How Jos Neighbourhood Watch Makes Christians, Muslims Their Brother's Keeper

The Office of Neighborhood Safety in Richmond, CA took a radical new approach to urban violence by creating mechanisms to financially stabilize perpetrators of violent acts in crime-ridden neighborhoods - essentially paying people not to kill. They have been dramatically successful at weening violent criminals off the destructive behavior by using a comprehensive approach that includes using solid data, employing mentors with similar backgrounds to the criminals, and monetary incentives.

Community policing models in Lowell Mass., Boston and Philadelphia, have significantly decreased violent crime, and inspired the Canton's Police Department.

Across the country, hospitals are embracing intensive intervention programs to help victims of violence — including those who have criminal histories — after they have been brought in for treatment of injuries. Such programs can help prevent retaliation, reduce the chance a patient will be violently injured again, and put people on track for success.

The Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence in Quebec has expanded rapidly, becoming a model for programs around the world. What sets it apart from projects in Europe and the United States is that it confronts extremism of all stripes — not just Islamist — and focuses on behavior that signals the risk of violence, not just radical ideas, only involving law enforcement as a last resort.

A growing number of tribal judges nationwide - including Judge Abby Abinanti of the Yurok Tribal Court - are using a framework of traditional culture and an approach known as "restorative justice" to address both the need for rehabilitation of offenders and resolution for people often failed by the dominant criminal justice system.

In Jackson, Mississippi, a series of community-led cooperatives are creating opportunities for affordable home ownership. This is part of a trend across the country to create community land trusts. They are financed through donations, other community businesses, or commissions. Though each land trust faces hurdles, they are collectively allowing more access to wealth and ownership in historically low-income neighborhoods.

Police departments across the United States are implementing strategies and reforms in response to the growing number of unsolved criminal cases. With cold cases often linked to declined trust in police and the undermining of wellbeing in, typically urban, neighborhoods, these reforms are seeking to reverse course.

Grassroots organizations, like the Vancouver Chinatown Foundation, seek to preserve Chinatown’s heritage and fight the displacement of old-time residents by gentrification. The organizations bought an historic hotel to prevent displacement of 100 low-income residents, revitalized commercial spaces such as restaurants to preserve the neighborhood’s heritage and history, and funded programs to support social connections with events such as Majhong socials that bring together over 100 people. While the organizations agree on the goal to preserve Vancouver’s Chinatown, they sometimes disagree on how to get there

Since Camden began addressing its high homicide rate in 2012 with closer collaboration with the community and stricter rules on the use of force, both murders and complaints about police have fallen dramatically. As part of what is considered some of the most extensive police reforms in the country, the city put more police on the streets. That had both good outcomes (interactions outside of crises) and bad (a troubling increase in low-level arrests). But, when many cities’ police-brutality protests in 2020 turned violent, Camden’s did not.

For 28 years, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, stripped more than 100 people of U.S. citizenship and deported them for their direct participation in Nazi war crimes. The most successful Nazi-hunting operation in the world, OSI’s painstaking investigations – historical research combined with criminal sleuthing and international diplomacy – pried needed records from other nations’ files in order to prove that post-war refugees who ended up in America had immigrated under false pretenses, hiding their true role in the Holocaust’s extermination camps.