URBAN PEACE
The Urban Peace program at Advancement Project reduces and prevents community violence, making poor neighborhoods safer so that children can learn, families can thrive and communities can prosper.
Follow Urban Peace updates on Facebook.
A new approach to preventing community violence, Urban Peace applies public health methods to understand the underlying reasons for violence and creates innovative, holistic ways to change the conditions that lead to them.
Urban Peace’s approach to violence reduction is well aligned with the national STRYVE (Striving to Reduce Youth Violence Everywhere) campaign from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. As a former grantee of the CDC, Urban Peace shares their analysis about the causes and solutions to youth violence, summarized in this two-minute video.
Urban Peace Achievements
As a result of our groundbreaking 2007 report that outlined recommendations for the City of L.A. – A Call to Action: The Case for Comprehensive Solutions to L.A.’s Gang Epidemic – our Urban Peace work has been instrumental in achieving the following:
- The City of L.A. adopted new strategies that decreased gang violence by 15%. In 2011, the homicide rate was at its lowest since the 1960’s.
- The City of L.A. created an office of Gang Reduction & Youth Development focusing public resources on 12 gang violence hot zones identified in conjunction with community leaders.
- The L.A. Police Department transformed the way it dealt with gangs- from a counter-productive, overbroad suppression approach to relationship-based, problem-solving policing.
- Gang homicides dropped 57% in the parks and surrounding neighborhoods with the Summer Night Lights program.
- Nearly 1,200 have been trained through the Urban Peace Academy - a rigorous training program that sets professional standards for this dangerous work, critical to keeping peace on the streets. Additionally, 400 police officers were trained to work with interventionists and implement effective community policing.
Implementing a Comprehensive Violence Reduction Strategy
Our work implementing the comprehensive violence reduction strategy continues as we pursue:
-
Building a track record for success
- For example, launching a unique Safe Passages program in the Belmont Schools Zone of Choice to harness the resources of both public and private stakeholders to ensure that safe routes to school are available as students cross gang territorial lines.
-
Expanding our impact
- One strategy is the Los Angeles Community Safety Scorecard, a Zip code level analysis of L.A.'s communities that assigns a letter grade based on a complex set of risk and protective factors. This tool helps advocates and policymakers target resources more effectively and understand how to move a neighborhood from less to more safe.
-
Reforming large public systems
- Working with the Probation Department to ensure that the 20,000 youth in their charge are no longer abused and neglected, reversing the Department's inability to help system-involved children.
- Finding or creating new funding streams for prevention
