Minneapolis
The city has employed community members to head off conflicts before they turn deadly.
Once you see them, you can’t miss them: A group of 20 people in bright orange T-shirts roaming city streets into the early morning hours, armed with knowledge about their community and a desperate wish to stop the gunfire.
They’re called “violence interrupters,” and they’re part of the city’s plan to curb an ongoing cycle of fatal retaliations at a time when shootings are at a five-year high in Minneapolis.
“I’m tired of it,” said Yulonda Royster, a violence interrupter who was starting her shift Friday night in downtown Minneapolis. “Every day there is some young Black boy being killed being shot. All of this gang violence, it can be prevented.”
The violence interrupters are paid employees of the city’s Office of Violence Prevention — not the police department. City officials launched the program about a month ago and modeled the group after similar efforts in New York City and Philadelphia.
On this night, most of the interrupters rounding the corner onto Hennepin Avenue are Black men. Royster is one of the few women.
Royster said she knows about the violence that can consume certain young men. When she and her family lived in north Minneapolis, one of her three sons was active in gangs, was wounded in a shooting, and was incarcerated, she recalled.
“My son comes from a good home, but still,” she said, “I didn’t have that village, that support, while I was out working one job always full time — sometimes two — and being in school. He was out on the streets a lot of times.”