D.C. released a new strategic plan to address gun violence this week, part of an ongoing effort to organize the city government’s response to a significant rise in homicides over the past several years.

The plan, commissioned by D.C.’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council and authored by the National Institute for Criminal Justice reform, rests on a central critique of the D.C. government’s recent approach to reducing gun violence: that while the city has the resources to address the problem, it has lacked both the strategy and political will to be successful.

“The District is unique in that it is one of the few cities in the country that has the needed talent, ability, and resources to drastically reduce gun violence in the city,” reads the plan. “However, it is lacking the political commitment, coordination, and a coherent strategy to reduce gun violence.”

The plan aims to solve for those shortcomings by laying out a citywide strategy for reducing gun violence with 16 main recommendations. Some of the recommendations focus on the longer-term, like launching a guaranteed income pilot with the goal of reducing poverty. But the bulk of the plan’s recommendations are geared towards reducing gun violence in the short-term, and more directly intervening in the lives of those most at risk of imminently becoming shooters or victims. The plan’s framework borrows from approaches that proved successful in reducing gun violence in other cities like Boston and Oakland.

“I’m thrilled to have a roadmap, something that we can share with the public,” says Linda Harllee Harper, who leads the city’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention and will shepherd the plan’s implementation.

Harllee Harper says D.C. has already begun implementing many of the report’s recommendations, and that she sees value in all of them. But, she added, as her team gathers feedback on the plan, they might tweak or adjust some aspects of it. “But, overall, we are in full support of the plan and the recommendations,” she says.

Harllee Harper says the D.C. government will be accepting feedback from residents on the plan through a series of public meetings, starting with a virtual event next Thursday.

The plan for reducing gun violence in the short-term focuses on four tenets: identifying people most at risk for committing or being the victim of violence, initiating “direct and respectful” communication with them, connecting them with services and supports, and training police resources toward serious crime and violence (and away from petty or low-level crimes).

The authors of the plan, who also published a recent analysis on two years of shootings in the District, have identified 230 people who are considered at extremely high risk of being involved in shootings or being a victim of a shooting. And according to the NICJR analysis of D.C., about 500 people a year rise to the level of being at extremely high risk for involvement in gun violence. The plan asks D.C. to devote significant resources and attention to this relatively small number of residents, by pairing them with a credible messenger and a life coach and prioritizing them for government services like safe housing and trauma-informed mental health care.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser recently announced a program geared towards doing just that. But the NICJR plan seems to indicate that the District needs more resources to fully realize this vision. For example, the plan says D.C. needs to set aside money to provide financial incentives for high-risk clients who achieve certain goals, like obtaining a valid ID, completing a substance abuse program, or consistently attending school.

The NICJR also recommends that to better coordinate the city’s response to shootings, two meetings should begin happening every week in D.C.: First, a law enforcement review of each shooting that week, where police and members of supervision agencies and D.C. corrections agencies meet to review each shooting, share intelligence, and coordinate their response. And second, a similar meeting where non-police violence interruption groups and service providers meet to review every shooting and make a plan to connect people who may be associated with that shooting to services. Currently, Harllee Harper says, a D.C. government team has a daily call to review shootings that occurred the previous night – but she says her team is exploring a shift in the timing of these meetings and an expansion of who participates.

The plan argues that police and the courts should play a role in reducing gun violence in the District: It recommends that a specialized violence reduction unit within the Metropolitan Police Department be expanded, with the goal of increasing the solve rate for homicides and non-fatal shootings. MPD’s homicide clearance rate was 67% last year, according to D.C. police. (MPD reports the number of solved homicides in a year divided by the number of total homicides that occurred in that year, meaning that some of the solved murders could have been committed in prior years.)

It also asks the D.C. government to “utilize its lobbyists” to urge Congress to fill judicial vacancies in D.C. Superior Court, so cases can move faster. (Bowser and D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee have partially blamed D.C.’s rise in homicides on a court backlog during the pandemic, while the D.C. Superior Court’s chief judge has disagreed with that characterization. The data don’t show a clear link between court backlogs and violent crime. But the Bowser administration and the chief judge do agree that Congress must quickly fill judicial vacancies to help overall with the court’s operations and its backlog of pending cases.)

The plan also recommends some collaboration between police and non-police forms of violence prevention. Harllee Harper says her office has a “healthy arms length” relationship with the police department. For example, she says, the new “People of Promise ” initiative targeting 200 high-risk individuals used MPD data to identify the people they wanted to reach, but the communication currently only goes in that one direction: The program will not be communicating information about clients back to MPD.

Some of the other recommendations in the report involve expanding data collection on city residents — including data on young people who are identified as being potentially high-risk, or people who have been under supervision or served by violence-prevention organizations. Government databases, especially when it comes to crime, often raise concerns about police surveillance and civil liberties, but Harllee Harper says the D.C. government is aiming to be responsive to these concerns.

“I hear you about civil liberties,” Harllee Harper says. “It is being raised at every meeting.”

The plan directs the District to hire more violence intervention workers. These workers often come from the same neighborhoods as people considered high-risk, and are in many cases returning citizens who used to be involved in crime but have changed their lives.

The plan also recommends that the city elevate and professionalize the violence intervention workforce by launching a training certificate program through a local university and paying workers higher salaries, at least $60,000 per year for full time violence prevention employees.

Currently, the average salary for a violence interrupter or outreach worker in D.C. is between $35,000 and $65,000, Harllee Harper says. She says the D.C. government does not currently set salaries for these positions, which are often managed by community-based organizations that have D.C. government contracts. But, she added, there’s been a nationwide push to compensate this workforce more highly, because their jobs are “very difficult.” Anthony Petty, a credible messenger in D.C., wrote in an op-ed last month that violence intervention workers need to be afforded the same level of professionalism as the police.

“To have a chance to be successful, more than just an expansion of our numbers is required; we also need more investment in credible messengers and violence interrupters as a profession — meaning more sustainable salaries and the benefits necessary to cope with the risks of the job,” Petty wrote.

The plan’s main recommendations do not include any specific strategies around domestic violence, which NICJR’s analysis says drives about 6% of homicides in the city. In a sidebar at the end of the report, the plan mentions that domestic violence service providers should be included in coordinating services for high risk individuals.

Leaders of organizations that serve survivors of domestic violence have argued that they need to be more central to the city’s homicide reduction strategy — and Harllee Harper says she agrees.

“A lot of the cases that we hear on the shooting reviews – it’s hard for MPD to always say, ‘Yes, this was domestic violence,’ but they definitely seem to be shootings that escalated out of a domestic relationship,” Harllee Harper says. “That has really brought to the forefront the need to have them at the table.”