The Greensboro City Council will receive a report on the Gate City Coalition (GCC) Cure Violence program at the Tuesday Dec. 7 meeting.

The GCC Cure Violence program is run by City Councilmember Yvonne Johnson as executive director of One Step Further through a contract with the City of Greensboro for about $500,000 a year.

The report on the GCC was done by the SERVE Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG).

The SERVE Center, according to the report, “is a university-based research, development, dissemination, evaluation, and technical assistance center.  Its mission is to support and promote teaching and learning excellence in the K-12 education community.” The lengthy description of the SERVE Center in the report mentions no examples of other projects where the SERVE Center analyzed a crime reduction program.

The report states, “According to the September 2021 monthly report, there were 31 active participants at the time of data collection.”  Those active participants were given surveys and, according to the report, 16 surveys were returned that contained enough information to be analyzed for the report.

The report states, “Overall, according to the open-ended responses provided, the most common impacts that the program had on the lives of participants included (a) personal skills and dealing with anger, (b) legal advocacy, (c) educational support, and (d) job assistance.”

The report also lists the crime data from the Greensboro Police Department for the two areas covered by the ACC Cure Violence program.  The Martin Luther King Jr. Drive (MLK) corridor and Smith Homes.

According to the data in the report, in 2019, the year before the ACC Cure Violence program was initiated, there were 108 aggravated assaults in the MLK corridor.  In 2020, the first year of ACC Cure Violence program, there were 119 aggravated assaults. In 2019 there were 0 murders in the MLK corridor, and in 2020 there were 2 homicides in the MLK corridor.

For Smith Homes in 2019 there were 36 aggravated assaults and in 2020 there were 17.  In 2019 there were 0 homicides and in 2020 there were 0 homicides.

The full 29-page report can be viewed here: https://pub-greensboro-nc.escribemeetings.com/filestream.ashx?DocumentId=12707