Effects of two community violence interruption programs on firearm violence in Washington, DC

To reduce urban firearm violence, many cities have enacted community violence interruption (CVI) programs, which rely on credible messengers who do street outreach with high-risk individuals, mediate conflicts before they escalate to gunfire, and promote nonviolence. Washington, DC has implemented two CVI programs, Cure the Streets (CTS) and the Violence Intervention Initiative (VII) in multiple waves in dozens of neighborhoods citywide. In this study, we estimate these programs' impact on firearm assaults and homicides spanning 2016 to 2025. Using a spatial disaggregation approach, we first divided the city into approximately 1500 equally sized hexagons and assigned their CVI status, then identified synthetic and matched control hexagons that had not yet or never received CVI treatment. Compared to synthetic control areas, we found that VII areas had significantly higher rates of firearm homicides, while CTS areas had somewhat but not significantly elevated rates of firearm homicides. Matched analyses yielded similar results. Subanalyses of individual CTS and VII sites did not reveal any significant protective effects against firearm violence from either program. More research is needed to identify the resources and staffing requirements necessary to support successful CVI activities.