Break the Cycle of Violence Act
A BILL
To authorize the Secretary of Health and Human Services to build safer, thriving communities, and save lives, by investing in effective community-based violence reduction initiatives, and for other purposes.
Sec. 2 Findings
The Congress finds the following:
Community violence is a significant public health, public safety, and community infrastructure concern nationwide and is a leading cause of death, injury, and trauma for people in the United States that disrupts employment and hinders a community’s social and economic development.
From 2010 to 2019, over 175,000 people were murdered in the United States. Hundreds of thousands more were hospitalized or treated in emergency departments after surviving life-changing gunshot injuries and other violent assaults.
In 2020, the Nation suffered the largest single-year spike in homicides on record, driven largely by record spikes in fatal shootings. Nationwide, 75 percent of all homicides are committed with a gun.
Communities across the Nation experience enormous disparities in safety that are driven by inequitable social and structural determinants of health. Interpersonal shootings are disproportionately concentrated in neighborhoods harmed by past and present racial discrimination, segregation, redlining, disinvestment, mass incarceration, and concentrated poverty, and this violence’s toll falls overwhelmingly on people of color, especially young Black and brown men and boys and their loved ones. From 2015 to 2019, Black children and teens were 14 times as likely to be shot to death as their White peers. Hispanic children and teens and Native American children and teens were both about 3 times as likely to be shot to death as their White peers. Over this period, 72 percent of children murdered before their 18th birthday were people of color, and 50 percent were Black.
Black boys and men make up less than 7 percent of the population in the United States, but account for more than 50 percent of all gun homicide victims each year. Violence is responsible for nearly half of all deaths among Black boys and young men, ages 15 through 24, meaning the parents of a Black son in this age group are as likely to lose their child to homicide as nearly every other cause of death combined.
This violence imposes enormous human, social, and economic costs. The Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Violence Prevention presented research to Congress demonstrating that “youth living in inner cities show a higher prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder than soldiers” in the Nation’s wartime military. While the vast majority of these young people resiliently persevere, people who have been victims of violence are at substantially higher risk of being violently re-attacked or killed. Additionally, both direct and indirect violence exposure have been associated with a host of poor health outcomes, including chronic illness, anxiety, depression, and substance misuse.
When properly implemented and consistently funded, coordinated, community-based strategies that utilize trauma-responsive care and interrupt cycles of violence can produce lifesaving and cost-saving results in a short period of time without contributing to mass incarceration. These strategies identify those at the highest risk, coordinate individualized wraparound resources, provide pathways to healing and stability, and monitor and support long-term success. Many cities have substantially reduced community violence in recent years by implementing various combinations of these strategies, which include the following:
Community outreach programs, which hire violence intervention and prevention specialists who have established relationships, relatable lived experiences, and credibility with individuals in their communities at high risk of violence and connect them with intensive counseling, mediation, peer support, and social services in order to reduce their risk. Evaluations have found that these programs, particularly when integrated into wider networks of supportive services, are frequently associated with significant reductions in gun violence.
Hospital-based violence intervention programs (referred to in this section as “HVIP”), which work to break cycles of violence by leveraging credible violence intervention and prevention specialists to provide intensive counseling, peer support, case management, mediation, and social services to patients recovering from gunshot wounds and other violent injuries. Research has shown that violently injured patients are at high risk of retaliating with violence themselves or being revictimized by violence in the near future. Evaluations of HVIPs have found that patients who received HVIP services were often less likely to be convicted of a violent crime and less likely to be subsequently reinjured by violence than patients who did not receive HVIP services.
Group violence interventions provide tailored social services and support to group-involved individuals at highest risk for involvement in community violence. This intervention, which must be trauma informed, culturally responsive, and community driven to be most successful, includes a process for community members to voice a clear demand for the violence to stop and narrowly focused enforcement actions against those who continue to engage in acts of serious violence. The approach coordinates law enforcement, service providers, and community engagement efforts to reduce violence in ways that do not contribute to mass incarceration.
Violence interruption and crisis management, which respond to potentially violent incidents to mediate conflicts or to scenes where violence has occurred to offer trauma-informed services and community supports to survivors and others exposed to violence. These strategies help to prevent retaliatory violence and promote healing and well-being. Programs that include these components have reported deescalating dozens of disputes that were highly likely to end in lethal violence.
Access to job and entrepreneurship training, apprenticeship, and technological and digital literacy programs are effective tools in reducing community violence. A 2012 University of Pennsylvania study of 13 high-violence schools in the Chicago area found “well-targeted, low-cost employment policies can make a substantial difference”, and the city’s most violent neighborhoods saw a 43 percent drop in violent-crime arrests of participants in a youth job program.
Individualized wraparound services and opportunities include, but are not limited to, housing support, financial assistance, reentry services, legal assistance, therapeutic services, grief counseling or targeted victim services, and skill building based on the needs of survivors or individuals at the highest risk of community violence. Leveraging the relationships of violence intervention and prevention specialists, these services are used in the context of structured, person-centered peer mentorship that facilitates personal transformation by meeting people where they are and offering to help participants change the trajectories of their lives.
The past year has had a disproportionate impact on youth unemployment, with 2.9 million more unemployed youth in mid-2020 compared with pre-2020 levels. Simultaneously, the 2020 recession accelerated an already increasingly digital and automated workforce, and youth must attain the digital, technological, and other technical skills necessary to thrive in the future of work. While jobs in the customer service and food industry could fall by 4.3 million between 2018 and 2030, health care and STEM occupations could grow more now than ever.
Intentional and sustained investments in community-based violence reduction strategies can reverse recent increases in homicides, help to heal impacted communities, and reduce the enormous human and economic costs of community violence, without contributing to mass incarceration.
Sec. 3 Definitions
In this Act:
Community violence— The term community violence—
means nonfatal firearm injuries, aggravated assaults, homicides, and other acts of life-threatening interpersonal violence committed outside the context of a familial or romantic relationship; and
does not include acts of violence motivated by political beliefs.
Eligible unit of local government— The term eligible unit of local government means a municipality or other local government that—
for not less than 2 out of the 3 calendar years preceding the date on which an application for a grant is submitted under section 101—
experienced 35 or more homicides per year; or
experienced 20 or more homicides per year and had a homicide rate that was not less than double the national average; or
has a compelling need to address community violence, as determined by the Secretary, based on high levels of homicide relative to other localities within the same State.
Opportunity youth— The term opportunity youth means individuals who—
have attained 16 years of age but not yet attained 25 years of age; and
are not—
enrolled in education or training on a full-time or part-time basis; or
employed on a full-time or part-time basis.