South Park Peacemakers: Reducing Community Violence

The Connie Rice Institute for Urban Peace, doing business as the Urban Peace Institute (UPI), will implement the South Park Peacemakers: Reducing Community Violence initiative. UPI’s community-based gun violence intervention initiative will reduce violent crime and save the lives of Los Angeles’ South Park neighborhood residents who are disproportionately impacted by gun and gang violence.

UPI will convene a CVIPI Working Group/Planning Team comprised of diverse stakeholders to assess the drivers of violence and develop community-based violence intervention and prevention strategies. UPI will engage a subrecipient research partner, University of California Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, to conduct a community violence assessment to determine where and why violence is occurring in this underserved neighborhood. UPI will then implement the strategies identified in the Planning Team’s Violence Reduction Strategic Plan, with an emphasis on coordinating a community-based peacemaker driven response to reduce gun and gang violence in the community.

During the implementation phase, UPI will train and support seven new peacemakers employed by subrecipient Resilient, a local violence intervention partner. These peacemakers will work on-the-ground to reduce violent crime and homicides by responding to shootings, preventing violent retaliations and conducting rumor control.

UPI will also convene a Rapid Response Team to identify crime hotspots and effectively deploy Resilient’s violence intervention workers based on timely violent crime data provided by the Los Angeles Police Department and analyzed by subrecipient People’s Health Solutions. UPI will also strengthen multidisciplinary partnerships among residents, violence intervention workers, and law enforcement officers by expanding the organization’s Leadership Institute and creating a new South Park School Safety Collaborative. UC Davis will identify program metrics and conduct outcome assessments to assess the efficacy of this initiative to reduce gun and gang violence.

UPI expects to achieve the following objectives over the three-year grant period: 1) Violent crime in South Park will be reduced by at least 10%; 2) Homicides will be reduced by at least 5%; and 3) Residents’ engagement and collaboration with law enforcement and violence intervention agencies will increase by 20% over the three-year grant period. UPI seeks priority consideration for OJP Priority Area 1(A) promoting racial equity detailed on Page 10-11 of the proposal narrative; Priority Area 2 as a community with high levels of homicides addressed on Page 2; and Priority Area 3 demonstrating partnerships with a multidisciplinary team detailed on Page 6-7 and the CVIPI Team attachment.