Vallejo Police provide details on new gun violence intervention program

This story is part of a series on gun violence reduction strategies produced with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network.

VALLEJO — Vallejo police provided details on a new strategy for reducing gun violence in partnership with various community organizations during a public safety meeting on Wednesday.

Police are calling it project VISION, which stands for Violence Intervention Support Improving Our Neighborhoods. Vallejo Police Chief Jason Ta first announced the initiative in February of last year, after a four-year-old girl was struck by a stray bullet. Local leaders called for the implementation of a new gun violence reduction strategy and Ta said reducing violent crime was his “top priority.”

During Wednesday’s meeting of the City Council’s Public Safety Subcommittee, police revealed details of the program for the first time during a presentation by police Capt. Jerome Bautista.

The strategy involves identifying individuals most likely to commit gun violence and convincing them to stop shooting, a preventative model of policing which aims to stop crime before it happens. Bautista said the typical reactive policing model “often may not address the root causes of violence.”

“Identifying the most prolific and repeat drivers of violent crime,” said Bautista, is the first part of the strategy. Once those individuals are identified, police and their community partner, the Center for Urban Excellence, will deliver a directed “anti-violence” message to them.

The Center for Urban Excellence, a nonprofit that operates in Solano and Contra Costa counties, will follow up with those individuals offering social services and support.

Bautista said that the program’s message was not about threatening offenders with the threat of the criminal justice system but about offering them an opportunity to turn things around for themselves.

“VISION should be viewed as an opportunity, rather than a punitive approach for those who are identified,” said Bautista.

However, if notified participants continue shooting, police said that the strategy moves onto the “accountability phase.” 

While he provided sparse detail about what that would entail, Bautista said that the “Solano County DA’s office and U.S. Attorney’s Office are on board with the VISION program.”

VISION took over a year to develop and was done with guidance from federal partners under a program called the National Public Safety Partnership, which recently lost funding through cuts by the Trump Administration. 

The City Council allocated $300,000 last year to get the program running and Vallejo Police were also awarded close to $2 million from the California Violence Intervention and Prevention Program, or CalVIP. 

The state money was scheduled to be disbursed Wednesday. Operations are expected to begin right away. According to the terms and conditions of the CalVIP grant, half of the money is supposed to be allocated to the community partner.

However neither police, city nor Center for Urban Excellence answered how the money will be divided up or how long it is intended to last. 

Designing a gun violence intervention program

Gun violence intervention strategies rely on the fact that most recurring shootings can be traced to a handful of select individuals. While strategies differ as to the best method to get individuals to stop shooting, they all have in common the aim of stopping conflict before it escalates to violence.

Identifying the individuals at highest risk of both being a victim and perpetrator of gun violence is the first critical step in any strategy. Vallejo police are calling this the "intelligence analysis” portion of the strategy.

Several proven gun violence intervention strategies have been developed and implemented across the country. The Vallejo VISION program is akin to a strategy called Focused Deterrence, also known as Ceasefire. Originally pioneered in Boston in the 1990s, it was later implemented in cities across the country, including in Oakland. The strategy seeks to provide a way for people to escape cyclical violence, but also threatens police crackdowns if shootings don’t stop. 

Police in Boston worked with the parole department to identify gang affiliated individuals already in the criminal justice system. Those individuals were brought in for a “call-in” and were explicitly told to stop shooting at their enemies. 

If they did, they could receive benefits like job training and education. But they were warned that the first gang to resume shooting would face all of the police’s attention and associated consequences. 

Shown to be effective, the largest difficulty in conducting Focused Deterrence is in sustaining its effort. Additionally, police can only succeed if the intelligence used is accurate, the messaging trust-worthy and sent to all potential perpetrators involved in recurring violence.

Who will the program target?

Police said that VISION will target individuals with a history of gun violence. They provided a list of sources that could determine someone's eligibility, which include a known criminal history, whether someone was a victim of gun violence, community input, known active gang affiliation, police and detective referrals, and intelligence from other agencies.

A good example of someone who would have likely been eligible would be Jose Guadalupe Castillo, who was arrested for allegedly killing a grandmother after shooting at houses while driving down Interstate 80. Two months before the murder, Guadalupe Castillo had been arrested and released for shooting in the same negligent manner. 

Once Vallejo Police identify recalcitrant gun offenders, they make a referral to the Center for Urban Excellence. 

The nonprofit would then reach out to the individual to set up a face-to-face meeting. Opting to meet in public places, or at the individual’s home if needed, the outreach workers and a criminal justice partner would then deliver the “anti-violence” message in person.

The Center for Urban Excellence would then provide VISION’s “anti-violence” letter, complete an intake and assessment, assign the individual a case manager and conduct follow up meetings and communications.

Bautista said that even if a participant refuses services but doesn’t re-offend for a gun related crime, then it's “actually considered successful contact because custom notifications made an impact.” 

However, if the individual does re-offend, then police move onto the “accountability” phase of the plan. 

Police spokesperson Sgt. Rashad Hollis said in an interview that “if you know we're looking at you and you commit a crime, after we’ve provided you a heads up and resources to help you out from committing that crime, there will be accountability.” 

In the police presentation, they said that efforts will focus on people ages 14 to 25. 

According to Vallejo police shooting data, in the past two years combined, 56% of shooting victims were over 29 years old. Last year, 67% were over 29.

The Vallejo Sun asked during the meeting Wednesday why police are focusing their efforts on the minority age group affected by gun violence. Bautista responded that it was based on their crime analysis and feedback from partners but that they “could certainly pivot” if their data changes.

Thomas Abt, founding director of the Violence Reduction Center, or VRC, at the University of Maryland, said in an interview that “targeting youth offenders is a common choice among jurisdictions, often because of the sensational nature of such crimes.”

“That said, the VRC typically recommends focusing on the age ranges where most of the homicides are occurring in order to save the most lives,” said Abt.

Gun violence in Vallejo also disproportionately affects Black men. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black people last year made up 17% of Vallejo’s population, but made up 52% of shooting victims. 

Shooters are most often the same demographic as their victims.

Community partners providing an anti-violence message

Vallejo Police chose to partner with the Center for Urban Excellence to provide social services to participants and deliver the “anti-violence” messaging. Dionne Carter was hired at the center to oversee those efforts, having worked in Vallejo doing violence intervention in the past.

“The police doesn't have a great reputation and it can serve as a barrier to people,” Carter said in an interview. “So we have taken on the role of working directly with the folks.”

Carter said that the center's “Community Violence Intervention Impact Team” currently has two full-time case workers. She plans to hire more and is still working on building out the program.

As part of the intervention component, Carter said that they will also conduct hospital based intervention at Kaiser Vallejo to reach shooting victims who are still in the hospital to try and prevent retaliation. The strategy operates on the idea that victims of gun violence are at a high risk of getting shot again and was pioneered by the nonprofit Youth Alive! in Oakland.

Carter said she was directly inspired by her time working at Youth Alive and designed the program to closely mirror theirs.

“It's a voluntary program,” Carter said. “The police will say, ‘we've identified these folks, here's a letter to them saying that we're going to give them some grace period for behavior change, we're going to refer them to CUE, and Dionne, you and your team take it from there.’”

Experts agree that for the program to truly lead to long-term change, participants must be given a credible off-ramp to their lifestyle.

Jason Corburn, a UC Berkeley professor of public health and city planning, said in an interview that “people at the center of gun violence are often grappling with unaddressed traumas, and a bunch of things that are out of their control in terms of their neighborhood exposures, which could contribute to some of the behaviors and the stressors that they're under.”

“And we often don't recognize that. We just say, ‘Hey, either you change your behavior, you're gonna get locked up,’” Corburn said. “I think our criminology approach just says, ‘Well, let's do whatever we can to force behavioral change, people who are engaged in crime, to not be engaged in crime.’ But we don't really know how that happens.”

The public health approach, said Corburn, is about providing services that address both individual and societal risk factors.

“It's hard for any individual to address on their own and without both public health support but also community change,” said Corburn.

For this, Carter also started a collective of nonprofits working to reduce violence. Under Carter’s leadership, the aim is to assemble the various organizations under one umbrella to coordinate efforts and strengthen sources of funding.

“We have a host of organizations that intersect with gun violence and we meet monthly,” Carter said.

While not officially part of the VISION program, by addressing the associated risk factors involved in gun violence, the collective hopes to address the structural conditions that lead to it.

“The goal of it is to address violence as a public health issue looking at the spectrum: primary prevention all the way up to intervention,” said Carter.

Abt, an expert on Focused Deterrence, said that “community-led efforts can and should work alongside police-led efforts.” He argued that having community partners and a diverse set of approaches bolsters police effectiveness. Some of these strategies, “may seem to be contradictory at first, but ultimately turn out to be complementary.”

Other local intervention experts say it is important for community partners to draw boundaries with law enforcement so that they do not end up acting as informants. Carter herself said that being seen as too closely associated with police would be detrimental to establishing the credibility needed to establish relationships with gun offenders.

Peter Kim, who worked in Oakland doing violence prevention for close to a decade, said that “there must be a deep line in the sand between law enforcement and violence intervention workers, particularly in regard to information exchange.” 

“It must be a one-direction flow, with law enforcement being free to share referrals,” he said. “But there can’t be any expectation of any information or ‘intel’ to be shared back to police.”

Questions about transparency

At the public safety meeting Wednesday, the Vallejo Sun asked how the city plans to keep it funded and what transparency measures police will provide in order to ensure the program is successful. 

Assistant to the city manager Natalie Peterson said that as they bring police updates to council, “we can report on high-level stats” about the program metrics.

She added that a previous similar effort in the past had been critiqued for not providing sufficient updates, but that “the city manager's office is committed to supporting this effort.”

Meanwhile, City Councilmembers Tonia Lediju and Alexander Matias said that long-term funding and commitment will depend on the program's success. They emphasized the need for its progress to be transparent.

“I think it has to be a combination of grant funding that we're leveraging from our state and federal partners,” said Matias. “At the same time, if public safety is one of our priorities, then we have to be able to set aside dollars from the general fund and at the sales tax level to continue to fund those long term.”

Lediju said that with a $29 million city budget deficit, the council is busy “figuring out what the community really wants.”

Mike McLively, senior staff attorney at the Giffords Law Center, a nonprofit dedicated to gun violence prevention, said in an interview that a public project plan and metrics are needed to be made public in order to ensure the program’s success. 

“How else do you hold yourself accountable?” said McLively. “A lot of these programs that fail, it's not public and you're not holding yourself to that standard.”