The number of “violence interrupters” in three key areas of St. Louis city has decreased significantly, albeit temporarily, after a city contract with the Cure Violence program ended earlier this month.
In 2019, the city entered into a $7 million, three-year contract with Employment Connections to run two Cure Violence sites, one in the Dutchtown neighborhood of south city and the other covering parts of the Wells Goodfellow and Hamilton Heights neighborhoods in north city. The Urban League of St. Louis was also contracted to run a site in Walnut Park.
Cure Violence is a national program that involves hiring people from the community and training them as violence interrupters, tasked with interceding in situations where the risk of violence is high — for instance, after someone has been killed and the possibility of retaliation is high.
The effectiveness of the program over the last three years depends on who you ask, with some reports stating that Cure Violence was able to cut homicides in some areas by more than 40 percent. Other experts said the results were more muted. A hallmark of Cure Violence is that the violence interrupters generally try to resolve disputes without the involvement of the police.
In March, as the three-year contract was coming to a close, the city put out a call for proposals for organizations to submit bids to run "a more collaborative violence prevention model" — which many have interpreted as meaning greater cooperation with police. Neither Employment Connections nor the Urban League submitted applications in time.
"I can't tell you why they didn't apply initially," says Wilford Pinkney, director of the city's Office of Violence Prevention. "The [request for proposals] was out in March. They knew about it, both of them. Both those organizations got copies of the RFP."
Pinkney says that another organization did submit a proposal to be a site operator, and an organization also submitted to be a technical assistance provider. He hopes to have those contracts finalized by the August 16 Board of Estimate and Apportionment meeting. Pinkney wouldn’t say what the organizations were, other than that they are not organizations that were previously involved in the effort: Employment Connections, the Urban League or Cure Violence.
Until a system is in place, the city has retained eight individuals from the Cure Violence program to continue working to prevent violence on the streets. However, only eight people spread out across three neighborhoods is a significantly smaller presence than when Cure Violence was in full swing.
Dutchtown resident Nate Linsdey, who worked with the violence interrupters in his neighborhood, says the end of Cure Violence in the city has his neighbors "left wondering who to reach out to" when in the past they would have contacted a Cure Violence staff member. He blamed the confusion on a "lack of communication by the Office of Violence Prevention."
For their part, the Office of Violence Prevention couldn’t say exactly how significant the reduction of people on the streets has been, because they couldn’t say exactly how many people were previously working under the Cure Violence program; a representative from the office said it was "at least a dozen."
But RFT reporting suggests the number was likely closer to 30. Lindsey says around eight or nine individuals were working for the Dutchtown Cure Violence site when it was up and running. An employee schedule from the Wells Goodfellow and Hamilton Heights site from May 2021 shows eight individuals working in violence interruption or community engagement. An individual with the Walnut Park site says that on average around nine people were on staff there at any given time over the last three years as well.
Jonathan Pulphus worked at the Wells Goodfellow and Hamilton Heights site for about two years, initially hired to manage high-risk participants from the neighborhood and connect them to services.
Pulphus says that he was one of the people who responded when there was shooting, and the top priority was making sure another shooting didn’t happen in retaliation.
"We would sit down with the more level-headed members of the family, like the matriarch of the family, to try to intervene and get us to a ceasefire or peace status," he says.
Pulphus says that things took a turn for the worse at his site after October 21, 2022, when a supervisor from the Wells Goodfellow & Hamilton Heights site was robbed at night at the Cure Violence office. Pulphus says that Employment Connections CEO Sal Martinez blamed the robbery on not enough staff being at the site office that evening, even though Pulphus stresses they had permission to not be at the office at the time.
Pulphus says the incident led to Martinez laying off most of the staff at the Wells Goodfellow and Hamilton Heights site in December.
In January, five violence interrupters and outreach workers from the Wells Goodfellow and Hamilton Heights site wrote a letter to Sal Martinez and Employment Connections CFO David Kessel, copying Pinkney and the mayor as well. The letter says the staff members felt they were being unfairly punished for the robbery, including wrongfully having pay withheld.
Sal Martinez did not respond to multiple calls seeking comment.
Pulphus sums up his time with Cure Violence this way: "Things were good when it was good. But when things were bad, it was terrible."
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