As the Neighborhood Safety Coordinator for Capitol Hill, I’ve heard loud and clear what’s on everyone’s minds lately: gun violence. Councilmember Maritza Rivera is bringing the National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC) to the forefront of the conversation in Seattle, but what is the NNSC, and why are we feeling more positive about its implementation?
The NNSC focuses on group violence intervention, intimate partner violence, and innovations in initiatives such as drug market intervention, larceny, and reconciliation. The NNSC was launched in 2009 at John Jay College and has been included in over seventy empirical studies with significant reductions in offenses. New Orleans has seen a 32% decrease in group member involved homicides, a 17% decrease in overall homicide, and a 16% decrease in total firearm violence, while Nashville boasts a 55% reduction in narcotics offenses, both following NNSC training.
The NNSC operates by recognizing interventions as a three-legged stool: the leg of law enforcement, the leg of a community moral voice, and the leg of support and outreach. To be successful, all three legs must be implemented and utilized successfully. The NNSC trains our “legs” here at home, and we continue program implementation to include our city’s culture and unique nuances that make us Seattle.
The most common question here is cost. The straightforward answer is just over $400k. In return, my question is, “What is the cost without the strategy?” The data for our city shows a drop in citywide homicides for the first half of 2026, but data is irrelevant to those who are victimized by gun violence, and I don’t believe we can put a price tag on the lives lost or impacted.
This strategy is not guaranteed to work. None of them are. That said, if the answer were simple, we would already be executing it. We are at a crossroad now where we can continue to defer to our already overburdened police department to arrest our way out of gun violence, which we already know is ineffective; or, we could try something new with proven results that would provide our community with additional tools and resources to increase our capacity to act before the bullets are even fired. The answer seems clear to me.
All data was retrieved from the National Network for Safe Communities.
This blog was written by Jen Carl.
Neighborhood Safety Coordinator, GSBA: Capitol Hill
