engage and employ the people in the neighborhoods through a relationship-based strategy to address the issue.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Especially as you're taking this public health model, I don't want to presume that either I or the listeners here all have a shared definition about what constitutes violence in the community.

Aqeela Sherrills: Homicides, assaults, robberies, all of these things are the things that constitute violence and underscore trauma and violence in the neighborhood. In some communities across the country-- I'm originally from Los Angeles and lived in a war zone. When I say war, I really mean war. Between 1983 and 2003 in LA County alone, there were over 20,000 gang-related deaths, and it didn't include those permanently maimed or those incarcerated for the rest of their life behind their participation. Folks in the community all suffer from traumatic stress disorder, hypervigilance, vicarious trauma with very little support services to support people in their respective healing journey.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Sateria, let me draw you in here then. Talk to me a bit about Baton Rouge. Give me a sense of both what violence looks like in that community and what the Community Street Team unit is up to.

Sateria Tate Alexander: Violence in our community is similar to what we've seen nationally. Since the COVID pandemic, we've seen an increase in violence starting in 2020, and that violence peaked in 2021, where we saw the highest rate of homicides and major crimes in the history of our city. The Baton Rouge Community Street Team was actually deployed in 2021. We started in June of 2021, and with our boots-on-the-ground strategy, our public safety roundtable which brings in community members along with public safety officials and allows public safety officials to talk about what the strategies are but it also allows the community to have a voice in voicing any concerns or asking any questions that they may have.

We also have safe passage, which is embedded in several of our highest-risk schools. We've seen a significant decline in violence in those schools from the time that we got there. In 2021, like I said, we had the highest rate but in 2022, we already started to see some of the progress happening with our strategies that we have in our city because we saw an overall decrease in homicides at the rate of 23%, and we saw an overall decrease in major crimes by 14%, which is unheard of having those double-digit successes in cities right now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How do you manage to build trust?

Sateria Tate Alexander: Consistency. That's one of the greatest elements of building trust. Of course, our community is experiencing that mistrust. Of course, our community has a sense of distrust for the solutions that have been in place for how long but having the consistency in place helps to build that trust because what our community has also experienced is the hope of something coming in and helping.

This is a different solution because instead of the something coming in from the outside is coming from the inside, it's empowering our community to be active and engaged in the public safety process, which is something that is new.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Aqeela, again, as I'm listening to Sateria talk about this way of building trust through consistency, can you also help me to understand the ways that this initiative is able to do things that as you point out, this police crackdown version simply can't address when it comes to violence?

Aqeela Sherrills: Absolutely. There's a lot of mistrust that is created as a result of the trauma that people actually suffer. For Black folks in community, our cries for help has always fell on deaf ears. Labels like gangs actually desensitize the public to the cry for help and it dehumanizes the people who are behind those labels. I'm not saying that gangs don't exist, but it is a prominent civil rights attorney in Los Angeles County, Rice, who did a report about 17 years ago and basically discovered that less than 3% to 5% of so-called gang members are actually committing violent crime and murder. The vast majority of these individuals are part of a surrogate family that lost their nuclear family to the real killer, which is poverty.

It is organized and planned in the capitalist system. Capitalism somebody has to be poor in order for somebody to be rich. This, again, I think that the trauma underscores the trust and it erodes the trust amongst people.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When we get back, more on this initiative to reduce community gun violence. It's The Takeaway.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and you're still with The Takeaway. We've been talking with Aqeela Sherrills, Executive Director and co-founder of the Community-Based Public Safety Collective, and Sateria Tate Alexander, founder of Agile Planning Solutions. They're two of the people leading an initiative to drastically reduce gun violence in some of America's cities. You made a point about poverty and I suppose that's part of what I was asking even initially about what constitutes violence. Aqeela, can this work be successful without meaningful systemic change around poverty?

Aqeela Sherrills: No, it cannot. This work has-- we always say that you can't legislate peace, that you have to incentivize peace, that we have to invest in the people, we have to invest in infrastructure, in communities, and in infrastructure as people. You have to invest deeply in people. This is the thing that's been missing for so long. We were all just participating-- the federal government has made a significant investment in community violence intervention, or what we call community-based public safety as a complementary strategy to law enforcement and to policing in communities.

We were looking at a graph in which last year the federal government invested $307 billion in their criminal legal system to try to produce public safety in neighborhoods. Then when we looked at how much they've invested in community violence intervention, it was a proposed number of 5 billion, this is what the president is actually proposing and we're excited about it because this is the first sitting president that has ever made this significant investment in community-based solutions. The current investment is about $100 million, $150 million.

There's some real equity issues that have to be addressed and we believe that this is now the time and the moment for organizations that are doing community-based public safety to partner, and to leverage their collective power to move more public investment into this work.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Sateria, let's talk about how it works. Can you talk to me about the roles that your team plays? About what an engager, a recorder, a navigator, a high-risk interventionist. What are these roles? What do they mean on the ground?

Sateria Tate Alexander: These are people who are credible messengers inside of these communities. They were born and raised, or they live in the communities in which they serve. We also have connections with folks that may not necessarily be a part of our team. They're called LTOs, which means licensed to operate. It's the relationship component, building relationships, sustaining relationships, and leaning in on relationships that make things work the way that they should.

We have several roles. The first being high-risk interventionists. Our high-risk interventionists are the boots-on-the-ground folks. They're the ones that have the most deep relationships within the communities. They're the ones that will likely hear what's happening in the community before it actually happens in the community. Utilizing that intel helps us build strategy to address some of the things, the concerns that we see, but we also have what's called community navigators.

For us, our community navigators are the folks that help connect the people to the resources. Essentially, our high-risk interventionists are there with those relationships, and they're also identifying high-risk folks who need resources. They're connected to our community navigators who are responsible for connecting them to those resources but also helping them to create a smart goal plan for themselves that helps them to achieve these goals to help them make better decisions or position them to better spaces to help change the trajectory of where they are in life.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Aqeela, four cities in this first cohort, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Newark, Indianapolis. Are there going to be more cities and when would we expect that to happen?

Aqeela Sherrills: The goal is that we're going to work in 12 cities over the next 5 years with the goal of actually reducing near-term violence by 20% in those cities. We started with the first four because we have deep relationships in those communities already. One of our plans is to bring this ecosystem of services to continue to coordinate our collectives community-based strategy in those communities. The National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform, Cities United, the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, better known as the HAVI, and the Collective, are the four national TTA providers who are partnering to do this 12-city initiative.

We're going to start rolling out our second four cities, and we've identified those cities, however, we haven't solidified them. I think I could say that I know that Los Angeles and Jacksonville, Atlanta, St. Louis are a part of the next cohort of cities that we're planning to work in. Our strategy is never to come in and to supplant what's there. It's about enhancing existing infrastructure in those respective communities because in many cases, these neighborhoods already have the bones.

They have the charismatic leaders in the neighborhood. They have folks like Sateria who are longtime residents, who are just brilliant in terms of how to build and set up organizations. We're coming in to provide that strategic support and coordination. In each one of the cities that we're working in, we're going to be providing about $500,000 dollars in capacity-building grants for the organizations. We're going to bring subject matter experts to the table to help organizations with everything from launching their 501(c)(3)s to training their boots on the ground.

We also help them to do grant writing. It's not an easy thing to manage a city, state, or federal grant. Our organizations need a lot of support in terms of that capacity because sometimes they're so busy doing the hard work of mediation and de-escalation in the streets that they don't have the time to manage the grantee-grantor relationship or to manage a lot of the internal paperwork that is required to advance these grants.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Sateria, always part of grant management is an assessment process and asking less in the federal or private grant land of assessment and more in the gut check land of assessment, Sateria, how will you know five years out that the work that you all are doing has been, at least in part, successful?

Sateria Tate Alexander: The community. Understanding the landscape of the community and seeing our community in a better place. What I mean by that is seeing them more engaged, seeing them more responsive is going to be one of those tell tales that things are working because you can't be active, you can't be in the midst of everything and not exact change. This is a shift in culture. When I start to see that the culture is changing, the landscape of the community is changing, that's when I'll know that what we are doing is effective. It's less about the numbers and it's more about the narrative and the storytelling.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Aqeela, do you want to jump in on that one as well?

Aqeela Sherrills: Absolutely. In a city like Newark, when we started our work, there was 104 homicides in the city in 2013. Three years in, we had double-digit reduction. Today we've cut the homicide rate in half, removed-- seven consecutive years in a row now of decreases of homicide and overall violence. Newark is no longer at the top 10 most violent city list where it had a coveted position for almost 50 consecutive years.

To Sateria's point, crime stats says nothing necessarily about whether or not people feel safe. Safety is subjective, in many cases. We believe that there has to be complementary tools that are developed that don't just look at crime stats, but also that looks at doing a survey on the most vulnerable in the community so that we understand how they feel.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Aqeela Sherrills is Executive Director of The Community-Based Public Safety Collective, and Sateria Tate Alexander is Executive Director of the Baton Rouge Community Street Team. Thank you both for being here.

Sateria Tate Alexander: Thank you for having us.

Aqeela Sherrills: Thank you so much, Melissa.

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