The Center for Justice Innovation—and our operating programs—are regularly featured in the media. Here is a sampling of the press coverage of our work.
After an uptick in shootings across Brooklyn, dozens of anti-gun violence advocates, including Save Our Streets, gathered the community to speak out against gun violence. “We look at violence, especially gun violence, as a public health issue and not a criminal issue,” said Shadoe Tarver, our associate director of community safety.
Gun violence has risen in cities across the U.S. this summer, compounding the issues of systemic racism, intergenerational trauma, and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Nonprofit Quarterly explores research-backed solutions to gun violence, including violence interruption programs like our Save Our Streets, which approaches gun violence as a public health issue.
"In New York City, one study found that gun violence rates declined significantly in two neighborhoods operating violence interruption programs." The Appeal cites our Save Our Streets program in the Bronx as one way to reduce the footprint of police and create safer communities.
Violence prevention groups like Save Our Streets will help lead the efforts toward ending gun violence in Brooklyn, with a goal to "saturate the community with the violence interrupters and outreach workers and all the members of the cure violence team,” said Ife Charles, our deputy director for S.O.S.
All communities want to be free from violence, but that doesn't mean all communities want more police. Shadoe Tarver, associate director of safety at Save Our Streets, Bed-Stuy, talk about community based models for public safety.
Anti-violence and community-based organizations in New York City present an alternative approach to public safety. Save Our Streets "helped reduce shootings in the South Bronx area where they work by sixty-three per cent," the New Yorker reports in a profile of our work.
Art is a powerful vehicle for racial and social justice. Project Reset partners with Brooklyn Museum to offer individuals with low-level cases the chance to dispose of the case through the study and creation of art that explores perspectives. In this video, teaching artist, Sophia Dawson, and two participants, Denagee and Aristides, share their experiences with NBCLX.
"Climate change is racial injustice." Taking that as their topic, students in our Brooklyn-based Restorative Justice in Schools program placed first out of 2,200 submissions in NPR's Student Podcast Challenge. Read more about the students, and hear their award-winning episode, in this NPR profile. "Racism is like a tree," explains one of the students, "and police brutality and environmental racism are just a couple of branches off that giant tree."
Out of 2,200 submissions across the United States, "The Flossy Podcast," created by the Men in Color group, a project of our Restorative Justice in Schools program, won NPR's Student Podcast Challenge. Students Jaheim and Joshua and teacher Mischael joined WNYC's Brian Lehrer to discuss their winning episode on climate change and environmental racism.
New York City's problem-solving courts reopened on May 4. In Brooklyn, this includes our mental health court, presided by Judge D'Emic, along with a treatment court and domestic violence court, which provide defendants with services and mental health treatment to aid their rehabilitation under a single judge.
