Richard Garland: Violence Prevention Initiative
Interviewed by: Vivian Wang & Naomi Shin
Richard Garland is the Director of the BCHS Center for Health Equity’s Violence Prevention Initative
where he oversees training, data collection and outreach efforts aimed at reducing crime and violence.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell me about yourself.
I’m the Director at the Violence Prevention Project at Pitt - I have a few projects there. One is the Gunshot Reoccurring Injury Prevention Service (GRIPS), where I see gunshot victims who come into UPMC and offer them services. The most used service is moving a whole family from one community to another. Working with the county, I can get them their first month’s rent and their security deposit in many situations. I also look at homicide trends in the county. That’s how I see what’s happening on the streets.
Right now, I also have a nonprofit called Reimagine Reentry, where I work with people coming out of state and federal institutions and formerly incarcerated folks. One thing we have going on is MC3, a curriculum to introduce folks to trades. We’ve done five cohorts and participants can choose the trade they want to go into. We’re actually changing the name of GRIPS to CommUnity Peace and that’s moving to Reimagine.
I also do a lot of violence prevention work in the community. I have outreach workers and disruptors and look at violence as a public health problem.
Q: What do the outreach workers do?
I get people from the community who are known. They could have been part of the problem at one time, and I make them part of the solution. They know the issues that are going on in the community. As someone that’s respected in the community, they can use their status to shut arguments down in the community. Even law enforcement see them in a different way now, as helping and not hurting the community. Now, people want to do this work. The idea as a public health approach is to change community norms and interrupt the transmission of violence as a disease. And the biggest thing is identity transformation - no matter who they used to be, now they are coming as not only credible messengers but as those that aren’t involved in drugs or violence- they’ve changed their whole lives around. That’s why I believe in people from the community - someone from outside can’t come in and change things. It has to be someone from the community. The workers get trained on the Cure Violence model by people from Chicago and Atlanta to make it work.
Q: What’s your most successful program? Can you share how you’ve seen your organization’s work make a difference in the community?
I’ve only been at Pitt for 10 years. Before Pitt, I had an organization called One Vision, One Life where I had interrupters and over 70 staff members. We knew that we might not stop the first shooting but we could stop the retaliation. Based on the people I had working the streets - that’s the most important part of it. I did that for 12.5 years. When we ran out of money, I got picked up by Pitt, which had me come in as an assistant professor. When I started Reimagine, my whole thing was about giving back to the community. I have a history because I’m a former gang member from Philadelphia who spent over 23 years in a penitentiary. I moved here after that and because I wasn’t from here, folks and especially the kids weren’t suspicious that I was feuding with people from another community, so they let me in. I get school districts and parents calling me about working with their sons or daughters.
Q: How does moving to a new environment play in stopping violence?
It depends on the situation. If there’s a feud going on, I try to sit down with both parties. Especially with gunshot victims. They know who shot them, and I might be able to go to the person they were feuding with. But I’ve had situations where a guy owed somebody a hundred thousand dollars and I can’t do anything about that. I can try to talk to them, but when it gets to that, they have to make their own decision.
I’d love to say every remediation turns positive but they don’t. It depends on what was taken. If the dude is worried about their reputation in their community… you know, I keep saying dude, but ladies are my biggest problem right now.
Q: Can you speak more about that?
I can give a dude something and say go do this, but when ladies are committed to something, they don’t have gray areas.
Q: So women tend to take things all the way through?
Yes, if ladies are committed to something, they go all the way down the line.
Q: What are some of the day-to-day challenges you face in your line of work?
Drugs and alcohol. Kids are popping pills. Especially in the African American community. It used to be that white kids were popping pills, and now it’s people of color. They’re mixing the pills with other stuff, making them quick to pull the trigger when they wouldn’t if they were thinking normally. And people are lacing weed. The difference with gangs nowadays is, I was brought up on loyalty. That isn’t the way it goes now here, Dudes are shooting their best friends, just because they might have a package of drugs. When I came up it was a moral thing. There’s no loyalty today. When I go into penitentiaries to talk, it’s babies in there now. It’s young men who made a mistake and are in there for the rest of their lives.
I’m worried about the summer. We have a lot of mental health issues that we’ve never seen. In lockdown, people were going crazy and using social media on their phones to see when they will get their next liquor or drugs from.
Q: Is there anything that makes you hopeful about what you do?
Young people like you give me hope. You’ll take this bull by the horns and change it. If I ask any young people that I deal with what they think they’ll be doing in the next 5 years, a lot of them will say they won’t be around. But young people are the way we will get out of it. We have to embrace our children.
Q: You are on the streets seeing what’s happening. A lot of people in the medical community are very far removed.
Can you give us an idea of what your day-to-day looks like, so people can understand the importance of the work you do?
So just this morning, I got a call about the four juveniles that were stabbed in Clairton. I told them I wouldn’t get there until 2 o’clock to talk about it. So nobody went to the hospital because the hospital will usually send a text or email or call me when they get a gunshot wound victim, or anything that deals with violence. Then what I usually do is go inside the hospital, see the individual, and see what services they need. Then I start from there, and start working with my contacts to see if I can get them the things they need. And as I said, the most used services include me helping the family move from one community to another. Because if it’s the kid messing it up for the family and moves someplace else, the family’s still at risk because of what the kid’s done. So that’s one of the reasons why I have to move the whole family.
Q: That sounds like incredibly important work. Can I ask -- how did you start doing this kind of work and what was that journey like?
You know what -- I was tired of being in jail. The last stint I did was twelve-and-a-half years. And I started out where most people in Philly start out, at Graterford [Prison]. Then they kicked me out of Graterford and sent me to Huntingdon. I used to have long dreadlocks. And when I was in Huntingdon, because I refused to cut my hair, I spent 32 months in solitary confinement. I used to come out of my cell every other day, go into a cage and exercise, and go back in the cell for the next day and a half. But the thing that bothered me most, was every time I got a letter from home saying someone was dying. So in a way, the penitentiary saved me from being a statistic. And I got my education, my GED, at Western Penitentiary, but I didn’t stop there. I used to take college courses from Pitt, and that’s how I started my bachelor’s degree. And I started thinking about what would’ve made a difference with me if I had gotten the support I needed. That’s why I do what I’m doing. Because of my commitment to many of the people I left behind. Because I think they some of the most intelligent people I know.
Q: That’s powerful.
Yeah, it got me on the path of, you know -- nobody really wants to go to jail. Nobody wants to do a lot of these things if they didn’t have to. If they can just have peace to go about their business and be productive, that’s what people will do. That’s the reason I came up with One Vision, One Life, and why we look at Reimagine, Re-entry. It’s about the guys I left behind, who taught me the things that I know now. So I feel like I owe it them. And the violence prevention stuff goes hand-in-hand. If I can talk to a young buck (or an adult) that they need to change, most will say no. But I want to do something.
Q: So what’s next?
So I’m sending emails to the hospital right now about getting ready to have a team. For the last 5-6 years, it was just me and a lady called Gina Brooks. So a lot of times, if the hospital don’t call me the day of when the patients come in, by the time I get to them they leave. Through this county grant, I’ll be able to hire some hospital-based outreach workers. So we can get there on time, as soon as they hit the hospital - they can get a referral and we can work with them. Under the Allegheny COunty violence reduction grant, we are getting $50,000 to help people move. And that’s what’s up.
Q: How can people like me, people in the healthcare community, support your work and the Violence Prevention Project?
Letting people know that there’s a resource. I have a lot of good relationships with people in the community, but word-of-mouth is really good. And, I’m hoping I can get more young people like yourself to get involved in this work. BEcause young people speak a universal language, because of your age. Kids your age are more likely to listen to you than to me. They only listen to me because of my reputation. That’s important.
Q: If there was one takeaway that you’d want the medical community to know, what would that be?
I think that people have to recognize how important the community is, and how important the people from that community are in addressing the issues they have. I might pull the mom or dad that have the most juice in the community - and they say the same things we’re saying, it means a whole lot. I think that’s the most important part of my job.