About five years ago, the city of Philadelphia embarked on two different violence-reduction strategies that seemed to be sending the city in the right direction.

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In three districts in South Philly, the police department launched Focused Deterrence, which identified the relatively few neighborhood residents responsible for gun violence in the area and concentrated their efforts on reaching them. Meanwhile, in North Philly, Temple University School of Medicine launched Cure Violence, which deployed people formerly involved in violence to intercede before shootings could occur.

Both were successful.

Focused Deterrence brought shootings down by 35 percent over two years, and Cure Violence by 30 percent—hopeful signs in a city that needed it.

But then Mayor Kenney was elected, appointing a newOakland, California.

Throughout the early 2000s, Oakland experienced a spike in homicides not unlike what we’ve seen in Philly over the last few years—enough to make the city of 450,000 the third most violent in America by 2012. The violence included a few horrific murders—of children shot and killed in the crossfire—that shocked, but also galvanized, the community.

Faith leaders and other residents pushed city officials to launch Oakland Ceasefire, informed by the groundbreaking work that slashed the homicide rate in Boston in the 1990s. The work of Oakland Ceasefire has been hard; it has been unceasing for the last seven years. And it has succeeded.

As of last year, Oakland had cut its number of homicides in half, from 126 in 2012 to 68 in 2018; cut non-fatal shootings also