June 6, 2019 | From City of New Orleans
City of New Orleans’ Gun Violence Reduction Task Force Provides Preview of Recommendations
NEW ORLEANS – The City of New Orleans, in recognition of Gun Violence Awareness Day, today offered an advance look at work being undertaken by Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s Gun Violence Reduction Task Force. Mayor Cantrell announced the formation of the task force in one of her first executive orders after taking office in May 2018; the group’s work began in September.
Since then, the group has developed a comprehensive set of recommendations to measurably reduce gun violence in New Orleans, which will be announced in a full report that will be released by Aug. 1, 2019. Here is are some of the initial recommendations along with a timeline of this work.
Recommendations
Public Health through Social Services: The City can reduce gun violence over time by creating an interdisciplinary entity that is tasked with creating public health interventions, ensuring that programming is effectively delivered and measuring the outcomes. This entity, which is driven by data and informed by national best practices, should offer individuals likely to be involved in gun violence a variety of services that can help prevent that involvement.
Preventing Homicides by Solving Homicides Cases: Through solving more homicide cases, law enforcement can play a critical role in removing dangerous individuals from our communities, deterring would-be shooters and increasing community trust in the criminal justice system to bring perpetrators to justice. These recommendations largely focus on increased training, collaboration and institutionalizing the characteristics of good homicide investigations department-wide through an operations manual.
Community Engagement: Cure Violence New Orleans (Cure Violence) is a local arm of an international violence intervention program based out of Chicago. The program aims to prevent shootings by identifying situations where the likelihood of violence is high and engaging to de-escalate the situations before violence occurs. The current program has its roots in Ceasefire New Orleans, with a similar usage of culturally competent messengers as violence interrupters and case workers who impact at-risk individuals in their neighborhoods and in hospital settings.
Timeline
- Mayor’s Executive Order creating the Task Force: May 2018
- Task Force organized and began meeting: October 2018 – July 2019
- Release of Gun Violence Reduction Task Force’s Report: Aug. 1, 2019
- Building the interdisciplinary entity to deliver services: Sept. 2019 – Sept. 2020
- 1-year follow-up report on the Task Force’s recommendations – October 2020.
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