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A consultant’s advice on reducing deadly street violence in Salem centers around hiring a manager that city officials are struggling to secure.
That’s because funding available to pay for the position won’t last more than a few years, Salem Police Chief Trevor Womack said Monday night at a Salem City Council work session on reducing violent crime.
The meeting was the culmination of a year’s work to build a roadmap to reducing shootings and community violence in Salem. It involved Salem-area law enforcement agencies, community leaders and an Oakland-based consulting firm, Empower Initiative.
In a report last week, the consultant recommended hiring a person in the Salem City Manager’s Office to coordinate efforts between police, community organizations and service providers to bring down violence. That would include meeting at-risk young people for interventions and a concerted effort to alert underserved residents about social services that address root causes of violence.
“To attract a high-quality candidate to take a job that’s temporary in a city that’s talking about budget cuts and layoffs and so forth is almost impossible,” Womack said at the meeting.
Womack also told Salem Reporter after the meeting that his agency will again plan to assign overtime work next summer to ramp up vehicle and foot patrols as they did in recent months in parts of Salem most vulnerable to violence. That included neighborhoods and parks in northeast Salem and the downtown corridor.
As the city’s work got underway, Salem police recorded a slight decline in shootings. Early data for 2024 shows that fatal shootings have dropped from five this time last year to four, and shootings leaving people injured are down 9% from 22 to 20.
The agency said in its report that “no definitive causal link can yet be established” between its violence reduction work and crime statistics. It said in April that Salem’s violent crime rate has steadily increased over 10 years.
The strategy
Womack and Ben McBride, the consulting firm’s CEO and co-founder, discussed the recommendations at the Monday work session. Those in attendance included Salem city councilors, Marion County Sheriff Nick Hunter, Marion County District Attorney Paige Clarkson and community leaders from organizations such as Valor Mentoring, Community Business & Education Leaders, To God Be the Glory Church and Salem-Keizer Coalition for Equality.
Salem City Councilor Virginia Stapleton asked if there are already programs in the community that are ready to provide case management and mentoring.
McBride said existing organizations such as Mano a Mano provide services that already bring them close to those at highest risk of being perpetrators or victims of violence.
“Rather than resourcing organizations that would need to try to find relationships in the community, I think leaning on an organization that is already in (a) relationship with these communities, and allowing them to direct people in the right direction would be the best way,” he said.
McBride said Salem doesn’t have a large network of gangs or criminal enterprises.
“Your model is one that actually is going to have to go a couple degrees deeper and really mine out the relationships of people that are more at risk, which means they’re going to have to take a deeper relational strategy, rather than just an organizational strategy where you’re identifying groups,” he said.
As a result, he also said law enforcement’s approach needs to be slower to build relationships with the community, rather than racially profile people because police “are trying to figure out who are the people that are at risk.”
Councilor Jose Gonzalez said he hopes that the city can partner with the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce to find more employment opportunities for teenagers.
McBride agreed and said when community leaders in other cities have organized meetings with at-risk young people, business owners have attended who are ready to offer employment during the meeting.
He said that the city’s strategy rests on reducing gun violence and the number of people cycling in and out of the criminal justice system. He also said building community trust in the police is key so that when violence does occur, people don’t resort to street justice.
“The people at the highest risk to shoot are oftentimes the people at the highest risk to be shot, because usually these are people, for a variety of different reasons, that are engaged in firearm activity,” he said.
One of the consultant’s recommendations is what they called the “call-in” approach, where community stakeholders reach out directly to at-risk young people both to provide accountability and help to steer people away from violence. Womack said that would include contacting people who are about to be released from prison or a juvenile correctional facility.
Those in attendance would help the person find employment or get them access to social services, such as mental health care, substance abuse treatment and housing.
McBride said he has participated in many such meetings which have saved the life of the subject and potentially other people they might have otherwise gone on to harm.
He said providing personalized help to those at risk of engaging in violence has been controversial among some people who have asked, “Why should we reward people to not harm the community?”
“I will simply say it’s the fiscally smart solution,” he said. “You could spend a few thousand dollars with some incentivized case management, which is about giving people $50 to $100 here or there to begin to make the right choices – getting ID, moving towards job support, getting them on a track away from violence.”
Alternatively, he said the cumulative cost of one gun homicide can total around $1 million.
McBride said some people, “by nature of the violence that they might be involved in,” may need to move out of the city for their own safety. He recommended working with regional partners to establish ways to help people relocate, such as job training and placement programs.
McBride and several city councilors agreed that gun violence needs to be treated as a public health issue.
Councilor Vanessa Nordyke said that county public health departments should participate in the violence reduction work. She pointed to the consultant’s recommendation that a program be dedicated to making Salem residents aware of social services, saying that education is what public health departments “are all about.”
Community leaders speak
The consulting group’s report recommended that the violence reduction work be co-led for the next year by Levi Herrera-López, executive director of Mano a Mano, a nonprofit serving mostly farmworker and Latino families, and Kyle Dickinson, incoming executive director of the Salem Leadership Foundation, which encourages local churches to get involved in the Salem community.
They would lead a “community work group” intended to bring together organizations that are closest to the communities most affected by violence, the consultant’s report suggested.
Both Herrera-López and Dickinson said after the meeting that hiring a long-term manager will be key to reducing gun violence in Salem.
Hererra-López agreed that the person should work in the city manager’s office to have “a high level picture of everything happening.”
But he doesn’t want the job.
Contracting the position out to a community nonprofit is “not a good idea,” he said, because it may not have enough authority to marshal city-wide resources.
He also said the Salem community needs to consider how much money it is willing to bring for its side of the project. If it’s not as much as the city receives in grant funding, “we will end up with a stool that has some shorter legs and some longer ones,” he said in an email. “There is then the matter of helping make sure the people affected by this issue have the resources to be part of the solution.”
Dickinson said in an interview that his and Herrera-López’s paying jobs have “a ton of overlap” with the violence reduction efforts. But he shares the chief’s concern that the city may not be able to hire a manager as long as it’s a temporary position. He said he wonders if a new private-public partnership could emerge out of that need.
“There’s just a real strong sense that everybody has a role to play in this,” he said. “That really is a challenge to put forth to the community, because we have a role to play alongside of law enforcement. It can’t just be one and it can’t just be the other. We have to be working closely together on this if it’s really going to make a big difference.”
Next steps for violence reduction
The city’s report on violence November 2023 found as many as eight out of ten shootings over the previous five years involved members of gangs or more informal groups as victims, attackers or both.
But Womack said at the Monday meeting that active gang members make up less than 1% of Salem’s population. He also pointed to data from that report which showed that more than half of shootings were occurring in one 5-mile-square area of northeast Salem.
He said those two realities will help the city focus its limited resources.
Salem police hired outside researchers to gather the data laid out in its report last year. The Marion County Sheriff’s Office later brought in the same researchers to examine the state of gun violence throughout the county – including unincorporated east Salem, which wasn’t part of the city’s study.
Hunter, the Marion County sheriff, said at the meeting on Monday that there have been delays but he hopes to release his agency’s findings in December. “We’ve asked them to go back and do a few additional details for us,” he said. “Anecdotally, you’re seeing a lot of the same things.”
In response to a question from Councilor Micki Varney, Womack said using peer mentors would be a “critical component” to helping people at risk of being involved in violence.
“It’s proven effective to have peer mentors with lived experience come along (with) folks in their addiction and begin to help them make the right decisions towards coming away from their addiction,” he said. “The same logic applies to violence too.”
Womack and Dickinson both said in interviews after the meeting that one immediate step that can be taken is organizing more community-based night walks, a tactic introduced during the public meetings this past spring and summer focused on violence reduction.
They also said developing a “call-in” program may take more time to conduct risk assessments to determine who is a candidate for such meetings. Womack said that would include coordinating with the sheriff’s office or Marion County Juvenile Department.
The most critical step, Womack said, will be hiring the violence reduction manager. Without one, he said he is concerned that the community side of such work will fade away “unless some coordinator can pick it up and run with it.”
Womack doesn’t believe the city can fill that position without finding a way to secure it permanently, he said. “I don’t know how we’re going to find a long-term solution of having that person.”
City officials say the manager could be paid using police salary savings from positions that are currently vacant, though the city is facing an $18 million budget deficit next year, with deep cuts on the horizon.
Salem police also recently applied for a $2 million federal grant for violence reduction work and expect to learn “any day” whether they will receive it, Womack said at the work session. But the chief said he wouldn’t recommend using that funding to pay for the violence coordinator because it would only last three years.
Salem officials intended to fill the position this past spring, describing it in a posting as a full-time community safety outreach program manager and saying the job would have an 18-month duration. The monthly salary was listed between $6,566 to $8,821.
Recruitment efforts fizzled out after the city interviewed six candidates and offered the job to two, who both turned it down.
“They didn’t want to leave their job to take a temporary position for a city facing a budget crisis,” Womack told Salem Reporter.
RELATED COVERAGE:
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Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053.
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Ardeshir Tabrizian has covered criminal justice and housing for Salem Reporter since September 2021. As an Oregon native, his award-winning watchdog journalism has traversed the state. He has done reporting for The Oregonian, Eugene Weekly and Malheur Enterprise.
