My work on gun violence sits where public policy meets lived experience. I have caused harm and been held accountable. I lost a son to gun violence at 17, a twin brother to a decades-long federal prison sentence and an older brother to a fatal encounter with police. I also served as Seattle’s first gun violence prevention liaison, trained through the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy. I know the personal cost of violence and the work required to prevent it. Seattle has many of the parts to reduce gun violence. It needs a coordinated plan to connect them and a system to support the work.
From April to August 2026, the Seattle City Council hired me to write three reports guiding its gun violence policy and budget decisions. I measured Seattle’s efforts against “Beyond Models,” a national framework from the California Partnership for Safe Communities. It asks a basic question: Does a city have the leadership, people, partnerships, information and systems to reduce shootings and keep the numbers down? It argues few cities sustain reductions in gun violence, even with proven strategies and historic investment.
I found that Seattle has strong programs and community partners. What it lacks is one coordinated plan that identifies who is driving shootings, makes clear who is responsible for what, gives community partners the support they need to succeed and independently measures whether the strategy is working. I recommended establishing an Office of Violence Prevention, or a similar structure, to connect this work across government, police, hospitals and community partners. Seattle’s leaders can build a system that will make a plan work, not simply choose one model.
The City Council passed Resolution 32217, which calls for a two-year, $418,000 partnership with the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College to bring its Group Violence Intervention strategy to Seattle. Weeks later, the mayor’s gun violence plan moved gun violence intervention programs into the CARE (Community Assisted Response and Engagement) Department under a new director of gun violence reduction and will map existing programs with the University of Washington.
These are meaningful steps toward the leadership Seattle has lacked. But the council and the mayor each plan to do their own study of the problem and both call for a strategy like John Jay College’s. Without a shared definition of the problem, Seattle risks two parallel strategies, one run by Seattle police and CARE, the other by NNSC, instead of one coordinated plan.
That means Seattle may pick a strategy before it understands who is being shot, where, what is driving it and why the city’s response has fallen short. Moving gun violence programs under CARE is a start; the next step is giving CARE the authority, staff and funding to outlast any one administration. Community programs also need trained intervention workers who follow shared protocols and have standard operating procedures at shooting scenes. Seattle needs experts to broker professional respect between police and community providers. Investment without this foundation fails the programs and the public.
Group violence intervention focuses police, the community’s moral voice and services on the few people at highest risk of lethal violence, with a clear offer: Take help and leave violence behind, or be stopped. Similar strategies helped reduce homicides in Baltimore by about 60% and youth homicides by 63% in Boston. I support group violence intervention. My concern is that the Seattle resolution names one provider before any competitive bidding or study of the problem. Baltimore tried this approach twice and failed. What made it work was not the model, but the setup: A city violence prevention office led it, with help from several outside expert groups. No single provider produced those results.
The resolution says the city would evaluate the potential partnership with John Jay College after two years, but it doesn’t say how the evaluator would be chosen. Seattle could fund the partnership for a limited first phase to study who is involved in shootings and what conflicts lead to the shootings, and to determine whether Seattle is ready to carry out the strategy. Before signing a longer contract, the city should assess its own gaps in leadership and staffing, compare strategies and outside experts, and hire an evaluator with no role in the work and no financial stake in its results.
