Springfield has Massachusetts's highest violent crime rate, with 9.05 violent crimes per capita and 20 murders in 2019. While some crime decreased in Springfield between 2019 and 2020, overall rates remained high: aggravated assaults increased by 11 percent, and gun offenses increased by 21.56 percent. In 2020, there were 368 shooting incidents (17 murders, 1 rape, 124 robberies, and 226 aggravated assaults). During this period, there were 106 shooting victims (a 41 percent increase from 2019), 772 shots-fired calls for service (a 59 percent increase from 2019), and 1,295 ShotSpotter calls for service (a 62 percent increase from 2019). Our targeted focus areas are clear drivers of these increases in gun crime. Within them, gun violence is increasingly committed by small groups of very high-risk young men in specific social networks who cannot succeed in traditional work or programming.  

These youth display significantly more signs of outward poverty, and a lack of community services can create distrust and a sense of fear within struggling neighborhoods. The lack of opportunities that youth experience (e.g., access to jobs, quality of schools, political efficacy, individual racism) are significant risk factors. Springfield youth's adverse childhood experiences are associated with various behavioral risk factors and chronic illnesses carried into adulthood. These challenges are exacerbated by high levels of opiate use and the increasing levels of trauma our young people face. Social media has dramatically increased the speed of communications and its impact on violence. Youth living in areas with high risk of violence are at elevated risk for trauma, which can have devastating effects on their physiology, emotions, impulse control, self-image, relationships with others, and ability to think, learn, and concentrate. Ecological theory posits that living in such disadvantaged communities can directly influence individual characteristics and associated behaviors, resulting in young people devaluing their neighborhoods and futures. 

Better Tomorrow (BT) is a partnership between the medical care system, the criminal justice system, and community-based service providers. It focuses on reducing gun violence in the communities most heavily impacted by gun violence. BT’s hospital-based component will serve trauma patients who have suffered a gunshot wound. It will focus its community-based work on young people between 18 and 25 who drive violence in these critical focus areas. Through a combination of hospital-based violence intervention, community-based long-term behavioral intervention, and restorative justice, the BT partnership is committed to creating long-term sustainable change, measurable through reducing violence and explicitly focusing on reducing retaliatory violence. At the same time, BT will promote positive alternatives to violence and develop community-based engagement in violence reduction work, improving relationships and communications between police and our targeted communities. Finally, BT will work to create systems change within our criminal justice partners, increasing their effectiveness in working with our highest-risk young people. 

Relying on the resources and expertise of each of its partners, BT will create a continuum of services designed to support long-term, sustainable behavior change. This approach will ensure services are delivered by meeting young people where they are, behaviorally and developmentally, and following an understanding of adolescent brain development. The team will host several meetings to generate buy-in and complete the development of this comprehensive violence reduction approach. The program will include, at a minimum:  

• The creation of a hospital-based program, integrated closely with community programs and designed to address the modifiable risk factors predisposing patients to violent injury.  

• The expansion of ROCA’s community-based, targeted cognitive behavioral intervention model, focusing on the highest-risk young people between the ages of 18 and 25 who are driving gun violence in the community, many of whom will be linked to ROCA as part of the hospital-based program.  

• Critical community engagement and restorative justice practices, including training of key community members on young-adult brain science and trauma, cognitive behavioral theory, and peacemaking circles. 

The Springfield grantee site will implement Roca's Intervention Model. This model is a voluntary program that specializes in engaging young adults who would otherwise not choose to participate in change. Roca's Intervention Model is an internationally recognized, four-year behavioral health model that intervenes with young people at the center of urban violence to teach them life-saving skills, specifically the behavioral skills they need to stay alive long enough so that they can learn to choose to live. The goal of this project is to create a new Hospital-Based Violence Intervention (HBVI) program that will target violently injured trauma patients, particularly those who are being treated for gun related injury, and provide them a trauma-informed, cognitive intervention and linkage to long term care and treatment in the community. To achieve this goal, the grantee site and its project partners, will implement the following strategies: 

Partner with Roca to implement community-based intervention. The components of the Roca model are: 

• Create safety and stability 
• Teach life-saving skills
• Practice skills, relapse, and repeat
• Engage institutions and systems 
• Implement peacemaking circles and restorative justice practices 
• Enhanced partnerships and targeted suppression
• Develop a coalition to help with pediatric prevention through education 

ROCA, Springfield Police Department, Better Tomorrow Criminal Justice Partners, Hampden County, Holyoke Police Department, Hampden County Sheriff’s Department, US Attorneys