Behind The Headlines, hosted by Eric Barnes, CEO of The Daily Memphian, airs on WKNO Fridays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 8:30 a.m. Watch the show now via the video link at the top of this story or listen to the podcast version that includes extended conversation not included in the television version.

For more than a year, leaders of Youth Villages, a nonprofit best known for its services to children and young adults aging out of foster care, have talked about a deeper dive into gun violence.

“We haven’t worked with the highest risk people involved in gun violence,” Youth Villages CEO Patrick Lawler said on the WKNO Channel 10 program Behind The Headlines.

The Memphis Allies violent intervention program announced in March is a $60 million, four-year effort with a goal of reducing the rate of homicides per 100,000 people by 30%.

That comes in a city where the annual homicide count set a record in 2020 and then broke that record in 2021.

“We started looking at the problem, and this is not a problem with children,” Lawler said. “Ninety percent of the murders in our community are committed by adults. Often, young people and children and juveniles get the headlines. They are really only about 10% of the people who are involved in gun violence.”

Lawler estimates there are about 300 to 500 people in the city “at the highest risk of gun violence” — committing it and/or being a victim of it and retaliating — with 28 being the average age of those charged with murder in the city.

“That’s not actually a large number,” he said. “We believe we can reach those at highest risk.”

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Memphis Allies is an intervention effort that Executive Director Susan Deason says will work with existing efforts as well as build new efforts that rely in large part on those who have been involved in gun violence and with criminal records in their past. The goal is for those people to reach those living that life now. 

“Bringing someone down a path of change includes working with somebody, building a relationship with somebody who has that same history themselves,” she said on the podcast version of the show. “They can better understand where they’ve been and they are a symbol for change. They themselves have made that change.”

Intervention programs in several cities across the country, including New York City and Chicago, were studied as part of the Youth Villages effort, which Lawler said is tailored specifically to Memphis.

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“It’s much more intensive than the other models we saw and much larger than the other programs we saw because he have such a large problem,” he said.

The city of Memphis has its own gun violence intervention program nearing the end of its first fiscal year. It involves extensive training for those who intervene specifically to stop retaliation for shootings.

The Memphis effort under the administration of Mayor Jim Strickland is a retooling of a more tentative intervention effort during the administration of Strickland’s predecessor, AC Wharton. That effort didn’t last very long and specifically sent intervenors to hospital emergency rooms and crime scenes.

The Memphis Allies effort will not be limited to police responses to violence where someone is arrested or otherwise charged.

“Many people involved in gun violence are not arrested,” Lawler said. “They are living in the communities. And those are the people we can help.”

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Deason described the intervention as “the most intensive intervention we’ve developed to date.” She said it is about the surroundings of those at risk and the communities they live in, as well as working with organizations already on the ground in those communities.

“Obviously, many of these adults who are at highest risk started off as at-risk or high-risk young people,” she said. “But when someone is exposed to violence at a young age and grows up in a community or in a family where that’s normalized — maybe in a gang at a younger age that becomes day to day — it’s normal for some.

“And for many of these individuals, they don’t know that there are other opportunities. They haven’t been offered those other opportunities,” Deason said.

Lawler said the intervention will involve families and communities as well.

“What are you really going to change in that community? Young people — for that matter, all of us — are a reflection of who we are with and what those people are doing,” he said. “And if you don’t change the community and the environment, family circumstances — the situations where they return back into — there’s not going to be much change by just taking them away and putting them in an institution for six months or a year. As a matter of fact, they may come out worse.”

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The effort will be “heavily involved,” by Lawler’s description, in changing some policies in the criminal justice system but not in broader issues involving state laws like gun ownership and gun-carry law.

Most of the leaders of the local criminal justice system have been vocal in their criticism of recent changes in state law that allow for guns to be carried in cars and that eliminated any permits to own and carry guns for those over the age of 21.

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Local law enforcement has said most of the guns on the streets illegally in Memphis are guns stolen from cars.

“We’ve had a gun violence problem here long before that legislation passed. There are some people in this community that probably don’t need a gun,” Lawler said.

“We are not involved in the legislation. But we are not advocates for people who are dangerous having weapons,” he said. “That’s not something we would support whatsoever. But we pretty much stay out of the legislative process.”