RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) — Wake County Commissioners are working to bring a violence interruption program to Wake County.
Commissioners discussed progress in creating the program during Monday’s Public Safety Committee meeting.
“It’s so much better and it’s so much easier to avoid a violent act than to deal with it on the back end,” commissioner Matt Calabria said.
Calabria said part of the violence interrupters program will be modeled after the Department of Justice’s Project Safe Neighborhoods, which he said is effective in reducing gun violence.
In the coming months, he said commissioners, law enforcement, prosecutors and community members will decide what that model looks like in Wake County.
CBS 17 asked Calabria how the program will be different from what the county is doing now. He said while the county funds the sheriff’s office it doesn’t always have a natural role in working with gun violence prevention.
“This is really us—for the first time—squaring our shoulders to the issue of gun violence,” Calabria said.
Calabria said they are now in the planning phase, progress from a few months ago when he said this was still in the idea phase. Since then, in a March meeting when the program was discussed, he said commissioners compiled all the different resources and organizations that work to prevent violence.
District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said she wants to use data to find the root sources of violence.
“The number one thing that really stands out to all of us, is kind of, the proliferation of weapons within our community,” Freeman said.
She said the number of firearms being brought to school by children is also something that stands out, and that part of the solution is making gun owners aware of how to safely store weapons so they don’t fall into the wrong hands.
Calabria said there’s no set timeline for when the program will be up and running, but that violence interruption is one of the commission’s top priorities this year.
“These are matters of life and death in many cases and so we have to be really thoughtful about how we approach them,” he said.
He said the next step is hopefully having a memorandum of understanding in the next two to three months so everyone involved knows their clear roles.