Santa Clara County creates office to prevent violence

Santa Clara County wants to be proactive instead of reactive when it comes to addressing community violence. To accomplish this, county leaders plan to sink millions of dollars into a new initiative.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously voted Feb. 4 to create the Office of Community Violence Prevention and put aside $5 million, spread out over three years, toward coordinating and implementing policies to reduce violence. The office will strategize ways to address the root causes of violence and evaluate prevention efforts.

“It’s important to have an office because our work in violence prevention is spread so broadly across so many departments right now,” Supervisor Susan Ellenberg, who co-introduced the item last year with Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, told San José Spotlight. “We don’t have a single point of coordination to confirm that all of our plans are strategically aligned, that we don’t have any redundancy in funding and that we’re truly maximizing all of our efforts.”

Officials say community violence is a widespread issue in Santa Clara County. Homicide/assault is the third highest cause of death among residents ages 18 to 24, and the fourth leading cause of death for residents under 18, according to a county report.

The office of community violence prevention will work on testing, implementing and evaluating initiatives to prevent violence for targeted communities, whether it be at-risk youth or neighborhoods impacted by gun violence. Some possible initiatives the office could implement include establishing resource hubs and focusing on intervention efforts in communities highly impacted by violence, such as East Gilroy and San Jose’s Seven Trees neighborhood. Other policies the office might explore are banning guns from high-risk individuals, increasing green spaces and reducing the number of tobacco stores where youth frequent.

“Our main goal is to continue to create the conditions in which families can be healthy, the community can be healthy and children who live in those communities feel supported,” Angelica Diaz, county healthy communities director, told San José Spotlight. “It’s also (about) addressing social determinants of health.”

The Santa Clara County Public Health Department created a strategic plan for violence prevention and found more than $740 million is being invested annually toward prevention and intervention initiatives, with the majority of programs geared toward serving individuals after an incident has occurred. The department also found there’s a lack of funding toward root causes compared to law enforcement agencies which receive 93% of funding to address violent incidents.

The county is already implementing various prevention efforts, such as piloting programs that give monthly cash payments to vulnerable individuals and families, including young moms and homeless high school students.

The East San Jose PEACE partnership, formed in 2016, brings together more than 30 organizations including social services, health care groups and businesses to promote a healthier community by advocating for affordable housing, preventing lead exposure and more.

“These kinds of approaches work, they’re cost effective and they’re better for all of us ultimately if the issue of violence isn’t solely treated as a law enforcement issue,” Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits CEO Kyra Kazantzis told San José Spotlight. 
County supervisors asked employees to report back with initiative recommendations in six months or after the office has been established. The budget process will determine which initiatives move forward.

“The nice thing about setting up an office that’s really dedicated toward the prevention, intervention and all the different techniques, and not punishing people at the end of what should be a more systematized approach, is that all those things can be tried and tested and supervised and coordinated in one place,” Kazantzis said.

Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.