In a Brooklyn Neighborhood, Residents — Not Police — Take the Lead on Preventing Violence

On a recent Tuesday, alongside a vacant lot in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Dushoun Almond — better known as Bigga — chatted with New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander in a makeshift sidewalk barbershop offering cuts for free. Two men got trims and their beards lined up, and a young boy was just starting an all around, his hair falling to the pavement and a grin on his face. “Your haircut is looking good, young man,” Lander told him.

Bigga got a call.

It was a fight between two men at a laundromat down the block. Bigga and his team of violence interrupters from Brownsville In, Violence Out jumped into action, hustling to the end of the block and across the street. When they arrived, a tense crowd had formed — accusations flying, unsubstantiated rumors of a stabbing echoing off storefronts.

One of the men involved, who’d bolted moments earlier, came stumbling back toward the laundromat, the afternoon sun illuminating a swollen and bloody face from what turned out to be a fistfight. Bigga and the interrupters — wary that the man might go back in swinging — stepped between him and the potential for more violence.

Within moments, shouts began to soften into tense but real conversation. Bigga warned the man of the potential repercussions. “You just told all these people out here you know where he lives,” he said. “What do you think could happen?” The man turned around and left — no stretcher, no flashing lights, and no trip to the precinct. What could have been an ugly moment turned into something smaller, and for that handful of tense minutes, public safety in the heart of Brownsville was in the hands of its own residents.

And for the founders of the Brownsville Safety Alliance, that is exactly the point.

The Alliance takes place for one week each quarter. For those BSA days, on two blocks of the neighborhood, violence prevention groups like Brownsville In, Violence Out take the lead on public safety — instead of the police. By stepping in to calm conflicts and route emergencies to services instead of cuffs, they work to prevent violence without force or incarceration.

“These calls could lead to more violence and arrest,” Bigga told me. “Somebody going through the system. But we can talk to them because the community knows us and we know the community. We know our people. We can talk them down, or see what they need, and lead them to the right people.”

This approach — relying on credible community members and local organizations to proactively prevent and respond to violence — is the essence of community-based violence intervention. 

The most recent iteration of the Alliance took place from April 29 to May 3. During that time, 911 and 311 calls were routed from law enforcement to Bigga and his group of violence interrupters. It only lasts for a limited time, but it draws on Brownsville In, Violence Out’s year-round work as one of more than two dozen community-led groups that make up the New York City Crisis Management System.

The CMS, which began in 2012, is New York City’s effort to coordinate, fund, and institutionalize violence intervention as a mainstay of the public safety ecosystem. In a way, the Brownsville Safety Alliance represents a vision of a future with more community-led public safety — what a fully funded, supported, and empowered violence interruption system could be.

“These guys are able to reach people in the streets that most people are not able to reach,” Bilal Jacks, a barber from Brownsville who was offering the free cuts during the Alliance week in April, said. “They have some reputable guys on their team who are able to say, ‘I don’t think you should do that. There’s no need for you guys to have guns, or to have a shootout, or to have a fight.’”

The Brownsville Safety Alliance isn’t just about the violence interrupters. During Alliance weeks, resource tents line the streets of Mother Gaston Boulevard, connecting residents with legal aid, housing and mental health support, work opportunities, and more — all the way down to free books and bags of chips. It even featured some of the biggest drill rappers in Brooklyn learning how to “stop the bleed” and use fentanyl test strips, and sharing the training session with thousands of followers on Instagram live.

We can talk to them because the community knows us and we know the community. We know our people.

Dushoun “Bigga” Almond

“I love coming out here, bringing our services to the public, because you won’t know who we are or where we’re at unless you see our presence, not a poster,” said Wilhelmina Reynolds, with the addiction recovery services program Phoenix House. “You see us in our community. And that’s the most amazing thing.”

Outside of Brownsville, CMS violence interrupters are still working, and appear to be succeeding, at preventing shootings, a recent study by Comptroller Lander’s office found. The report analyzed shooting data over the past decade and estimated that areas where CMS programs are active experienced a statistically significant reduction in gun violence.

The analysis found that police precincts with CMS-funded programs like Brownsville In, Violence Out saw 20 percent fewer shootings than would be expected without them, according to statistical modeling. In all, that amounts to 1,567 fewer shootings citywide from 2012 through 2024.

“They’re really working,” Lander said as he talked with the men at the pop-up barbershop that day. “That’s making a big difference. But there’s a bunch of things still holding them back.”

The city has expanded the CMS significantly, both in funding and geographic reach, over the past decade. Its budget has grown from $4.8 million in its first year to nearly $100 million today. And its footprint has expanded from just a handful of neighborhoods to 29 police precincts. But that’s out of 77 total precincts, meaning most neighborhoods still don’t have city-funded violence interrupters.

Lander said some of the neighborhoods that still don’t have violence interruption programs still suffer from relatively high rates of gun violence. Those neighborhoods, he said, shouldn’t be ignored.

“They absolutely need it,” Lander told me.

The comptroller’s report also pinpointed the hurdles violence interrupters and other community-based programs routinely face, the most significant of which is persistent problems within the city’s payment and reimbursement system. The average wait time for CMS organizations to get reimbursed for their work increased dramatically from 130 days in 2016 to 255 days in 2024, the comptroller’s report found. 

When paychecks — already modest compared to New York’s high costs — are interrupted for months, it makes it hard for nonprofits to retain staff working in difficult and often dangerous conditions.

CAMBA, the community services nonprofit that serves as the parent organization for Brownsville In, Violence Out, for example, is owed millions from the city, the comptroller said. But not every organization has a larger parent to help absorb the volatility.

“It’s crazy,” Lander said. “It’s almost like CAMBA is lending money to the city of New York. But if you’re small, you can’t. Even if you’re large, you’re not supposed to have to be the city’s banker. It makes no sense.”

New York’s CMS is the most well-funded community violence intervention effort in the country, but its funding and resources are still minuscule compared with the size of the city and the burden of gun violence. (For comparison, the New York City Police Department’s budget was roughly $11 billion in fiscal year 2024.)

“There was a general feedback of certain places not getting enough resources or money — not only reimbursements, but how much the budget is in general,” Justyn Richardson, director of criminal justice and public safety policy in the Comptroller’s Office, said. “Our analysis was how effective they are in their particular precinct, but most precincts don’t have a CVI at all. Think about how much we could expand the benefit.”

An expansion could benefit the city in other ways, too. 

“Any shooting costs about $300,000 minimum, and that’s not even assuming that there was an injury as a result,” said Jeffrey Butts, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and director of the John Jay Research and Evaluation Center. “You’ll see that these programs are much cheaper than taking the same amount of money and investing it in expanded enforcement.”

While the comptroller’s report is one of the most comprehensive reviews of the system to date, its methodology doesn’t provide definitive evidence of cause and effect, a high bar that’s challenging to reach in social science. 

“That’s always difficult,” Butts told me. Still, Butts said, the study adds to a growing body of promising evidence suggesting that CMS helps reduce violence in the Big Apple.

But it’s not a magic solution, he said.

“These programs are important,” he said, “You don’t shift everything into CMS and forget about all other support sectors, but it’s certainly worth the money that the city spends.”

The report also points to data issues — both coming from and going to the violence prevention groups. The comptroller’s report found that there’s no standardized data collection on the groups that make up CMS, and no comprehensive strategy in place to evaluate them. Meanwhile, despite their city-sanctioned role in preventing violence, the programs have only limited access to essential real-time city data on crime trends, shootings, and public health indicators. 

“We want them to have all this real-time data at their fingertips to help people and help reduce shootings,” said Richardson.

Even as violence interrupters log real wins, they face a deeper barrier to expanding their work: the NYPD’s monopoly over the city’s public safety system, Dana Rachlin, the executive director and co-founder of We Build the Block and one of the architects of the Brownsville Safety Alliance, told the comptroller as he visited the BSA.

“We could talk for days and days and days about payments and how much people get paid, and programming and all of that. But at the end of the day, nothing works if we’re not rightsizing the role of the NYPD,” she told him. “They are the sole center, and they control everything in the orbit, versus being part of the ecosystem.”

The NYPD’s reluctance to cede ground was on display during the April Alliance week. Although the department had agreed to channel calls to Bigga’s team and step back routine enforcement on the designated blocks, officers continued to circle the area and handed out at least one summons, enforcement that directly undermined the week’s de-escalation goals, Rachlin said.

“This was a very positive thing for the NYPD, and yet they are undermining it in both principle and practice,” Rachlin told me. “It doesn’t seem to make sense at a time when we’re trying to reduce the number of people going through the court system, and we’re trying to create safer communities. If we’re not allowing the community partners to do their work without the government undermining them, then the story shifts.”

As Bigga waited for the next emergency call, he strategized how to handle a reignited beef between some young men in two nearby public housing developments and gave some of his program participants advice. Then he paused to lay out a simple case for community response.

“We know the young man who might be upset that his Sunday sneakers and his gym sneakers are his everyday sneakers. And that anger turns into something else, and now he wants to lash out,” he said. “Or the young people who are upset that they didn’t eat breakfast in the morning. And they got to keep just being hungry through school. We know that. We’re able to talk to them about that.”

“If it ain’t a murder, let us help,” he said. “We can lower the 911 calls for you.”