By Brentin Mock
CityLab
Terrence McCoy recently offered up an interesting solution to Baltimore’s homicide crisis in The Washington Post: A program like one in Richmond, California, that identifies residents with the most violent histories of criminal behavior and pays them to stay out of trouble. Under Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety Initiative, participants receive monthly stipends up to $1,000 for refraining from violence and following a “life map” regimen of GED classes, job training, anger-management counseling and other forms of criminal-conversion therapy.
So far, the program appears effective. In less than eight years of existence, the number of killings per year there dropped from 47 in 2007 to just 11 last year. Of course, that drop can’t be credited totally to the program. As pointed out in Mother Jones last year, the declines have also coincided with the arrival of a new police chief who has dramatically reformed policing practices in Richmond. Still, McCoy reports that some in California believe that the Richmond model could have a positive impact in Baltimore, which just suffered its most murderous month in 40 years.
Let’s take a look at ”the Richmond Model.” First, it’s not novel. It’s not even the first of its kind. As Mother Jones points out, Boston employed a similar program in the 1990s. In Pittsburgh, the One Vision, One Life initiative, which began in 2004, was closer to an apples-to-apples version of what Richmond started three years later. Murders continued to escalate in the first few years of One Vision, peaking in 2008 with 120 homicides, but then made a precipitous drop in 2009 down to 88 murders the following year, then dropping even lower in 2011 (check out this graphic from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). And then there’s the Chicago Ceasefire program, made popular in the award-winning documentary The Interrupters.
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