Nashville was awarded nearly $2 million by the Department of Justice to launch a violence intervention program. It will be the city’s first in-house effort.
The money will fund a three-year program within the city government. The Office of Community Safety will hire and train community members with lived experiences of violence to help quell conflicts before they escalate.
If that model sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same one the group Gideon’s Army is already using in the Cumberland View neighborhood of North Nashville.
The pool of money for the new city-run program is different from the $1.5 million that was promised to existing groups, like Gideon’s Army, under former Mayor John Cooper’s administration. Some of that funding still remains undistributed.
The city has historically had a complicated relationship with violence interruption work.
The distribution of the $1.5 million grant has been rocky, with one group being chosen for funding and then withdrawing from consideration.
A NewsChannel 5 investigation questioned whether Gideon’s Army should receive a chunk of that money, criticizing the group for hiring an alleged former gang member.
However, a critical part of the violence interruption model is to hire so-called “credible messengers” who, at one time or another, were potentially the ones holding guns themselves. With training, the model sends them back into their neighborhoods to use their street cred to convince people not to shoot.
It’s unclear how the city will stay true to the model while walking the line that Gideon’s Army was accused of crossing.
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