The Cure VIBE Woodland Hills team canvasses a Braddock neighborhood on March 21. A new app built by the Allegheny County Department of Human Services aids the team’s violence intervention work. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
An app has informed rapid responses to more than 130 Pittsburgh-area shootings since July. It’s part of the county’s $50 million investment to curb gun violence, but the future looks fraught for federal funding of violence prevention.
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Shots rang out in a quiet Turtle Creek neighborhood on a Sunday night in December. Alarmed by the sound of gunfire, neighbors called Lee Davis and his team of violence interrupters, who had worked to build trust in the community.
It was after 10 p.m., but Davis was awake and keeping watch. Gun violence is more likely after dark, and some of the “most horrific” shootings in the area took place on weekends, he said. He rushed to his office at Greater Valley Community Services in Braddock, where he serves as the director of violence prevention, to plan a response with his team.
Greater Valley received funding from Allegheny County to adapt Cure Violence — a global violence prevention model — to the Woodland Hills area. Davis and his team were trained to de-escalate conflict among people involved in shootings and connect them with supportive services. They start by canvassing the area to learn what they can from witnesses and neighbors, but typically wait for police and emergency responders to leave before moving in. They limit contact with law enforcement to stay credible in Black communities that bear the brunt of the gun violence epidemic — and a carceral system that largely fails to address it, according to experts.
But police can provide information that the community sometimes can’t, such as the exact location of the shooting. Davis had been led astray enough times by neighbors to know that “some people’s hearing can be way off,” which slows the team down when they need to act quickly to prevent a retaliatory shooting.
A new tool — built by the county Department of Human Services [ACDHS] and launched in July — has solved this problem for Davis’ team. While the group planned, they received a text about the shooting: It happened near the 7-Eleven on the 400 block of James Street. One person was shot in the ankle, while another was shot multiple times and found nearby on Albert Street. Both were hospitalized.
“It helps immensely,” said Davis, describing how the app pinpoints the location of a shooting. Before, his team had to “just rely on anybody and everybody from the street [because the authorities] wouldn’t share anything with us.” Now they can easily identify contacts nearby who may have information.
Such notifications are part of the county’s Rapid Response protocol, which was designed to help violence intervention teams collaborate and coordinate while working in different hotspots for gun violence. ACDHS developed an internal app to facilitate the process, in which County Police log shootings to alert the teams. A team located near the shooting will respond and coordinate with other teams if the violence involves people who live in different parts of the county.
Some teams follow the Cure Violence or REACH models by gathering intel, mediating conflict and changing community norms. Others meet victims and families in hospitals to head off retaliation and offer services, including relocation and mental health supports. And a team from Neighborhood Resilience Project, a Hill District nonprofit, travels to shooting locations countywide in a “trauma response van” to administer psychological first aid to victims.
County officials didn’t answer questions about the protocol until recently, indicating they wanted to establish its track record before speaking with a reporter. An ACDHS team tracked 130 incidents in the app from early July to late February. Across those incidents, they logged 157 victims, 46 of whom died. A spokesperson wrote those numbers may not be complete or accurate, but still paint a big picture of non-fatal shootings in the county, which were previously hard to measure.
County and City of Pittsburgh officials described the protocol as “historic” during a group interview with PublicSource. It allows for quick, standardized teamwork across neighborhoods and municipal borders to prevent violence. Until recently, that wasn’t happening in one of the most fragmented counties in the nation, with 130 municipalities and 108 police departments, they said. And while other cities and counties have helped teams coordinate and share information, experts told PublicSource they’re not aware of any that built an app for that process.
“Putting it into an app is pretty novel, right?” said Andy Papachristos, a sociology professor at Northwestern University who researches gun violence, policing and urban neighborhoods. Even Chicago, which pioneered gun violence prevention, hasn’t built this kind of tech, he added.
Rapid Response is part of the county’s Community Violence Reduction Initiative — a $50 million investment over five years, starting in 2023, to curb gun violence through public health programs. The effort spans across at least 10 high-priority areas, which include neighborhoods that were dispossessed by structural racism. Eleven teams embedded in the areas work with those at risk, who are disproportionately Black men and boys. Three of those teams are funded by the City of Pittsburgh.
A ‘pressing need’ to curb violence across borders
Gun violence follows the path of an infectious disease: It spreads from one neighborhood or municipality to another through retaliatory shootings. Experts say mistrust in the justice system, which is far less likely to solve murders of Black people than white people, drives retaliation.
Violence “doesn’t respect city boundaries” or “know about political geography,” said Mike McLively, policy director of the Giffords Center for Violence Intervention, part of the gun safety research and advocacy group founded by former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords. If a shooting in one municipality is followed by retaliation in another, “you might have completely different systems of response that don’t know what’s happening in the other.”
And because municipalities are funded through property taxes, different responses to shootings can lead to disparities and unequal outcomes, said Daniel Salahuddin, a psychiatrist who treats patients traumatized by gun violence at the Sto-Rox Family Health Center in McKees Rocks. “It’s just so much fragmentation and not enough pooling of resources for the greater good,” he said.
More than half the incidents logged in the app involve people from different parts of the county. In a typical pattern, the effects of a shooting will ripple through the neighborhood where it occurred, an entirely different neighborhood where the suspect lives and yet another one where the victim lives. “That’s how transient this is,” said Nick Cotter, an ACDHS research practitioner who helped build Rapid Response.
It’s why the app was a “pressing need,” he added. It standardized the flow of information to teams that might otherwise work in silos, and fostered “symbiotic” relationships across the county’s ecosystem for community violence intervention.
How the Rapid Response protocol works
The ACDHS team relies on police blotters, media reports and other sources to log incidents in the app. But they were initially “missing a lot” of shootings, so they brought in County Police to help capture nearly all gun violence in the county, said Cotter.
Soon after emergency responders reach the scene, a County Police supervisor or sergeant will log a shooting in the app. They’ll include the location and number of victims, noting if any are fatalities. And they’ll describe how safe the area is and warn of an active shooter, if necessary.
That information is sent to all the teams via text message, but only the one located in the relevant area is asked to respond. That team logs their actions and updates in the app in real time, which the other teams can act on if the shooting spills over to other areas.
The two police forces that use the app, County Police and the Penn Hills Police Department, can’t see what the teams record. Their limited access only allows them to log a shooting and see if the location is in an area with a response team.
It’s an important restriction that builds trust with victims, families and the broader community, said Cornell Jones, the group violence intervention coordinator for the City of Pittsburgh. “The goal is to be able to help,” he said, not “arresting people” or “building mass incarceration.” The app also puts up a boundary between teams with lived experience, who might be uncomfortable around police, and law enforcement that provides the information they need.
Penn Hills Police officials didn’t respond to a request for comment, but a County Police official said his department is supportive of the process.
“Anything that helps reduce violence, the likelihood of someone participating in gun violence [and] becoming the victim of gun violence is something that we want to be a part of,” said Assistant Superintendent Victor Joseph.
That police buy-in is “pretty remarkable,” said ACDHS Director Erin Dalton, explaining that “getting police and operational folks to use [information technology] is just incredibly difficult.”
Cotter said the teams had achieved an 85% response rate to shootings by January, which he expects will climb as they get used to the protocol and become more efficient.
Is Rapid Response having an impact?
Violence prevention can be dangerous and emotionally taxing work. Those who do it for the county say Rapid Response has made their jobs easier and better, and could ultimately save more lives.
The app has simplified hospital-based intervention — a crucial way to prevent retaliation. “The next shooters” are often triggered while grieving over a loved one’s death or injuries in a hospital, said Gina Brooks, director of violence prevention at Reimagine Reentry, a Hill District nonprofit whose team deploys to the four major trauma centers in the area.
Before the app launched, her team faced hurdles that could keep them from reaching a victim before they’re discharged. They had no way of knowing which hospital a victim was taken to, and relied on staff to make referrals. Brooks regularly trains hospital workers to do so, but staff turns over quickly and victims can fall through the cracks.
Now County Police use the app to tell teams which hospital the victim is en route to, which helps Brooks’ team get there much faster. They may be more likely to prevent another shooting and keep staff from making potentially catastrophic mistakes, such as placing two people involved in a shooting on the same floor.
“They don’t know the street,” said Brooks. “So it’s good for us to go there and support the hospital staff” while they care for victims, she said.
In Turtle Creek, Davis’ team searched for leads in the area surrounding James Street — the location logged in the app. They quickly found those affected by the incident near 7-Eleven, which escalated from a drug sale to an attempted robbery to a shooting. While a hospital-based intervention team reached a victim’s bedside, neighborhood contacts led Davis’ team to his mother and family. They also tracked down others involved in the shooting, who are minors.
“And that’s how we were able to really mediate,” he said. Asked if a retaliation was brewing, Davis said “we got on it so fast that I don’t even think there was a chance for anybody to think about it.” Neither side has escalated the conflict, he said.
ACDHS will likely do a “rigorous,” data-driven evaluation of Rapid Response and all violence intervention programs, Cotter said. “But we know for a fact every week that they prevent violence.”
Experts pointed out the limits of community violence intervention. Providing services to people involved in shootings only goes so far while the context around them doesn’t change.
“We’re throwing a lot of money at the problem of gun violence, whereas the problem is not gun violence,” said Salahuddin, who’s also an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. “The problem is systemic inequity, racism, disenfranchisement, lack of economic opportunity [and] the education gap.”
From funding at ‘historic highs’ to possible lows
Dalton said developing a tool like Rapid Response “is part of us treating [violence intervention] as a profession and caring about it and resourcing it as we would any other proper set of services.”
That resourcing is partly paid for by a federal grant awarded in 2023 from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the arm of the U.S. Department of Justice that supports local public safety programs. ACDHS has, as yet, no indication that it will have to scale back its violence intervention spending. ACDHS also receives federal funding that flows through state coffers, a spokesperson wrote in an email.
Federal funding for community violence intervention reached “historic highs” under the Biden administration, said McLively of the Giffords Center. But President Donald Trump’s administration removed a 2024 Surgeon General’s Advisory declaring gun violence a public health crisis. It also archived web pages detailing funding opportunities for violence intervention.
Both McLively and Papachristos believe Trump could slash funding for research and programs that help make tools like Rapid Response and innovation in violence intervention possible.
McLively said the Giffords Center is encouraging providers to spend down their federal dollars and diversify funding streams.
“There’s this sense that at any given time, and for very little justification, the faucet could just be turned off.”
Venuri Siriwardane is PublicSource’s health and mental health reporter. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org or on Bluesky @venuri.bsky.social.
This story was fact-checked by Bella Markovitz.
The Jewish Healthcare Foundation has contributed funding to PublicSource’s health care reporting.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
