How to reduce gun crime in California? Why not pay people not to shoot each other?

by Guest Sun Jul 06, 2014 9:44 am

Dequan Wright, a cocky, charming former high school football player from Richmond, California, was only 14 when he was sentenced to a year in jail for firearms offences.

Of the 12 other boys he called close friends when he was growing up, one is dead and 10 are behind bars. He would most likely be back there too, he says, if not for the involvement of the Office of Neighbourhood Safety (ONS), an experimental mentorship programme introduced to the city several years ago in a desperate bid to stem the flow of shooting deaths.
Now 20, Wright wants to become a barber and a responsible father to his two young sons. The ONS is trying to find somewhere for him to train, and trying to keep him out of trouble. Not long ago, he recalls, he drove to the wrong part of town, apparently to provoke a showdown with some local rivals. ONS workers read his mind. “I made it to the park and they were already there. They told me I should leave,” he says. Without that intervention, “Something would probably have happened – and I probably would have been incarcerated.”
While homicide rates have fallen dramatically across the US over the past two decades, many cities and neighbourhoods still suffer from endemic urban gun violence that is easily forgotten amid the coverage of mass shootings. Richmond, a community of about 100,000 so close to wealthy San Francisco that its residents can see the skyscrapers across the Bay, is one such city.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/how-to-reduce-gun-crime-in-california-why-not-pay-people-not-to-shoot-each-other-9587061.html