As gun violence has risen in St. Paul, researchers who came to the city last year linked a large percent of it to violent street groups.
For more than a year, Ramsey County and St. Paul officials have discussed the Group Violence Intervention initiative — a carrot-and-stick approach of offering services to people who want to get out of a life of violence and focusing law enforcement on the groups who won’t stop shooting.
There was at least $100,000 on the table to get GVI off the ground and the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office staff wrote a grant proposal. In the end, they didn’t apply for it, although federal partners told them they were likely to get the funding.
While St. Paul Police Department brass supported the idea, the mayor’s office had concerns and questions about how the model would specifically address the needs of St. Paul, according to emails from city and county staff reviewed by the Pioneer Press as well as conversations with officials involved. The county attorney’s office didn’t want to move forward without Mayor Melvin Carter on board.
“Ultimately, we wouldn’t do it alone,” Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said in a statement.
Carter said in a recent interview he is open to an approach like GVI, but he needs to know more about how any initiative aimed at reducing violence would work in St. Paul and gain buy-in from the broader community.
“We have to build a model that we know works in St. Paul as opposed to just sort of replicating a national model,” Carter said. “… I am still excited for the opportunity to work with the county attorney’s office and our police department under a focused type of model and we are still … working out the details.”
Now, as St. Paul grapples with the most homicides in the city in more than two decades, there are various smaller initiatives underway, but no coordinated multi-agency plan to quell the violence.
The discussions are ongoing, though. The national director of GVI met with the St. Paul City Council recently. And Carter is holding three community meetings about public safety and said he’s looking forward to hearing people’s ideas for “any proven strategy we can come up with to significantly reduce gun violence here in St. Paul.”
MANY SHOOTINGS TRACED TO FEUDS BETWEEN STREET GROUPS
In September 2018, researchers from the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College in New York came to St. Paul to assess how group dynamics impact violence locally.
What emerged was a picture that mirrors what the organization says is playing out in urban centers across the country: The majority of violent crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals involved in groups or gangs.
Their findings in St. Paul included:
- Feuds among 34 street groups — they could be traditional gangs or just a loosely-knit social network — were most often the common denominator between shootings.
- Between 2015 and mid-2018, violence among the groups was linked to at least 36 percent of St. Paul’s homicides and 40 percent of non-fatal shootings.
- The people in the groups, however, made up less than half a percent of the city’s population.
- Group-involved shootings were on the rise.
Louisa Aviles, director of GVI at National Network for Safe Communities, calls GVI an approach and not a program. Aviles said it’s flexible enough to meet the needs of different communities.
They also don’t use the word “gang.” That’s because the groups tend not to have organized hierarchies, Aviles said, unlike gangs of the past. Their behavior isn’t typically motivated by money or involvement in the drug trade, either.
Instead, the groups are more fluid and their conflicts tend to arise from feuds with other groups often triggered by perceived signs of disrespect. Violence can spike when groups get locked in a retaliatory cycle.
DELIVERING A MESSAGE: VIOLENCE NEEDS TO STOP
Cities across the country have rolled out GVI in different forms in the past 20 years and they’ve seen broad success in reducing gun violence, including in Minneapolis.
The idea is to use law enforcement and community member’s knowledge of groups and group members to identify those involved, and then call them into meetings with community leaders who have relationships with the group members.
Their role at the meetings is to strongly deliver the message that the violence needs to stop, that the community cares about them and wants to keep them alive, and to offer support for those who want it, Aviles said.
Then, law enforcement officers articulate the legal consequences the group will face if they keep up the violence.
For example, group members — many of whom are already on probation for past crimes — could more regularly be brought in for probation violations, or probation officers might make more routine visits to their houses.
The aim is for whole groups to feel pressure when members don’t stop shooting, Aviles said. Help is swiftly made available for those who want it.
SOME RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT APPROACH
The method doesn’t come without questions.
GVI is intended to shift the approach to viewing people involved in violence as potential next victims, not perpetrators.
And gun violence in St. Paul disproportionately impacts the African-American community — about 74 percent of the people shot in the city this year have been black, and at least 23 of 28 homicide victims were African-American, according to police statistics.
During a presentation to the St. Paul City Council about GVI in October, Council Member Mitra Nelson asked how the approach works when there are histories of “communities that are overpoliced or are policed unfairly.”
She also asked how group members are selected, a question Carter echoed in a recent interview.
“How do we make sure that we do that in a way that it doesn’t cast too wide a net that sweeps up young people in our community that shouldn’t be swept up?” Carter said. “… Those are the types of details that we have to know and be in agreement on.”
People are identified by law enforcement based on incidents of violence, Aviles said.
GVI is commonly misunderstood to involve a “list” of group members who are subject to constant special attention from law enforcement, but that’s not correct, Aviles said.
Instead, Aviles said a group doesn’t get any special attention from law enforcement unless they’re involved in serious violence in violation of the “no shootings/no killings” rules that the GVI partnership sets out with members of the group.
MORE THAN A YEAR OF DISCUSSIONS
St. Paul and Ramsey County officials had many discussions before the July deadline for the federal grant application for GVI, but the decision about applying for it came down to the wire, the Pioneer Press found in reviewing hundreds of pages of emails obtained in public records requests.
In February 2018, staff from the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office and St. Paul Police went to New York to meet with the criminologist who started GVI, and local community members were included in discussions that started about two months later.
In December 2018, Aviles met with Carter, Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher and others to discuss findings from their study about shootings in St. Paul.
Emails show strong support continued for the method from the Ramsey County Attorney and St. Paul Police Chief Todd Axtell.
In May, Axtell emphasized the need to secure the funding in an email to Carter, writing: “I know it is very important for you (and me) to have resources available for those who wish to get out of the cycle of violence — this is a high priority. Additionally, I know we agree that there is a need to unapologetically target those who are most likely to shoot someone, or become a victim of gun violence.”
But the messages also show the concerns that were being raised.
Tarek Tomes, then the city’s Chief Innovation Officer, wrote to Carter and Tincher in March and said the method didn’t seem to include anything new as far as law enforcement’s role and that the “resource and opportunity options aren’t prepared or tangible.”
GRANT PROPOSAL WRITTEN, NOT SUBMITTED
The momentum continued and the county attorney’s office drafted the grant proposal.
It proposed a governing team to oversee an approach based on the GVI model, as well as its goals and a general strategy for how social service providers, law enforcement and city and community leaders would work together to reach them.
Tincher raised questions in emails and said she had “concerns with moving forward on an effort … without clear understanding and agreement” by everyone involved about how they would “achieve the goals we state.”
She asked who would be driving decisions and expressed concerns about whether community leaders would “feel empowered to advocate and argue with leaders/departments such as SPPD, the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” if there were disagreements during implementation.
On July 15 — the day the grant application was due — Erica Schumacher, a county attorney’s office staffer, wrote back to Tincher and urged the mayor’s office to take a more pivotal role.
“You should be the ultimate decision-maker because you are at the apex of police and community,” she wrote.
Schumacher told Tincher that the county attorney’s office could apply for the grant, with any changes they wanted, or they could help the city apply.
In the end, neither Ramsey County nor St. Paul applied.
“This issue is in desperate need of coordinated leadership to bring people together to start working on solutions and figuring out how to find the funding,” Choi said in a statement explaining the decision. “In speaking with potential partners this past summer, we didn’t feel that we had consensus around a coordinated strategy to actually reduce shots fired.”
Four other agencies, none in the east metro, applied for grants and decisions haven’t been made about which will receive funding.
Carter said on Thursday he’s not opposed to GVI, and added that he’s “very intrigued” by “focused-deterrence” models.
But he said questions remain about how street outreach workers would successfully work alongside law enforcement, as well as how to fund and provide the right resources to help group members get the services they need.
“I want to make sure … we are doing it thoughtfully, that we are doing it in a way that is evidence based, that we are doing it in a way that we are clear about what we are trying to do (so) that we can really say that this is a new approach that is meeting the challenges that we have today in our community,” Carter said.
MINNEAPOLIS OFFICIAL: GVI WORKS
Minneapolis started GVI in 2017, and the city has compared shootings from 2016 to the years that followed.
There were 93 non-fatal group-involved shootings in 2016, which fell to 25 in 2018; however, shootings not involving group violence were up in 2018 compared to the previous two years.
Community members like the approach Minneapolis takes of having a 24-hour crisis line, which is managed by an outreach team, because it gives people “an opportunity to help the young people in their community without just calling the police,” said Sasha Cotton, director of the Minneapolis Office of Violence Prevention.
And on the law enforcement side, Cotton said she thinks GVI “helps them to be more of a scalpel and not a mallet.”
“It’s not saturation policing, where you stop everything that moves because there was a recent homicide or shooting,” Cotton said.
Danny Givens Jr., who was hired by St. Paul-Ramsey County Public Health last summer, has shadowed Cotton as part of his work in providing gun violence prevention, intervention and healing services.
He said his aim is to understand how GVI could benefit St. Paul or if another model might be a better fit.
WHAT’S NEXT?
St. Paul City Council President Amy Brendmoen said she and others want to make sure there’s “buy-in from advocacy groups” before they move forward with any new program, such as GVI, which she thinks should be used in St. Paul.
Brendmoen said she thinks people in St. Paul are cautious because of their experience with another plan between the city, Ramsey County and the St. Paul Public Schools that would have shared youth data to identify and help at-risk students before they turn to crime.
Amid withering criticism and community pushback, officials announced in January that the agreement was being canceled.
Carter said he’s interested in building a supplemental public safety budget, but it depends on what happens with Tuesday’s vote on organized garbage collection in the city because it will have an impact on the tax levy.
The community conversations about public safety that Carter is hosting are Thursday, then Nov. 12 and Nov. 16. More information can be found at stpaul.gov/departments/mayors-office/public-safety-community-meetings.
“I don’t think I am the person to say, ‘This is the one or that is the one,’ ” Carter said of the potential approaches the city could take. “This is all part of why we are bringing people together to say, ‘Let’s address what our core questions need to be in the community so we can build the solutions together.’ “
Choi said the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office is ready to embrace any “proven strategy,” even if its not GVI, “that promises to reduce shots fired with dedicated staff and funding.”
Though Cotton works on GVI in Minneapolis, she is a St. Paul resident and she said she’s been hearing from people in the community about the need for an action plan.
“Even if the city doesn’t take on GVI, it’s really clear that we as a city need to do something in St. Paul,” Cotton said.