Earlier this year, a group of researchers quietly published a study with a stunning finding: A D.C. government-funded program aimed at reducing gun violence was actually associated with a slight increase in firearm fatalities in certain neighborhoods.
The study, spearheaded by Johns Hopkins professor Daniel Webster and University of Maryland professor Joseph Richardson, examined two D.C. programs that aimed to prevent shootings and offer resources to those most at risk of picking up a gun. The two launched their evaluation in 2023, as the city was experiencing a generational surge in homicides. Now, three years later, killings in D.C. have fallen sharply, in keeping with national trends — but, according to this research, the millions the city had spent on violence intervention programs did not appear to contribute to that reduction.
“I am not surprised that the outcomes were not good,” said Webster, who has studied gun violence prevention strategies for decades and said D.C.’s programs had a “fundamentally flawed” approach.
The findings, reflecting data from 2018 through the middle of 2025, were yet another blow for the city’s violence interruption programs, which have taken hits to both their budgets and reputations in recent years. Biden-era federal funding for these community anti-violence programs has dried up. In 2024, two city officials, including D.C. Council member Trayon White, were charged with bribery related to city violence intervention grants. And some violence interruption providers have come under scrutiny for employee misbehavior or alleged misuse of government funds.
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Now, as the final term of Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) winds down and Janeese Lewis George, the Democratic nominee for mayor, prepares her public safety strategy, the researchers who spearheaded the study are calling on the D.C. government to overhaul the violence intervention programs. Meanwhile, the violence interruption workers who lost their jobs after a recent round of budget cuts are mulling their own uncertain futures, contemplating how it feels to be discarded after years of grueling, dangerous work on the city’s streets.
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For some, “this is the only job that they’ve ever known,” said Alicia Jackson, who, until her employer’s grant with the city expired on Sept. 30, managed a team of violence interrupters in Northeast D.C.’s Trinidad neighborhood. “What are they gonna do?”
Lindsey Appiah, the District’s deputy mayor for public safety and justice, declined to be interviewed about the study results and budget cuts to the violence intervention programs, but said in a statement that much of the study’s core analysis “reflects the program’s earliest years” and does not take into account significant reforms enacted since 2024.
Appiah touted the Bowser administration’s efforts in public safety and noted that homicides were continuing to fall in the District.
“Through a comprehensive, collaborative approach across our public safety and justice ecosystem, including violence interruption, police enforcement, and policy changes to strengthen accountability, we have significantly reduced gun violence in our city,” she said in the statement.
And as for the workers who find themselves unemployed, Appiah encouraged them to contact the city’s new violence prevention grantees about open roles.
“Violence interrupters do some of the hardest and dangerous work in our city, and we are deeply grateful to each of them,” she said. “We understand that this transition is difficult. The work continues.”
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D.C. launched a pair of violence interruption programs in 2018, focused on diffusing neighborhood conflicts that can lead to shootings. One, housed under D.C.’s Office of the Attorney General, was called “Cure the Streets.” Another was housed under a nascent mayoral agency called the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE).
Some violence interrupters made a difference, brokering truces between crews in some of the city’s most violent neighborhoods and at times overseeing stretches of months without gun violence in areas that were accustomed to regular shootings. But overall, both programs ended up struggling, Webster said.
Cure the Streets adopted a model called Cure Violence, which was designed to address large, hierarchical gangs where leaders direct shooters to target people. The problem, according to Webster, is that violence in D.C. does not operate that way and has instead been increasingly tied to social media beefs, music and other kinds of interpersonal disputes.
As for the ONSE initiative, the agency never articulated a coherent strategy for reducing violence and offered little direction or accountability for the community-based organizations they funded, according to Webster and Richardson.
“I can see the honor and the heroics and integrity in the frontline workers and their commitment to really reducing gun violence in D.C. and working to improve their communities,” said Richardson, but they didn’t have “a full set of tools provided by the city to do so.”
A separate study featuring the perspectives of frontline workers in D.C. is forthcoming, Richardson said.
Staffing at some ONSE sites was also “pathetically low,” Webster added. “You’d have to have superman in there to have good outcomes with that low staffing.”
Appiah, the deputy mayor, said “the Mayor’s commitment to this work is clear,” citing consistent investments in the programs.
The mayor and Office of the Attorney General did invest in the programs. The budget for ONSE grew from about $5 million in fiscal year 2019 to $28 million at its height in fiscal year 2022 — including an $18 million bump between 2021 and 2022 alone. The increase in funding was made possible by both the city government and the Biden administration, which boosted federal investments in non-police forms of violence prevention.
“Some of that growth happened quicker than the city planned for,” said David Muhammad, director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. Muhammad, who has been hired to advise D.C. on violence reduction strategies, said that particularly at ONSE, “there weren’t the appropriate structures, accountability measures, data collection that could have made the work better.” Appiah, on the other hand, said the agency “was building the infrastructure to support that level of investment.”
One D.C. leader sought to evaluate and restructure the programs, Webster said: Linda Harllee Harper, who served as director of ONSE from February 2023 to her death from cancer in May of that year.
Harllee Harper, a rare leader who had the respect of both government bureaucrats and the streetwise violence interrupters, knew the ONSE program was “troubled” and set out to understand why, Webster said. Bowser spoke at her funeral, full of emotion as she told the audience how Linda made her believe in the potential of once-troubled young men to turn their lives around.
After Harllee Harper’s death, homicides and carjackings started dropping in D.C., as they did across the country. Many sought to take credit. The police department increased high visibility patrols in the city’s most violent neighborhoods. Federal prosecutors in charge of tackling D.C. street crime focused their attention on building drug and gun cases against violent neighborhood crews. The Bowser administration touted its approach, which included a package of laws that increased penalties for gun crimes, and giving violence interruption staff clearer directions about what to do after a shooting, Appiah said.
But as the overall news about crime got better, the headlines about D.C.’s violence interruption programs grew more negative. Some violence interruption workers were charged with violent crimes. Then, a corruption scandal: White, a D.C. Council member, was arrested and charged with bribery connected to the violence interruption program, a legal saga that is still ongoing after a mistrial last month. A ONSE deputy director, Dana McDaniel, pleaded guilty to bribery and acknowledged that she had accepted money from the same contractor who had given cash to White.
An investigation by The Washington Post this year also found that Life Deeds, the company run by the contractor at the center of the bribery scandal, had been allowed to spend large sums of government money in ways that top D.C. officials acknowledge was unacceptable.
It was unfair to hold the entire community responsible for the actions of a few, Muhammad said, but the cascade of scandals resulted in community violence intervention programs “getting quite a black eye in D.C.”
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It’s notoriously difficult to figure out why crime goes up and down, criminologists say. It’s also hard to measure the effectiveness of interventions like violence interrupters; how do you track the shootings that never happen because someone intervened? Among those who have tried to evaluate such programs, the results are mixed, with some bright spots: A study Webster led in Baltimore found that its Safe Streets violence interruption program was associated with a 22% drop in homicides over the course of about 15 years.
In D.C., Webster and Richardson’s evaluation yielded discouraging results. Between 2018 and 2025, the Cure the Streets program had no statistically significant impact on fatal firearm violence, it found. The ONSE program, however, found “evidence consistent with violence-generating program effects” — roughly one additional firearm homicide a year per neighborhood where the program operated.
After an early peek at those findings last year, council member Brooke Pinto, who chairs the public safety committee, said she was “very, very alarmed.” She recommended dissolving ONSE entirely and moving all violence interruption programming over to the attorney general’s office, whose programs were performing less poorly, according to the study.
Pinto reversed course after she could not get buy-in from the attorney general and her council colleagues, and lawmakers opted to consolidate all the programming under ONSE instead. The Ward 2 lawmaker said recently that she has been encouraged that ONSE has been moving its program towards a “group violence reduction strategy” similar to what has been used in neighboring Baltimore.
“It’s … completely unacceptable when people misuse taxpayer dollars or are violent to one another,” she said. “We will not stand for that, and it doesn’t mean that the entire program is not worth investing in, in a responsible way with targeted goals and oversight.”
Jackson also heard about what the researchers found — and she was shocked, she said.
She saw the grateful looks on people’s faces as they handed out meals to the homeless. They held coat drives and back-to-school events for the neighborhood. They put together a Thanksgiving dinner that fed 500 people at the local rec center.
And, she said, they worked directly with dozens of people considered at high risk of committing violent crimes. Each outreach worker had a case load of 15 people who they would help with housing, employment and education. She recalled the story of one young man who, with the help of her team, went back to high school, graduated and landed a steady and lucrative job at FedEx. Another young man got into a job training program with D.C. Central Kitchen, she said. In another case, the team worked with another group of violence interrupters in a different neighborhood to quash a conflict that had led to multiple homicides, stopping further bloodshed.
“We stepped right in to stop those incidents before they became violent,” she said. How could a study tell her they had made no difference?
With a new mayor starting in January, there’s a good chance D.C.’s entire strategy towards violence prevention could change again. In a statement, Lewis George pointed to programs in Baltimore, Chicago and Oakland as potential models.
“D.C. began doing that work earlier, but they are doing it better,” Lewis George said. “As mayor, I will overhaul and rebuild trust in our programs.”
Webster said he thinks the city needs to start small as it rebuilds.
“Put together a really strong program that is not built to fail,” he said. “Show that you can do this in a smaller, defined area. Take the lessons from that and hopefully build on that.”
For now, the city is moving forward by awarding contracts across seven wards of the city. Appiah’s office said grantees will be forced to adhere to the new “group violence reduction strategy,” a model focused intensely on the highest-risk individuals in a community, which offers them intensive support and threatens law enforcement action against those who continue to commit violence.
In Trinidad, the violence interruption office where Jackson worked is closed as of Oct. 1. The city selected a new grantee to cover all of Ward 5, where Trinidad is located, but has not publicly announced the recipient.
“Community members were feeling safer because we were there,” said Jackson. “I’m getting calls every day — ‘When is your office going to open back up?’ And I have to say, well, I don’t know.”
After what Jackson described as a remarkable stretch with relatively little violence, the police district that encompasses the Trinidad neighborhood experienced its first homicide of the year on Friday, Oct. 2.
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