Following a month of protests against police brutality and new calls to defund police, the D.C. Council voted Tuesday to reallocate funds from the Metropolitan Police Department to agencies and programs involved in violence interruption and prevention efforts.

The amended budget restores previous cuts to violence interruption efforts in both the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) and Cure the Streets program out of the Office of the Attorney General, including funding a new full time position to bridge communications between the two. The budget also adds $3.65 million in new funding to the two programs.

The amended version provides $1.25 million to ONSE specifically for violence interrupter contracts. The Council will invest $336,000 for stipends to support four cohorts of students within the ONSE Pathways Program, an employment and anti-violence initiative designed to decrease the participants’ exposure to the criminal justice system and improve their employment outcomes.

“The work of violence interruption at its core is about reaching those who are most likely to either commit a violent crime or be the victim of one. It’s very relationship-focused work,” said Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen, who chairs the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety. “We know most violent crime is committed by a small percentage of vulnerable residents. If we can reach these folks and offer them a way out, we will prevent more senseless gun violence.”

Violence interrupters build relationships with the community and encourage people to reach out to them if they know someone to be at high risk of both committing violence and becoming a victim. Program staff make house calls, and during the coronavirus, have maintained lines of communication through electronic means like videoconferencing and phone calls.

“We’re utilizing Zoom to broker truces, we’re utilizing video chat to check up on our participants,” said Clayton Rosenberg of the Alliance for Concerned Men, “to talk with them to make sure that we’re able to get in contact with them and bridge that communication gap, to strengthen our core relationships within the community.” Violence interrupters have also shifted their work during the pandemic to include providing accurate public health messaging to their neighborhoods.

Allen recommended several changes to the Mayor’s original budget proposal that reduced funding to some violence interruption programs by 11%.

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s original budget proposal presented in February represented a very different financial picture for the District — one untouched by the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic — but she still expressed confidence in the public safety budget amid calls to defund the police at a news conference in June. “I can tell you what we have submitted is what we think we need for public safety, not a penny more and not a penny less,” Bowser said.

At an oversight hearing of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety on June 25, Allen and others expressed concern over the proposed cuts.

“We’re going to change that because I don’t believe that we can handle fewer violence interrupters, I think we need more — and I think that’s what our communities need,” said Allen in the hearing.

In 2017 ONSE launched the violence interrupter program as a way to prevent violent crime. A year later, the Cure the Streets program was initiated through the Office of the Attorney General. They each use a model that emphasizes communication as the primary tool. Violence Interrupters have deep ties to the neighborhoods in which they operate and use that familiarity to mediate conflict or just convince others to stay in school and stop selling drugs.

Both programs faced a very uncertain financial future.

In last month’s budget oversight hearing, the committee pushed ONSE Executive Director Delbert McFadden to show how a reduced budget would directly impact the number of violence interrupters working in neighborhoods.

“When we negotiate and meet with the contractors, I believe that it will result in fewer [violence interrupters],” McFadden said at the hearing.

Homicide numbers continue to rise in the District. So far this year, 93 people have been killed, a 21% increase over last year’s numbers. Over the weekend, 11-year-old Davon McNeal became the latest victim when he was shot in the head with a stray bullet at the end of a “Stop The Violence” cookout on the Fourth of July. His mother worked as a violence interrupter.

“This is not the year to take our foot off the gas when using every tool to prevent violence,” said Allen.