New York City has long been a testing ground for innovative approaches to public safety, and its experience with the Cure Violence model offers valuable insights into how gun violence can be addressed through public health strategies rather than enforcement alone. The model, which treats gun violence as a contagious disease that can be controlled using public health methods, has been implemented in more than 50 American cities and 15 countries since its official start in 2000. When it arrived in New York City in 2012, it represented a novel way of thinking about shootings—one that has since shaped the city’s approach to violence prevention and yielded measurable results.
The Public Health Framework Behind Cure Violence
The core principle of Cure Violence is that gun violence behaves like a contagious disease, and its spread can be interrupted using strategies similar to those used in epidemiology. This approach was formalized in New York City as part of a broader citywide effort to support violence prevention organizations and provide services such as mental health support and job training. These efforts were coordinated through a network known as the Crisis Management System, which received an initial allocation of $5 million in 2013—an investment in holistic approaches to shootings and public welfare that remains rare in the United States.
Today, the Crisis Management System has a budget of nearly $100 million, and it continues to expand even as overall funding for violence prevention and research has dramatically decreased in the Trump administration’s second term. Jon Burke, a surgery resident and epidemiology scholar in New York who studied the connections between violence and municipal spending as a public health student, noted that the city’s financial commitment to social safety networks is often unmatched nationally. “New York City often leads the country,” he said, adding that while it is “one of the safest cities that provides robust social services for most things,” there are still neighborhoods with high levels of violence.
Measurable Reductions in Shootings
New York City began 2025 by recording one of its lowest rates of shootings since 1994, a decline that mirrors a larger national trend of violent crime returning to pre-pandemic lows. However, the national gun suicide rate increased in 2025 for the seventh consecutive year. While the exact reasons for the overall decline remain unclear, recent research has examined the roles of increased law enforcement, post-COVID socialization, and the dismantling of investment in gun violence research. The latter has contributed to a growing knowledge gap around community violence and how public health approaches can help reduce it.
In New York, research released in 2017 on the Cure Violence model showed a clear pattern: between 2005 and 2016, gun injuries in the Bronx and Brooklyn decreased by 37 percent and 50 percent, respectively. A 2024 study found that between 2012 and 2023, an estimated 1,300 shootings were avoided because of the model’s existence. Alaa Moussawi, a data scientist who co-authored a New York City Council research report on the study, emphasized that this demonstrates “there are non-enforcement-based alternatives to reducing crime, shootings, and homicides.” He added that initiatives like Cure Violence “are something that we should be looking into and potentially investing more into.”
How the 1,300 Figure Was Calculated
To arrive at the 1,300 estimate, Moussawi’s team analyzed New York City precincts that had Cure Violence programs and those that did not, as well as all precincts over time, to see how shootings changed citywide rather than in isolation. They built a statistical model that compared actual shootings with Cure Violence in place against predicted shootings if the model had never been implemented. Moussawi likened the analysis to poker, where an experienced player finds themselves in a game that unfolds unlike any other they’ve played before. “You realize that such gameplay could not have happened if it had not been triggered by some other catalysts,” he explained. “In our case, we’re suggesting that the catalyst [in the shooting reductions] could have very likely been Cure Violence.”
Historical Roots of Community-Based Violence Prevention
The answer to what else can be learned from New York’s political and financial investment in Cure Violence has a long history. Grassroots outreach by credible community members to prevent violent crime dates back to the 1950s and 1960s, when New York City was among the few cities to use this approach, even with little institutional funding and support from local leaders. The community-centric approach lost ground and funding in the 1970s as more support was directed toward policing.
In 2003, a decade before it was chosen to host New York’s Cure Violence method, a violence prevention group called Man Up! Inc. opened its doors, working primarily with young children through initiatives like summer camp programs and mentoring services. The organization later expanded to connect with teenagers and adults navigating social and economic disadvantage. When Cure Violence analyzed where the highest shooting injury risk was in each borough, East New York—the part of Brooklyn where Man Up! was based—rose to the top.
Evidence from East New York and the Bronx
Years after Cure Violence’s implementation in the city, leaders in the funding and research space sought an independent assessment of its effectiveness. The 2017 study found that between 2009 and 2016, shooting victimizations dropped 15 percent in East New York. Neighborhoods facing similarly stubborn rates of shootings experienced similar trends, including declines in gun injuries. The same study found that the Bronx’s Save Our Streets program, which uses the Cure Violence approach by providing mentoring and social support, led to a 63 percent decrease in shooting victimizations in the same period.
Sheyla Delgado, a violence prevention scholar and researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who co-authored the study, highlighted the importance of trust in the program’s success. “One of the ‘secret sauces’ of the Cure Violence strategy is the trust that the participants have with the program staff; what is promised to them is confidentiality,” she said. “They do not record names, last names, or any identifiable information, and I believe the city and the programs have been really, really consistent in keeping that promise alive throughout the past nearly 15 years.”
Most significantly to Delgado, the analysis found that areas with a Cure Violence program experienced a 33 percent decline in serious disputes, compared to 12 percent in areas without similar programs. She explained that it is often “lower-level, or more what I might consider insignificant [conflicts], that eventually evolve into something more serious. So focusing on that … actually intervening in that type [of] stuff would help the program become more successful in avoiding more serious conflicts.”
Challenges and Future Directions
Delgado said she would like to evaluate the city’s Crisis Management System in its totality, including resources like hospital responder services and housing assistance, but conducting such work has proven challenging due to the many departmental changes over the last decade. However, scholarship examining systems in other high-risk locations is increasing. In recent years, states like Alabama and Mississippi have had some of the highest gun homicide rates in the country, and rural towns now outpace urban cities in overall firearm mortality rates.
Although violence prevention has spread across the country in response to policies enacted by the Biden administration, some of the locations at highest risk currently do not have the same support in building their violence intervention networks. For some experts, highlighting research can help garner support for such investment. Moussawi pointed to Baltimore, which implemented a holistic approach to violence prevention through the use of credible messengers and is experiencing a significant decline in homicides.
New York’s early initiative in violence intervention led it to the cutting edge of research, Delgado explained, propelling Cure Violence onto the main stage of the city’s violence prevention strategy. “Each [mayoral] administration has elevated it and taken it further, expanding the program,” she said. “So it’s one of the non-policing strategies that is embedded in the public safety efforts of the city.”
