SPECIAL REPORT: Innovative outreach program worked in Bay Area, will it work in Salinas to cut down violence?

A year ago, Joel Contreras and Sam Vaughn, two unlikely friends, met face to face. Contreras was just getting out of school one day in Richmond, California, when Vaughn approached him with an opportunity to turn Contreras’ life around.

Contreras refused, he jumped in a car and about three blocks down the road he was shot.

“He contacted us from the hospital,” Vaugn said. “When he came home, he came in and met with us. We laid it all out for him: this is who we are.”

Vaughn, who grew up in Richmond, is a part of a team called the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS).

“It has one single focus and that is to reduce fire arm assault and associated injury and death,” said DeVone Boggan, director of ONS.

Richmond had a problem, a big problem.

The city had a record number of 62 homicides in the early ’90s. Then from 2003-2009 homicides spiked, averaging nearly 40 a year, according to stats compiled by Contra Costa Times.

“We had the highest murder rate in California and we were voted the top most dangerous cities in the United States,” said Richmond Police Capt. Mark Gagan.

Gagan has enforced the law in Richmond since the ’90s and says enforcing the law was part of the problem.

“I will go on the record to say that I don’t believe incarceration rehabilitates people,” Gagan said.

Gagan and others came to believe they couldn’t “arrest their way” out of the violence problem.

“What can we do differently? We’re losing,” Boggan said.

In 2007, the city decided to go in a different direction creating the ONS, a non-law enforcement team.

“Our theory of change is very simple: I’m trying to blow these young men’s minds. I’m trying to get them away from the ‘I don’t give a…’ to ‘Man, maybe I do,'” Boggan said.

Both the police and the ONS agree: It’s not the area or the streets that are dangerous in Richmond. You could be at City Hall or on 32nd street; it’s that small group of people committing dangerous crimes.

“What we decided as an organization in early March of 2010 was that, those are the guys. As long as they’re walking our streets idle, isolated, angry, negotiating all kinds of vicarious trauma, those are the young men we’re going to focus on,” Boggan said.

ONS’ strategy isn’t about cracking down on those young men, it’s about reaching out to them.

“We make government user-friendly,” Vaughn said.

Vaughn is on the front lines. He’s what ONS calls a neighborhood change agent and he didn’t get that title the easy way.

“I made a lot of bad decisions: alcohol abuse, smoked a lot of weed, committed crimes,” Vaughn said. “That concept and that way of thinking led me to prison for 10 years (for attempted murder).”

Vaughn’s first-hand knowledge of crime and the ability to turn his life around made him the perfect ambassador to find and connect with the city’s most dangerous and vulnerable.

“We’re the ones that are persistent,” he said.

Joel Contreras, whether it was a moment of clarity or fear, after he was dropped with a bullet, he dropped his guard.

“They (ONS) helped me get my driver’s license, they helped me get enrolled back in school,” Contreras said.

Richmond’s strategy which didn’t involve tougher police tactics is often credited with a dramatic drop in violence and homicides.

From 47 homicides in 2009 to just 11 in 2014, which is the lowest total since 1973, according to Contra Costa Times.

So far in 2015, there have been 18 homicides, Richmond police said.

But not everyone is so sure. Tom Butt, Richmond’s mayor and 20-year City Council member says it’s hard to give all the credit to ONS.

“We’ve got a lot of things we try and we think they all work, it’s pretty much impossible to really break it down,” Butt said.

Back on the Central Coast in Salinas, 2015 has been a rough year. The city is dealing with an all time record for homicides (34). Previously, the record was 29 in 2009.

“A lot of people in Salinas will tell you: We don’t have the money to do something that great or to think that big. We have the money, this is a city of resources,” said Jose Arreola, the city’s community safety administrator and director of the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace.

The big question is: Could an office of neighborhood safety work in the Salad Bowl?

Earlier this year, Arreola took some people from various Monterey County organizations on a field trip to Richmond.

As it turns out, Salinas did a variation of ONS that focused on outreach. From 2013 to 2014, the number of retaliation gang shootings dropped, Arreola said. But that program wasn’t continued.

“Grants go away so if we’re not going to build it into the way we do things and are going to allow it to sort of expire, that’s going to be a problem,” Arreola said. “But I think we’re getting to that place and I’m poised to make that case for our city.”

It’s hard to argue with a kid like Contreras, headed down a violent path then making a left turn on track for a high school diploma and continuing success with his new job.

“I wait on my paycheck every two weeks, I get it in and I worked for it and I feel good about it,” Contreras said.

“When we break our homicide record, we’re not getting a lot of outrage from the community about the violence that’s going on in the street,” said Salinas Police Chief Kelly McMillin, at Wednesday’s Monterey Bay State of the Region Conference in Santa Cruz.

“We do community policing really well in Salinas in one neighborhood, it needs to happen in 10 neighborhoods. All the people behind us attending this conference are interested in violence prevention. We need to find places for them at the table, figure out how to engage them so we can attack this problem on the scale that it actually is,” McMillin added.