As Prepared for Delivery
Good morning, and thank you so much, Eddie [Bocanegra]. And a huge thanks to our hosts, Shantel [Patu] and Rachel [Sottile], who you’ll hear from in just a moment.
It’s a privilege to share the podium with the three of you, and to join the dedicated professionals in the audience who are working so hard to reduce violence in Seattle and to bring hope and opportunity to the communities of this great city.
I want to acknowledge the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, Tessa Gorman, who is here with us this morning. Tessa, thank you for your leadership in the district and for your support of community-based partnerships.
I also want to give a shout-out to the Director of our National Institute of Justice, Dr. Nancy La Vigne. You’ll get to hear more from her in just a moment, but Nancy heads up the research division of the Department of Justice (DOJ), and she has been central to building our base of knowledge about community violence intervention (CVI) strategies.
Let me also acknowledge Katherine Brown, who leads our Office of Communications. OCOM, as we call it, is the messaging arm of OJP. Katherine and her team have been working hard to shine light on the amazing work being done by CVI professionals here in Seattle and across the country. I’m grateful that she could join me here today.
I’m feeling really energized. Earlier this morning, Eddie and I had the chance to meet with some of the exceptional leaders who are implementing community violence intervention programs – Shantel and Rachel, as well as the directors of some outstanding community organizations in Seattle, along with folks from the state of Washington, all of whom bring such rich experience and an incredible wealth of knowledge and insights about the challenges their communities are facing and what it takes to meet those challenges.
During our roundtable discussion, we had the privilege of hearing, in very personal terms, about the stakes in this work. Local leaders told us how violence deeply impacted their own lives from an early age, and how community violence intervention programs helped them find purpose and direction and envision a more hopeful future.
We have an obligation – as government officials, as civic leaders, as professionals serving your communities – to take a multi-faceted approach to preventing and reducing violence, and that includes lifting up CVI programs and helping take them to scale, so that others with similar experiences have access to the same kind of support and are able to feel the same kind of hope.
And we simply can’t do this life-saving CVI work without credible messengers, like so many in this room. Your lived experience gives you a connection to the people of your communities that no one else can claim, and that connection is critical to reducing violence and saving lives. I particularly want to thank the dedicated front-line workers who put themselves in harm’s way to support and protect others.
There’s no question that you are the driving force behind community violence intervention, and I’m proud that I can be here representing an Administration and a Department of Justice that has put its full support behind you. CVI strategies form a centerpiece of the President’s Safer America Plan, and the Justice Department’s Comprehensive Strategy for Reducing Violent Crime. Through the Office of Justice Programs, DOJ has made historic investments in CVI programs.
We’re here today to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Department of Justice’s Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative – what we call CVIPI. Since the program’s launch, we’ve made an unprecedented federal investment, totaling nearly $200 million, to support community violence intervention programs and research, with much of this funding coming courtesy of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
These investments have provided direct funding to promising and effective local programs, and they also tap some of these same organizations to reach smaller community-based groups that are even closer to the communities and individuals most impacted by violence, through micro-grants and technical assistance that can help build organizational capacity to scale and sustain their work for the long term.
To date, we have directly funded 76 organizations in 29 states and territories, and these grants are reaching communities across the country that are affected by violence, from Alabama to Minnesota, and from Miami to right here in Seattle. They’re supporting efforts in our largest cities, in smaller metro areas and in rural communities, many of them led by community-based organizations (CBOs), others as part of city-led collaboratives.
And we’re supporting seven organizations that serve as intermediaries and that are providing funding and hands-on assistance to smaller CBOs, to help them access resources and build their capacity to grow and sustain this work in the long term.
It's no mistake that we’re here in Seattle to commemorate this anniversary. Over the past two years, Seattle, King County and the state of Washington have come to embody our approach in action. Thanks to the commitment of so many in the room today, we’re seeing what’s possible when partners come together across sectors to build out a community safety infrastructure that is up to the challenge of tackling gun violence.
The Center for Children and Youth Justice is tapping into federal resources to deliver direct services to their community and to build the capacity of outstanding grassroots organizations here in the city. And we’re so fortunate that our partners from the Washington Department of Commerce have embraced this effort and are working closely with us to lift up the vital work that CVI leaders are doing across the state.
And we’re not done yet. As we celebrate two years since the launch of CVIPI we’re gearing up for a new round of funding. The investments that we’ve made thus far are part of a longer term strategy to expand these approaches and seed this work across the country, so that CVI becomes a core component of the community safety infrastructure. And I am pleased that tomorrow, the White House will have more good news to share about additional investments we are making to support CVI programs nationwide.
It's important to note that we’re able to make this commitment because we’ve seen the promise that community violence intervention holds for our country, thanks to the successes that dedicated CVI professionals like all of you have helped to achieve. Homicide is down nationally – dramatically, in fact – with 2023 experiencing the largest single-year decline in the last 20 years. And I believe that CVI strategies, along with traditional law enforcement approaches, have played an important part in making this possible. But it’s also true that not every city has seen reductions in homicides, shootings and other serious violence.
We all know that violence is a deep and complex problem, with no single cause and no simple solution. There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy here. But that’s the promise of community violence intervention. It’s a community-driven approach that grows from the ground up, both led by and engaging those with the greatest stakes in the outcome.
While our national-level initiative is only two years old, community violence intervention is not new – certainly not new to many of you – and it really is, at its core, a local story. Community leaders have been pioneering this work on the ground for decades, very often without the resources and the recognition they deserve.
We know – and you know better than anyone – that this is an all-hands effort. Each of us has to stake a claim – police and prosecutors, community and faith-based organizations, educators and healthcare professionals, government leaders and community members themselves – all working together to widen our vision of public safety, to envision safety not just as an absence of crime, but as the presence of opportunity.
Our hope here is to create a public safety landscape that puts the community at the center, one that recognizes your work as a critical complement to the justice system. We are very proud to be your partners, and I know I speak for my colleagues when I say that we are excited for what lies ahead in our work together.
Thank you for everything you do for your communities, thank you for the difference you are making in the lives of the people you touch and thank you for joining us today.
###