WaPo | The odds were good that Lonnie Holmes, 21,
would be the next person to kill or be killed in this working-class
suburb north of San Francisco.
Four of his cousins had died in
shootings. He was a passenger in a car involved in a drive-by shooting,
police said. And he was arrested for carrying a loaded gun.
But
when Holmes was released from prison last year, officials in this city
offered something unusual to try to keep him alive: money. They began
paying Holmes as much as $1,000 a month not to commit another gun crime.
Cities
across the country, beginning with the District of Columbia, are moving
to copy Richmond’s controversial approach because early indications
show it has helped reduce homicide rates.
But the program
requires governments to reject some basic tenets of law enforcement even
as it challenges notions of appropriate ways to spend tax dollars.
In
Richmond, the city has hired ex-convicts to mentor dozens of its most
violent offenders and allows them to take unconventional steps if it
means preventing the next homicide.
For example, the mentors have
coaxed inebriated teenagers threatening violence into city cars, not
for a ride to jail but home to sleep it off — sometimes with loaded
firearms still in their waistbands. The mentors have funded trips to
South Africa, London and Mexico City for rival gang members in the hope
that shared experiences and time away from the city streets would ease
tensions and forge new connections.
And when the elaborate
efforts at engagement fail, the mentors still pay those who pledge to
improve, even when, like Holmes, they are caught with a gun, or worse —
suspected of murder.
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