In Portland, Violence Interrupters Struggle to Keep a Steady Foothold

In 2020, when Fernando was shot twice in the street outside the old Portland Meadows Racetrack, where he was working as a construction flagger, it was actually fortuitous that he tore a tendon in his knee while trying to run away. He says that’s the reason he crumpled to the ground, and probably why the rest of the gunshots missed him. Construction workers erecting an Amazon warehouse in the old racetrack’s place called 911 as he lay on the ground, and then he was rushed to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in northeast Portland. 

Fernando’s wife Shauna, their two kids, and other relatives arrived at the emergency room in agony, frantically trying to learn of his condition. Amidst their anxiety, a familiar face came to visit them. 

Hiag Brown helps run a community violence intervention program called Healing Hurt People, which sends case workers like him to quickly respond to Portland hospitals when they receive gunshot victims. Before rushing to Legacy Emanuel the day Fernando was shot, Brown had already met Shauna and others in her family because of because of the group’s outreach work during other incidents of gang violence that have affected her family in the past. (The family asked that Bolts only use their first names to protect their privacy.)

After the shooting, Brown and other workers with Healing Hurt People became a near constant presence in the lives of Shauna, Fernando and their two boys. They checked in with the family daily, connected them to support services like counseling and job training, and also helped them cover essentials like utility bills.

Shauna says they became a stabilizing force for her family during that scary and chaotic time, and that the group has even continued to support them in the years since. She says they were especially good at supporting her boys as she was worrying how they might react to their father being a victim of gun violence. She says she had already been concerned about raising them in an area that had seen other shootings and gang violence, even before their dad was shot. 

“I’m sure you can just imagine how that could turn a good kid bad,” she told Bolts. 

Their youngest son, who was 15 when his father was shot, is now a young adult with a commercial driver’s license, which Shauna says he obtained because of help the family got though Brown and others with the program.

“A lot of time when you’re looking for help or services or anything you have to reach out and, in this instance, we never had to reach out,” Shauna told Bolts. “Hiag consistently checked on us.” 

Healing Hurt People is an example of the kind of violence intervention program that some communities have long tried to establish to provide more than just a police response to gun violence. The Portland program, which follows a model pioneered in Philadelphia nearly two decades ago, is one of at least 77 hospital-based violence intervention programs operating across the country. 

And like many other violence intervention programs, it has struggled over the years to keep its footing because funding is continually in jeopardy.

Proponents of these kinds of programs say they represent a more comprehensive response to shootings that better supports victims than simply tracking down and potentially prosecuting the perpetrator—an approach that they argue can help prevent retaliation and more violence. For Brown and other caseworkers, that often means helping shooting victims and their loved ones get counseling, housing assistance or job training after meeting them in the hospital and helping them get through those first frightening days. 

The research into this kind of community intervention has been limited but mostly promising. Violence interrupter programs like Cure Violence appear to be one of the most studied models and have been associated with reductions in violence in several cities. Hospital-based intervention programs have also been associated with reductions in violence.

Even so, studies have also concluded that the effectiveness of violence interrupter programs can vary depending on a number of different factors like funding, buy-in from “credible messengers” who can reach people at the highest risk of violence, as well as the competence and integrity of people running the programs. Experts also typically caution that a number of other factors can also affect violent crime and make it difficult to know how much of a role any particular intervention may play. 

In Portland, Brown told Bolts that he’s witnessed how the approach can help defuse the potential for violence. “You now have somebody that can walk you through that process of helping you disengage from the gangs and walk away, and how you do that in a respectful way to where you don’t become a target because you’ve gotten out of the lifestyle,” he said.  

Healing Hurt People launched in the city in 2013 as part of a community mental health care group called Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, a nonprofit providing services across the region like walk-in crisis centers and supportive housing. But five years later, Cascadia could no longer financially support their work as the service provider struggled to stay afloat. 

Brown says he was one of only two outreach workers meeting with shooting victims in the hospital around the time COVID hit, as Portland and other cities across the country saw an uptick in violence. And due to the lack of funding, Brown says he was mostly volunteering his time. 

Brown says the group—which has since gone under the wing of the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center (POIC), the local chapter of a nationwide workforce training organization—has taken major steps in recent years to bolster their work, including by partnering with Portland State University to evaluate and standardize training for its community safety workers. 

Soon after launching, Healing Hurt People started sending on-call outreach workers to respond to Legacy Emanuel, a hospital in northeast Portland where shooting victims often end up. Then around 2022, the group also began sending people to the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) hospital in Portland, as part of a partnership with researchers at the school’s Gun Violence Prevention Center to study hospital-based responses to gun violence. 

That means the group is now integrated into the care teams at both of Oregon’s top-level trauma centers and quickly gets access to victims’ names and initial information about the shooting, including medical status or even what room they’re in, which often helps them act as an intermediary for loved ones in the community. The group says that hospital access also gives them the opportunity to rapidly connect shooting victims and their families with more support, and helps inform any further outreach in the community to try and prevent future violence.

Kathleen Carlson, director of the OHSU center that’s working with Healing Hurt People, told Bolts that having a program that meets shooting victims in the hospital and stays with them after discharge could help direct more attention to other issues that can have an impact on gun violence. People could get connected to counseling that helps them address other traumas, or they could receive help accessing services that allow them to move out of an unsafe living situation. 

“Really it is a humanistic approach,” she said. 

In 2022, supporters of these programs scored a major win when Oregon lawmakers earmarked $5 million in state grant funding to help expand their work and grow similar programs outside the Portland metro area. Legislation passed that year also allowed the group to start billing Medicaid for work with shooting victims who are enrolled. 

Roy Moore, who was integral in securing Medicaid funding for Healing Hurt People and is now co-director of POIC’s community care team that oversees its work, says the program currently has four hospital-based outreach workers who work full time and who are supported by a host of others on POIC’s community care team. 

While they would like to expand this work, funding still always seems precarious. For instance, the Trump administration last year terminated grants aimed at community safety and violence intervention programs nationwide, which Healing Hurt People and its university partners had intended to use to fund more research into their work and improve training for outreach workers. 

“Slashing of all the federal funding of programs that didn’t meet the new administration’s priorities really sets us back by years in terms of being able to grow our team and our capacity to do that kind of work,” Carlson told Bolts.  

The drying up of federal grant funding also coincided with a city proposal to reduce funding for violence prevention programs this year, as Portland grappled with a $172 million budget deficit.

The budget initially proposed by Mayor Keith Wilson this past spring would have cut future grants the city’s Office of Violence Prevention gives out by $1 million—grants that support POIC’s violence intervention work. It also proposed significant cuts for other police alternatives, including downsizing Portland’s behavioral and mental health crisis response team. 

Around the same time, city officials issued a press release praising the city’s Office of Violence Prevention for helping Portland lead the nation in reducing gun violence in recent years. The statement cited a report listing Portland among the cities that have seen the steepest declines in shootings since the height of the pandemic.

After advocacy from the affected groups and a show of support from the community, council members made budget amendments to restore nearly all of the funding the mayor had proposed to cut from the city’s Office of Violence Prevention. 

Council member Sameer Kanal, who voted for the budget amendments, said he thinks such programs are a necessary part of the public safety network. “There are types of calls that need an armed police response and types of calls that need a traditional firefight response, but then there are other calls that go to those two responders because we don’t have built out structures that are tailormade for those types of lower acuity calls,” he told Bolts. “We need the right responder available for each call.” 

As they support shooting victims, Healing Hurt People outreach workers do sometimes have to coordinate with police. But Brown stresses how they’ve tried to adopt policies that make it clear to both victims and the police bureau that they are not part of, or working for, law enforcement. 

This has meant drawing some bright-line rules with police; for example, if police are in the hospital room speaking with a victim, their community safety workers are not. “We are not part of the investigation, so we’ll step out so they can do their job,” Brown told Bolts. “They stay in their lane and we stay in ours,” Brown said. “We collaborate, but we’re not best friends.” 

Kolby Ross was 23 when he first met community workers with Healing Hurt People inside a Portland hospital in late July 2022, after a bouncer at a downtown club shot him three times. The bouncer, who was working with an expired gun license, said he was firing at someone else who had shot at him first. 

Ross says that the difference between how Healing Hurt People made him feel and how the police and prosecutors treated him after the shooting could not have been more stark. “The police kind of forced themselves into my room and made me give a statement while I was under pain medications,” he told Bolts. He also stressed that the way the Multnomah County DA’s office questioned him while he was in the hospital felt “overwhelming and it re-traumatized me.” 

“When you’re vulnerable like that, it’s easy to feel like there’s nobody looking out for you,” Ross told Bolts. “I feel like the DA kind of did a good job of trying to isolate me in that moment so that he could get what he wanted out of me.” After the DA’s office declined to indict the shooter on any charges, Ross says officials never explained to him why. 

Ross couldn’t get around on his own after he was shot, let alone work. After he was released from a hospital in a wheelchair, Ross relied on case workers like Isiah Bailey with Healing Hurt People for mobility. Bailey was part of the first cohort of community safety workers who graduated from the training and accreditation program that Portland State University worked with the organization to develop. Prior to his injuries, Ross also didn’t have secure housing that he could return to after leaving the hospital. So Bailey worked to get him set up in an apartment while the group paid for his first month’s rent. 

Just as importantly, Ross says that Bailey also helped him figure out how to navigate the intense feelings he was having after the shooting. “Once I started feeling really anxious going out to places, he was really the only person I could come to,” Ross says. 

Bailey told Bolts that providing “access to mental health services,” is a big part of the work they do, adding “there’s a lot of stigma, especially in the brown and Black communities, about mental health and how to address mental health,” but sees part of his role as normalizing that access and those conversations.