Click here to download a one page fact sheet on our Gun Violence Campaign.
In 2021, there were 66 murders in the City of Richmond, and 2021 ended with 90 people having needlessly lost their lives. 2022 is not yet over and 144 people have been injured or killed by gun violence within the City of Richmond.
We first presented our proven, evidence-based solution (Group Violence Intervention - GVI) to Mayor Stoney on February 24, 2020. GVI has been implemented in dozens of cities nationwide, where it has been proven to cut homicides in half.
We have asked Mayor Stoney to move forward with GVI many times since June of 2020. In September of 2020 he reported to us that he and his team would be developing a hybrid gun violence intervention framework. We have yet to see any plan for its implementation - a year and a half later.
Click here for the website of the National Network for Safe Communities, the providers of GVI.
There are many studies documenting the effectiveness of GVI; click below to read -
Click here to access the website of Council on Criminal Justice's Violent Crime Working Group; toward the bottom of this page are very helpful bulletins this group is putting out regularly. Many of them have to do with GVI / focused deterrence.
Gun Violence Mini-Action on February 25
Click here to watch the entire video footage of our Gun Violence Mini-Action.
On February 25, 2022, after having been denied a meeting 11 times since he was re-elected in November of 2020, we attempted to meet with Mayor Stoney by taking over 100 people down to City Hall. Read here our letter to him, letting him know we would be coming.
Mayor Stoney, yet again, refused to meet with us. Instead, he wrote an "Open Letter to RISC" that afternoon, calling us bullies and accusing us of using gun violence victims as pawns.
Read Mayor Stoney's Open Letter to RISC here, and read our RISC Response here.
On October 19, we held a Gun Violence Roundtable. Below is a listing of the panelists:
Thomas Abt, Chair of the Violent Crime Working Group of the Council on Criminal Justice (and author of the book, Bleeding Out)
Tiffany Garner, Giffords Law Center
Stacey Spell, Project Longevity
Brother James Wynn, BREAD organization