Most cities think they're implementing Group Violence Intervention. Sasha Cotton has seen enough of those implementations to tell you most of them are wrong.

Sasha is the Executive Director at the National Network for Safer Communities at John Jay College — the organization that trained the teams behind Philadelphia's 62% homicide reduction and Pine Bluff, Arkansas going over 500 days without a juvenile homicide. In this conversation she breaks down the actual operating model: the call-in structure, the three-part message system, who speaks in what order and why, and the specific ways cities corrupt the model when they implement it without technical support.

She also goes somewhere the field rarely goes — the 25% crossover between domestic violence perpetrators and community violence perpetrators, and why you cannot build a serious violence prevention framework without addressing both. And she's honest about the thing nobody wants to say: policing as an institution was never designed to save our kids, and building a strategy that depends on it doing so is a design flaw.

Jonathan McMillan brings his own experience as a former outreach worker and violence interrupter to this conversation. This one covers ground most GVI conversations never reach.