Inside the community center at Pleasant Ridge, a public housing complex in McKees Rocks, kids like Javon Nelson gather on weekday nights to play basketball.
“It’s this nice little spot. A spot to get away from your house,” Nelson said. “You can just come up here and chill.”
He says it’s also a place where students get along. Nelson is a rising sophomore at Sto-Rox, the school district for both Stowe Township and McKees Rocks Borough.
“There's a lot of gun violence in this community,” he said. “You got to worry about somebody going outside. You got to worry about losing them.”
Between 2016 and 2021, McKees Rocks had the second-highest average homicide rate — 56 per 100,000 residents — among all municipalities with more than 1,000 residents countywide.
The borough of 5,920 residents is one the places in Allegheny County where violence is heavily concentrated, and the majority of homicide victims are Black men ages 18 to 34.
In April, 15-year-old Ahsan Edwards, a Sto-Rox student, was shot and killed in a park less than a 10-minute walk from the local junior-senior high school Nelson attends.
“You got to worry about somebody my age dying every day,” he said. “Anything can happen at any given moment.”
It’s conditions in communities like Sto-Rox that led U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to issue a first-of-its-kind advisory last month, declaring gun violence a national public health crisis.
Allegheny County has, in some ways, acted ahead of that call. In early 2023, officials launched a $50 million effort to systematically reduce gun violence over five years.
Funding has gone toward implementing violence prevention programs countywide, as well as community-specific programming in several places across Allegheny County most impacted by gun violence.
In Sto-Rox, that has resulted in a three-pronged approach: school-based counseling and mentorship for young Black men, career readiness training and employment services for high-risk young adults, and the deployment of “violence interrupters” when tensions begin to escalate.
Curing violence by interrupting it
“We're literally trying to change the norms by working with the most high-risk individuals in our community,” said Mike Mott, program manager for Cure Violence McKees Rocks.
A hyperlocal offshoot of the global nonprofit, Cure Violence positions these trained violence interrupters throughout the community to de-escalate neighborhood conflicts and respond when shootings happen.
Mott said the three violence interrupters Cure employs canvass neighborhood streets daily, taking the community’s “temperature” to determine where gun violence is likely. Two other outreach workers help a roster of 30 individuals connect with community services, and build relationships.
“If they have any kind of outburst, we’ll take them to get something to eat, bring them back to the community,” Mott said. “Just take them away from the violence or potential violence that they could possibly do.”
Because doing so requires the community’s trust, the people working with Cure have deep ties to Sto-Rox. Mott went to high school there, and has been working to reduce gun violence in his hometown for the last 20 years.
“I lost a couple of friends when I was a kid, and I lost my aunt as well,” he said. “So the work is dear to my heart. It's the reason why I do this work.”
Mott and his staff were there in the community after Edwards was shot and killed this spring, gathering as many people as they could for a peaceful protest.
“[We] just try to raise awareness around stopping the violence, and stopping the shootings and stopping the killings,” Mott said. “We try to bring the community together and bring them out.”
A funded, coordinated response to shootings
Cure Violence also has an ongoing dialogue with the local schools. Megan Van Fossan, Sto-Rox School District’s superintendent, said she frequently gets texts from the organization spelling out where things are “rocky” in the community.
Van Fossan said her school counselors and mental health staff — along with three additional violence interrupters the school district employs, independent from Cure Violence — then work to come up with solutions.
“We are then saying, ‘Okay, we know this is going to be rocky coming in on Monday morning. Are we going to separate them or we're going to try out of the gate to try to do peer mediation?’” Van Fossan said.
“Maybe we're going to be on the lookout, [be] even more alert, or have heightened or additional security because we think there is really something bad brewing.”
The Cure Violence team in McKees Rocks also communicates with all of the other Cure teams funded by the county’s initiative. It’s the kind of constant communication Allegheny County is working to coordinate between all the different agencies and groups intervening in gun violence.
Earlier this month, the Department of Human Services launched a new, internal app to serve as a real-time shooting alert system for all stakeholders across the county. Law enforcement, gun violence prevention groups and trauma response teams are all keyed in.
“It will notify a small group of stakeholders about every shooting incident in case there's a need to coordinate across teams,” said Jenn Batterton, who manages justice collaborations at the Department of Human Services.
Batterton said a request then goes out to the designated intervention team — Cure Violence being one — for the community where the incident occurred. That team can then confirm their response status to keep all parties up to date.
“In turn, we are gaining inputs into understanding when shooting incidents have occurred, as well as pretty real-time new data about whether our teams have responded to them,” Batterton added.
That will also allow the county to identify trends, address shared problems and develop data-backed policy reforms. Organizations from nearly 20 municipalities, all receiving funding through the $50 million initiative, have met weekly since May to share best practices and problem-solve.
The county selected the Hill District-based Neighborhood Resilience Project to convene and coordinate these meetings.
“Now that we've actually had some movement, you're really going to start to be able to see nonprofits help each other get out of survival mode, but also help our neighborhoods get out of survival mode as well,” said Quinten Boose, the organization’s director of violence reduction.
Last year, Allegheny County homicides reached their lowest level since 2019. Seven months into the year, Batterton said that 2024’s homicide rates are on track to be lower still.
Brett Douthett, director of Sto-Rox’s Community Violence Reduction Initiative, says it’s essential that this work happen across municipalities, because “violence doesn’t happen in a silo.”
Douthett serves as a liaison between Sto-Rox’s violence intervention groups and those in other parts of the county.
“It might be a young man who got shot in East Liberty, but he lives in McKees Rocks,” he said. “And the Cure team in McKees Rocks will be alerted so they can go and help meet that family's needs, so we can uphold the community.”
Douthett said it’s the first time gun violence intervention work in Allegheny County is crossing bridges, backed by five years of sustained funding.
“It’s truly a public health issue,” he said. “We've been saying it for years, and now somebody is listening.”
