Give Advance Peace a chance. Dyer, Balderrama wrong to give up on promising program

Advance Peace Fresno, a program focused on teaching some of the city’s most likely shooters how to stop committing violent crimes, is worth continuing.

But it has been controversial since its inception here.

In 2019, the City Council narrowly approved the program when it came under criticism by conservative politicians for paying stipends to participants to not commit crimes. In a social media posting at the time, then Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of Tulare said the idea of “paying criminals to be nice” is another reason why California is “going off the rails.” Then Mayor Lee Brand wound up vetoing the council’s approval.

The council then voted in 2020 to fund the program after a recommendation from the Commission on Police Reform. Advance Peace got under way in June 2021 in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Fast forward to now, and Mayor Jerry Dyer and Police Chief Paco Balderrama don’t want to support the program in the new budget because of the recent arrest of an Advance Peace employee in a gang sweep. Balderrama also believes some staff have acted in bad faith and violated his trust in the program.

The latest issues came to a head at the council’s budget hearing Monday, and forced Councilmember Miguel Arias to propose that $950,000 in funding for the program be frozen for 30 days after the budget is adopted. During that time, Arias said, Advance Peace officials can work with the city on new accountability measurements to address the concerns.

The council is going to vote Thursday on budget motions, and Arias’ idea is one that council members should approve. Advance Peace has been highly effective in other communities, and Fresno needs to give the local program more of a chance to prove itself.

Fresno’s history of shootings

The unfortunate background to the politics is the fact that the use of guns in committing crimes is practically woven into the fabric of Fresno. Most of it involves gang-on-gang violence.

Last year Fresno had more than 70 people shot to death. Of the state’s largest cities, only Oakland had a worse murder rate (total shootings vs. population). It was the second consecutive year that Fresno had more than 70 people killed in gun violence.

In writing about the disturbing trend, Bee columnist Marek Warszawski said “California’s fifth-largest city hasn’t experienced these sorts of homicide totals since the crack epidemic peaked in the mid ‘90s.”

Fortunately, the trend has improved this year. From Jan. 1 to June 21, police say there have been 220 shootings in the city vs. 316 over the same time last year. A total of 26 murders have occurred, compared to 34 in the same period last year.

Advance Peace’s benefits

One of the cities where Advance Peace has been tried is the Bay Area community of Richmond. There, according to the American Journal of Public Health, gun homicides and assaults dropped 55% from 1996 to 2016.

Julius Thibodeaux is from Richmond, and when he was 15 he shot a man who had been “picking on me.”

“To this day, despite years of reflection, I can’t really explain why I pulled the trigger that day,” he wrote in an op-ed The Bee published in 2019. “But I think it had a lot to do with feeling like I had no one to turn to, and feeling like I couldn’t express my anger with this man who was older than me.”

Thibodeaux went on to become a program manager for Advance Peace in Sacramento. In recounting the program’s difference in Richmond, he said it produced a positive economic impact of $500 million. Much of that was savings by not having the high costs of health care, law enforcement and criminal justice tied to gun violence.

Give Peace a chance

The Advance Peace worker caught up in the gang sweep will have his fate determined in the court, as it should be. But Arias pointed out that every so often a police officer is arrested for “misbehavior.” When that happens, the city does not get rid of the entire Police Department, he said.

So too it should not give up on Advance Peace Fresno simply because of one potentially bad actor.

Fresno has only had Advance Peace for a year, hardly enough time to draw ultimate conclusions about whether it deserves funding or not. It should continue for at least another year to develop more data so its effectiveness can be better judged. But early results look promising.

Researchers with UC Berkeley found that in the second half of 2021, Advance Peace Fresno’s 17 fellows interrupted 60 imminent gun violence conflicts; responded to 21 shootings to prevent retaliatory violence; and mediated 200 community conflicts that could have escalated to gun violence.

The key premise of Advance Peace is teaching participants to solve problems without resorting to violence. Given Fresno’s reality of shootings, such teaching is priceless.