A Reliable
Voice in the
Community

Volume 6
Issue 25
Sept. 2 - 8, 2009

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Innovative Office of Neighborhood Safety works to reduce violence in Richmond

By Tuseda A. Graggs

The term “small, but mighty” is a good description for the team that comprises Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety.

With a total of six employees the tiny department has a huge mandate: help stem the flow of youth gun violence on the streets of Richmond. And it is making headway, said DeVone Boggan, director of the office — or ONS — that began deploying representatives into the community just 16 months ago.

“We feel that if we had not been in the community, working with people and calming down tensions, there could have been many more homicides so far,” he said, recalling a recent spate of violence in July.

The ONS consists of Boggan, Operations Administrator Deborah Dias and four neighborhood change agents. The agents are long-time Richmond residents dedicated to the community and who work to resolve violence issues — often before they become major issues — through direct interaction with the people directly involved in violence.

The change agents are products of their Richmond environment. They are familiar with the residents — and sometimes non-residents — who are currently involved in violence. The ONS uses a best practice model made popular by Boston- and Chicago-based ceasefire programs to eliminate violence in the community.

“Many of (the change agents) had once been responsible for the havoc, but they have demonstrated that they have turned their lives around,” Boggan said. “We give them the resources and allow them to be resources to people who don’t have resources.”

The agents, whose names Boggan did not want made public, are currently working in Central, South and North Richmond. Another individual — a member of the clergy — also works as a change agent.

To date the city of Richmond reports 30 homicides during 2009. The deadly total is already two beyond the number of killings in all of 2008. Much of the gun violence began following the July 5 shooting of 25-year-old Rickeasha Washington on Interstate 80. Factions upset about her homicide retaliated, creating weeklong, back-and-forth violence that resulted in six homicides and 10 people wounded.

“Young people and some old people are caught in the cycle of violence and it’s like breaking an addiction for them. We’re trying to get folks weaned off milk and into the real meat of change,” Boggan said. “This nonsense wasn’t created overnight. But we believe that over time, our approach will work.”

To speed the reduction of violence in Richmond, Boggan is hoping to hire three new change agents when the Richmond City Council passes its budget in September.

“At any given time there are 60 to 80 active shooters walking the streets free,” Boggan said. “It’s no secret who these individuals are, but we have to have enough people (on staff) to be out there making connections and developing trust in the community.”

The ONS came into existence after the Richmond City Council hired the Oakland-based Mentoring Center in 2006 to study the city’s violence and provide recommendations on how to solve it, Boggan said. One of the recommendations was to establish the ONS, which the council approved in July 2007. The office opened in November 2007 and began officially working and deploying change agents into the community in April 2008.

During its assessment, The Mentoring Center found that the central portion of Richmond — west of 23rd Street to the Richmond Parkway and north of Ohio Street to unincorporated North Richmond, along with the Iron Triangle — accounted for 28 of the city’s 47 homicides during 2007. So during the ONS’s first year, it concentrated resources on Central Richmond, and in 2008, just three of the total 28 homicides in Richmond occurred in that area.

“We found that if you focus resources on a target that something can happen,” Boggan said. But, he added, the ONS can’t relax and assume that the trend will stand. For example, many of the July 2009 homicides occurred in the Central District.

But changing attitudes and lifestyles is a challenge, he said.

“People believe that there are no consequences. We are working to show people that this kind of behavior is not acceptable,” Boggan said.

And the ONS director isn’t waiting until people are released from prison to connect with them. He spends at least three Mondays each month at San Quentin State Prison where he co-facilitates a The Richmond Project — a class that links short-time jail inmates from Richmond with prison “lifers” and helps to prepare them for successful release.

“We work with individuals coming home from incarceration, because the data shows that many times either the victim or the shooter is someone on parole or probation,” he said.

So twice a month, Boggan holds meetings with those newly released inmates who have returned to the community. Often there are 50 to 75 participants who are seeking help and resources, he said.

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