This time, we’re not building a statue of a dead kid.
We’re not setting up a committee to study causes of urban violence.
We’re not buying back guns, or hiring more cops or promising to fill our jails, though that seems to be the crux of Gov. Mike Parson’s proposed solution.
This time, we’re investing in people.
That’s what the public safety committee of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen did on Tuesday when it advanced the most important response this summer to a spate of gun violence that has included the deaths of 13 children in the city.
In passing a bill sponsored by Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed to spend $5 million over three years bringing the acclaimed Cure Violence program to St. Louis, aldermen decided to spend money at the street level to adopt a data-driven program to seek to reduce homicides in one of the most violent cities in America.
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“It’s everything,” wrote Dr. Laurie Punch on Facebook shortly after the vote.
Punch came to St. Louis from Baltimore to help save children’s lives.
The Washington University surgeon and associate professor developed her Stop the Bleed program to teach the people closest to gun violence in the city how to literally save lives. The program trains young people, nurses, teachers and clergy in some basic trauma techniques to help stop bleeding that results from being shot.
But really, Punch’s program is about trust. It’s about connecting to young people who live in violent neighborhoods surrounded by daily trauma. When Punch came here from Baltimore, she was surprised at how hard it was for her to build relationships with the people in the communities she was trying to help.
“It was exceptionally humbling as a surgeon to recognize that the skills I had developed with my hands should have instead been invested in my ears,” Punch told me last year.
Now she’s leading the city to change.
Like Stop the Bleed, the Cure Violence program, developed in Chicago, is steeped in trust, by training people who live in the targeted communities to intervene when tension builds; to teach the sort of life-saving, de-escalation skills that might prevent a trauma surgeon from being forced to put her skills to use.
Cure Violence isn’t a panacea, though it has shown plenty of success in certain neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Baltimore, Kansas City and other places where it operates.
It doesn’t end poverty, the mother of all urban violence.
It won’t bring back Kennedi Powell, Charnija Keys, Eddie Hill IV or Xavier Usanga.
But it turns gun violence into a public health issue.
That’s Punch’s arena, and she works at a university that is becoming a national leader in trying to find the data to help health researchers find real solutions to gun violence by studying it as a public health issue, the same way scientists attack any other problem that leads to large numbers of deaths in young people or specific populations.
Funding Cure Violence, for several neighborhoods and for several years, also sends a message, Punch said, that the city is ready to take on the challenge of reducing the violence that plagues too many north side and south side neighborhoods where just playing outside is dangerous.
“Today, in City Hall, I saw a diversity of interests, experiences and identity in community members and organizations like I have never seen before,” Punch said. “I saw representatives from many different organizations as well as individual community members agreeing on a plan of action focused on reframing violence as a health issue and moving away from the monocular vision of violence as an issue of crime.”
While at City Hall on Tuesday, Punch was wearing her “Baltimore CeaseFire” hoodie, representative of another anti-violence initiative in an American city that has had many of them. One of the Cure Violence workers knew of the program and struck up a conversation with Punch. Then she shared a list with Punch of “stakeholders” the Cure Violence group had already developed so it can hit the ground running, and there was Punch’s name on the list.
“As an outsider, the thing that strikes me the most about St. Louis is the depth of its divisions, separating even like-minded, caring people into factions who hold one another in contempt,” Punch told me. Cure Violence, she believes, has an opportunity to overcome some of those divisions, particularly if St. Louis County also adopts the program for some of its more violent neighborhoods. “People in this city fight over helping. … People seem to thrive on need but fail to coalesce into real solutions. Cure Violence feels like it’s big enough to bring us all together, and that, I know, is going to be the only way we turn the tide on violence.”
