A packed house at the inaugural Summit on Saving Lives.

DURHAM – The city of Durham and Durham County joined to host the first “Summit on Saving Lives” June 24. 

The three-day event gathered over 30 community leaders to establish a set of strategies to reduce gun violence and save lives in the Bull City. The plan must be put into action within 60 days.

Although Wednesday’s sessions were open to the public, the workshop took place in the middle of the work week, beginning at 9 a.m. The final two days were for working group members only. 

June 25’s agenda included sessions on place- and problem-based policing, environmental crime prevention, policing and prosecuting gun violence, managing anti-violence initiatives, funding anti-violence initiatives, procedural fairness and a review of previous efforts. The summit was facilitated by Thomas Abt, founder and director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland. The center is funded by donations and corporate partner contributions but provides its services free of charge.

According to research by Lisa Barao and Reygan Cunningham from the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, the analysis of homicides and nonfatal shootings in Durham showed 197 homicides and 102 nonfatal shootings. Barao said this is about double the national average at 12.7 per 100,000 people. 

In 2025, 90% of Durham’s homicides involved guns. While youth gun violence is a major concern of residents, juvenile crime data is confidential.

A crude analysis of the cities in which the Violence Reduction Center has hosted its summits – St. Louis, Missouri; Boston; Memphis and Knoxville, Tennessee – show significant reductions in either homicide rates or nonfatal shootings.

“This is a crude indication that the VRC is helping these cities,” Abt said. “Of course, at the end of the day, it’s the folks in Boston, Knoxville and St. Louis that are driving the work – just like you will the work, but our hope is that maybe the VRC makes you a little bit better at what you do.”

Abt clarified that the summit is not intended to be an overall public safety plan. It does not cover topics like intimate partner violence, bullying or traffic safety. 

“It’s focused on the form of violence that is costing the most lives in the city this year,” he said. “We’re also not going to be addressing, at least directly, the broader picture: the root causes, the structural factors. Those two are incredibly important, but those are long-term issues which the city is moving to address in other ways, in other areas, every day.”

When asked for a rationale of why these root causes were not addressed, Abt said you have to pick and choose your battles. “If you promise to do everything, you’re most likely gonna end up doing nothing,” he said. “We have to be realistic about where we can start.”

Abt acknowledged the impact of racial segregation leading to social dysfunction and violence, “but that pathway is also working in reverse,” he said. “High rates of violence are traumatizing communities, intensifying racial segregation, intensifying concentrated poverty, and ultimately, reinforcing social stigma and separation.”

The city hosted over 15 public listening sessions between January and May in the months leading up to the summit. Roshanna Humphrey, director of Durham County’s Justice Services Department, presented the common threads from the sessions: the need for trust and fairness in the city’s justice structures, credible messengers in the window before violence occurs, safer conditions like lighting and sanitation, healing and mental healthcare after harm, and the need for income. 

“People need to feel like they can trust the individuals that they are working with. That is critical to this,” Humphrey said about procedural fairness in regard to the criminal justice system. “They want to feel that ownership. They want to feel a part of it.”

Tanya Kelley is a resident of Cornwallis Apartments, one of Durham’s public housing complexes. Trauma teams need to be sent more than once, and their efforts need to be more widespread, she said. Delays in police response only add to the community trauma, and it starts young. 

“Most times, it takes them so long to pick up a dead body. The children done watched it for so long outside. There’s gotta be some kind of decency,” she said. “It doesn’t affect just that person that got shot or their household, it affects the whole community…one shooting can lead to 10retaliation shootings.”

Kelley also said the city doesn’t clean up the blood after a shooting, so the residents are left to do it.

While the summit focuses on the most highly-impacted individuals, one figure from Barao and Cunningham’s analysis stands out from the rest: on average, individuals who were known perpetrators of homicide in the city had an average of 12 prior arrests for personal disputes like property or “women,” as Barao said. This begs the question whether enforcement actually deters these individuals.

“They were known to the criminal justice system before they committed a homicide,” Barao said. Despite 21% of gun-related incidents being motivated by known gang conflict, at least 52% of victims and suspects were known to be affiliated with gangs. The hot spots for these shootings were McDougald Terrace, Cornwallis Apartments and East Durham. 

“Adult African American males are most disproportionately impacted in Durham. At the same time, this is why I go back to using this as a foundation for problem analysis. It is not every Black male in Durham,” Cunningham said. “We’re talking about folks who are known to the criminal justice system, convicted of felonies, at least 15 prior contacts; we want to narrow it down.”

A recording of the public summit is available on the city’s YouTube page. 

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