City Touts Gun Violence-Prevention Partnership

The Elicker Administration has launched a new local-state-federal partnership focused on helping formerly incarcerated adults who are at risk of being victims or perpetrators of gun violence.

That initiative is called the Program for Reintegration, Engagement, Safety and Support, or PRESS. It will fall under the auspices of the city’s recently created Department of Community Resilience, and will ultimately be led by a yet-to-be-hired coordinator for the city’s new Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

“The theme of the day is collaborating together to solve the challenges that our community faces,” Elicker said while standing alongside over a dozen partners, including representatives from the New Haven Police Department (NHPD), the state Department of Correction (DOC), the state offices of probation and parole, the local reentry services organization Project M.O.R.E., the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the city Community Services Administration, the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program (CTVIP), and others.

Elicker said that PRESS’s goals are twofold: to ​“reduce shooting incidents by increasing collaboration between violence prevention partners and initiatives,” and to ​“coordinate service delivery for those at high risk of being perpetrators or victims of shootings.”

“PRESS closes the gap in the post-incarceration safety net,” city Department of Community Resilience Acting Director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo said.

Sosa-Lombardo said the first phase of the program kicked off three weeks ago.

Here’s how it works, he said: Representatives from probation, parole, NHPD, and DOC get together every week and create a list of people recently returned to the community whom ​“we should be focusing on” because they are at risk of getting involved in gun violence. 

That list of names is distributed to Project M.O.R.E., Project Longevity, and CTVIP, depending on whether, for example, a person is in a group or a gang, or a person has an ​“issue in the community that needs to be mediated.”

Project M.O.R.E., meanwhile, will have a social worker and a ​“peer with lived experience” in place to help connect that person to a host of social services related to everything from housing to employment to substance use treatment and mental health services to clothing and other basic needs.

This is exactly the type of ​“collaborative case management that is essential to help our clients get back on their feet,” said Keisha Gatison, who is the director of Project M.O.R.E.‘s reentry welcome center on Grand Avenue.

How exactly is PRESS different from other existing collaborative programs, like Project Longevity and Project Safe Neighborhoods, in which law enforcement and social service providers team up to target support at New Haveners likely to be victims or perpetrators of violence?

Sosa-Lombardo pointed out that Project Longevity focuses on providing support to gang and group members in the form of call-ins and conferences. With PRESS, he said, Project Longevity can now tap into ​“existing networks” at Project M.O.R.E. and the CTVIP street-outreach worker program. He said the same is true for the U.S. Attorney’s Office-coordinated Project Safe Neighborhoods.

Jacobson: 2 Guns Linked To Tuesday's Shooting

During his turn at the mic on Thursday, city Assistant Police Chief Karl Jacobson threw his and the NHPD’s support behind the new PRESS initiative. 

“This is the right approach. This is important. We need to be here for people who get out of prison,” he said. ​“We want people safe, alive, and out of jail.”

He also gave a brief update on the shooting incident that took place outside of Reggie Mayo preschool on Goffe Street on Tuesday afternoon. 

That’s when gunmen driving down Goffe sprayed 23 bullets in the direction of the apartment complex across the street from the preschool at the same time that school was getting out. No one was hurt. Then, on Wednesday, police announced that they had arrested three people — one 19 year old and two 17 year olds — who they believed were involved in the shooting.

At Thursday’s presser, Jacobson said that, through an analysis of ballistic evidence at the scene, police have linked two of the guns that were confiscated from those suspects with the Tuesday afternoon shootings.

He said that the NHPD is now working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office on filing a new set of shooting-related charges against the arrested individuals.