All five candidates for Richmond mayor have said they’d implement a gun violence prevention measure called Group Violence Intervention — a strategy that's been used for decades to reduce homicides and gun violence in cities like Boston, Detroit and New Orleans.
But Richmond leaders have previously declined to adopt the strategy.
GVI, sometimes referred to as “Operation Ceasefire,” operates under the assumption that a small group of people is responsible for the majority of violence in any given community. It targets those at highest risk of committing violence with social pressure, services and — as a last resort — law enforcement.
After putting the program in place, Boston saw a 63% reduction in youth homicide and a 27% reduction in shootings, according to the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College.
Those stats caught the attention of the group Richmonders Involved to Strengthen Our Communities when it began researching violence reduction strategies in 2019. RISC is a network of local religious congregations focused on justice issues that has urged Mayor Levar Stoney since 2020 to implement the strategy.
Following a violent start to 2021, Stoney and the nine-member Richmond City Council declared gun violence a public health crisis in Richmond. The city began engaging the community, including RISC, to find solutions.
What came out of those discussions was a strategy unique to Richmond: the Gun Violence Prevention and Intervention Framework.
Richmond’s GVPI Framework is largely focused on providing after-school activities and programming for people aged 12–19. The city’s put $3.5 million into its Positive Youth Development Fund since 2022, and $1.4 million in its We Matter RVA initiative since 2021. That’s in addition to hiring three community mediators and creating an Office of Neighborhood Safety, among other efforts.
City officials say the approach is working. Yearly progress reports were published in 2022 and 2023, which detailed some of the program's successes.
Last year’s report credits the city’s efforts with a 43% reduction in gun violence from 2021–2022, including a 27% reduction in youth victims of gun violence. And data provided by the city shows a drop of nearly 40% in youth-related violent crime incidents since 2017 — when Stoney took office.
So far this year, the city said there’s been a 6% reduction in overall violent crime and a 20% reduction in homicides compared to 2023. The city could not say when the next progress report would be released.
But members of RISC said the city can do more.
“You kind of in your mind think, you know, what would stop gun violence,” said Ralph Hodge, pastor at Second Baptist Church Southside. “Most of the time it’s pretty inaccurate.”
Hodge believes the decrease in gun violence is aligned with national trends and not solely tied to the city’s recent efforts. Data from the Center For American Progress shows gun homicides were down 16.4% from 2021. He said the city is doing great work with young people, but isn’t doing enough to intervene with adults — a population GVI would engage with.
“If you’re in that age group and you’ve got some issues with law enforcement, crime or gangs, it’s very difficult for you to get good work,” Hodge said. You may have a long standing drug abuse issue that started when you were a teenager, all sorts of stuff that requires severe intervention. That is, we believe, the missing piece in Richmond’s gun violence initiatives.”
During a mayoral forum it organized in August, RISC representatives asked Richmond mayoral candidates whether they’d adopt the GVI framework. All five said they would.
Candidate Harrison Roday has promised to create a city office within the mayor’s administration focused solely on gun violence prevention.
Candidate Michelle Mosby called GVI a “no-brainer.” And candidate Dr. Danny Avula has talked about the success of a GVI initiative in Hopewell.
At a September press conference, Stoney pushed back on the idea that Richmond doesn’t already have a gun violence office.
The mayor’s office said one reason Richmond previously declined to implement GVI was because it focuses on organized crime — and there aren’t a lot of gangs in Richmond. According to the GVI implementation guide, the term group refers to “any social network whose members commit violence crimes together, including gangs.”
In a statement provided to VPM News, Stoney said the city’s framework “is unique to Richmond because it was created by engaging community members who had experienced gun violence, public safety practitioners, and health experts.”
He added: “[The GVPI Framework] is evidence-based and takes a whole-government and whole-community approach, compared to solely Group Violence Intervention, which is a law enforcement heavy approach derived out of policy decisions from the 1990s to address organized crime.”
It’s inaccurate to say GVI is a law-enforcement led initiative, according to Chip Brownlee, a reporter for The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that covers gun violence and policy.
“The basic idea behind group violence intervention is that you have trusted community members,” Brownlee said. “Maybe it’s clergy, it might be coaches … going and talking to the people that are suspected of being involved in the violence and asking them to ‘please stop,’ and giving them an ethical and a moral argument for why they should stop the violence.”
That’s followed by law enforcement notifying the groups of the consequences, and finally, offering services — like job training opportunities or signing them up for Medicaid.
“If you don’t have all three elements of the group violence intervention program in place, then it’s not going to work as intended,” the reporter said.
That’s what happened in Birmingham, Alabama, Brownlee said: The city focused on law enforcement and neglected the other elements of the program.
“It kind of turned into this militarized law-enforcement-gang crackdown kind of situation,” he said. “That was really not how group violence intervention is supposed to work.”
Brownlee added that it’s hard to say definitively that any single program reduces gun violence.
“There’s more research coming out that suggests that these programs help,” he said. “But the numbers aren’t concrete enough for me to say that Group Violence Intervention is better than other programs or vice versa.”
Stoney said there is always more to be done, but urged the next mayor — whoever is selected by voters — to take a deeper look at the data “and listen to those involved with our GVPI efforts before committing to a proposal that doesn’t fit Richmond’s needs.”
