Cal Wellness Fellow Is Researching Solutions to Community Gun Violence

As a researcher, Dr. Buggs blends the science with the expertise of the community impacted by violence. (Photo by Heather Mount / Unsplash.)

In 2022, we launched the Cal Wellness Fellowship, which seeds and accelerates bold ideas and innovations by supporting individuals from diverse backgrounds who are working to advance racial and health equity, particularly within communities of color.

We are excited to announce our inaugural Cal Wellness Fellow Dr. Shani Buggs, assistant professor at UC Davis and its Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP). A visionary in her field, Dr. Buggs studies causes, consequences, and prevention of firearm violence. She is a health and public policy scholar with expertise engaging federal, state, and local officials, agency leaders, and organizations on comprehensive and community-driven violence intervention and prevention efforts. In her research, she strives to consistently center the experiences of individuals most impacted by violence and interrogate structural determinants of health to advance equity, safety, and well-being.

Dr. Buggs is in the process of launching an organization that will bring together gun violence researchers of color to help "shape the narrative and shift our understanding of violence by centering those who are most impacted by the violence and who have the most to gain or lose by the policies and practices that are put in place." The organization will be led by "researchers who feel accountable to the communities that we're serving and we're talking about. Because, whether we are of lived experience or not, these are our family members, our friends, our neighbors, our communities."

Cal Wellness has funded gun violence prevention for decades. In the recent years, we have focused on community-based gun violence prevention efforts and on applied research. As part of that work, we’ve invested in building a pipeline of researchers of color focused on gun and community-level violence. We believe that in order to advance the field, we need to include more diverse perspectives in research and policy development.

We spoke with Dr. Buggs to learn about the state of community gun violence in our country, to find out what prevention strategies are working best, and what she thinks the future holds for this field. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The social and structural conditions have allowed for deprivation and lack of opportunity, hope, and upward social and economic mobility to be concentrated in places. And that's allowed gun violence to flourish.
Dr. Shani Buggs

Can you tell us about yourself and how you came to research gun violence prevention?

Dr. Shani Buggs: My career in research is my second life. I was previously in corporate management for 10 years and I decided to go back to school to get my master's in public health. In the summer of 2012, shortly after beginning my master's program, there was a shooting at the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, “The Dark Knight Rises” movie showing.

I was in Baltimore, Maryland, at the time and was surprised by the contrast between the amount of attention that the shooting in Colorado was receiving in Baltimore versus gun violence that was happening in Baltimore on a fairly regular basis. Gun violence in Baltimore was not making the nightly news consistently and, when it did, it wasn't rising to the attention and the outrage that the Aurora, Colorado, shooting was receiving.

I happened to be at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which at the time was the only academic institution with a center devoted to firearm policy research. I ultimately changed the trajectory of my entire life: I quit the job in Atlanta I was planning to go back to, sold my house and decided to focus on gun violence research. It made sense to me to approach it as a public health issue.

Before that experience at Johns Hopkins and seeing this contrast between how gun violence was being treated and talked about when it occurred in a place like rural Colorado versus the way it wasn't talked about in a place like Baltimore, it had never occurred to me that I could have an impact on the way that the issue was understood and how it was addressed.

That was 10 years ago now. I finished my master's degree and got my doctorate at Johns Hopkins in health and public policy with a focus on firearm violence. I then came to University of California, Davis for a two year post-doctoral fellowship. I was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow for the state's Firearm Violence Research Center funding, which was awarded to University of California, Davis. In 2020, I became faculty here.

Why is community gun violence a public health problem, and not, for example, a criminal justice problem?

Dr. Shani Buggs: We need to do a lot more studying when it comes to gun violence. For decades, there’s been a dearth of funding for gun violence research. That's starting to be addressed, but we're behind the ball in understanding all of the factors that associate with gun violence.

What we know about gun violence is that structural and societal conditions play a major role in the concentration of gun violence among people and among places, and allow gun violence to flourish. We know that gun violence is heavily concentrated in areas where there are lots of risk factors associated with gun violence and too few protective factors. The risk factors are things like high rates of poverty and income inequality, high rates of police contact, high rates of underemployment or unemployment, and housing instability and insecurity. Protective factors are things like high rates of educational attainment and economic stability.

When you start to see these patterns, you realize that this is not an issue of, "We just need more police because people are inherently violent or inherently criminal in these areas." The social and structural conditions have allowed for deprivation and lack of opportunity, hope, and upward social and economic mobility to be concentrated in places. And that's allowed gun violence to flourish.

In addition to high levels of risk factors, we have also disturbingly high rates of firearm ownership in our country.

What does your research show are currently the most effective practices for reducing community gun violence?

Dr. Shani Buggs: What we do know about community gun violence in the United States is that it is most often related to interpersonal disputes that quickly escalate when firearms are present. These interpersonal disputes are often between friends or acquaintances, even family members, not total strangers. The conflict bubbles up and then, because you have lethal weapons present, the conflict spills over into near fatal or fatal violence.

Many of the community violence intervention programs that are promising involve individuals who have shared, lived and relatable experiences to the individuals who are at high risk of violence involvement. Those interventions allow those individuals to intervene in conflicts and disputes in ways that can quell that fire and bring resolution to the conflict, while also helping to address these structural and societal factors that make violence an option for individuals who are at high risk of violence.

What these strategies have in common is that they employ professionals who understand the complexities of violence and understand that violence isn't about inherently bad people. It's most often about individuals who have real or perceived constrained choices and options. This is not to excuse the violence that occurs, but it is to understand the perspectives of these individuals and to understand why violence is an option. Once we know that, we can help remove violence from being an option and help shift the trajectories of these individuals’ lives.

Community violence intervention programs were born out of necessity: Community members wanting to take care of their own community because the systems and structures that were meant to support us and keep us safe were failing.

What these strategies have in common is that they employ professionals who understand the complexities of violence and understand that violence isn't about inherently bad people. It's most often about individuals who have real or perceived constrained choices and options. This is not to excuse the violence that occurs, but it is to understand the perspectives of these individuals and to understand why violence is an option. Once we know that, we can help remove violence from being an option and help shift the trajectories of these individuals’ lives.
Dr. Shani Buggs

Some of the promising strategies include components of restorative justice, which is holding individuals accountable for the harms that were done in ways that can then resolve the issue. They're operationalized in different ways in cities around the country, but generally, they utilize outreach workers who know the community, who know the individuals who are at high risk for violence involvement, who are able to reach them, engage them in conversation, and help to address the conflicts or resolve the disputes that are potentially bubbling up to violence.

The promising strategies also connect individuals to services and supports in ways to address these larger risk and protective factors. That may include job training and subsidized employment, cognitive behavioral therapy or other kinds of therapeutic services, and relocation expenses because someone's physical safety is threatened. That may be helping with grief counseling or system navigation following an incidence of violence. For example, how to navigate the health system to address the wounds associated with violent injuries. Or, how to navigate police and ways to provide information that could help lead to a successful investigation.

All of these different components exist but we don't know yet which combinations of them are most effective. I think it's going to vary by community and by the drivers of violence and the needs of individuals and families in that particular community.

In past interviews, you mentioned that outreach workers are undervalued, underappreciated and grossly underpaid. Why is that?

Dr. Shani Buggs: While the field of community violence intervention has existed for decades, there has been incredibly little funding for the work—and for the workers. Politically, I think lots of people have seen these interventions as, to be frank, throwaway populations serving throwaway populations.

Intervention professionals and the participants are often individuals with criminal histories—individuals who have been engaged in violence—and are not seen as worth the investment.

That is changing, thankfully. But for most of the time that this strategy has been utilized in communities, the workers have been grossly underpaid, if paid at all. They have not received consistent training and they have not received consistent political backing. Financing of these strategies has often come from grants. That means that the expectation for these strategies to make significant impacts is unrealistic. Change in violence is expected in one or two grant cycles, maybe three. But when we recognize that violence has concentrated in places that have been historically disinvested, racially and economically segregated, a community intervention of workers who are grossly underpaid is likely not to reverse all of that disinvestment and that exclusion in a year or two or three.

These programs often have funding cut and workers laid off, and then the workers have to stop working until more funding is available.

Working in that environment, as you can imagine, is incredibly stressful. If you've ever worked in a place where you were dependent on grant funding, it is stressful in and of itself. But these are also people who are working to save lives, who are putting their lives, their physical bodies on the line with nothing but their word, with nothing but their reputation and their credibility in the community to help keep people from dying.

These workers give so much of themselves because they want to help their communities, they want to be a part of the solution to the problem and it’s embarrassingly sad that they have been so very unsupported or under-supported.

That is starting to change. There's increasing awareness about the need to consistently fund violence intervention strategies in order to innovate and see what's working.

Importantly, there has been federal investment in community violence intervention. The Department of Justice invested $100 million recently. And there is increasing money available in the federal budget for community violence intervention. Also, in the American Rescue Plan Act, the COVID relief dollars that were given to every city and state and county in the country, can be used for community violence intervention.

Gun violence has been on the rise and many policymakers are calling for more police and prison funding. What does the data show? Why is gun violence on the rise?

Dr. Shani Buggs: Because we have such poor data in our country to understand rates of firearm violence, it will be years before we figure out what happened in 2020. There are theories and speculation, but I don't know that we will ever fully understand all that happened.

Research done at the University of Chicago and also by me and colleagues here at UC Davis show that the communities that experienced the highest rates of gun violence over these last couple of years are the exact same communities that are most economically fragile and racially and economically segregated.

In the below audio clip, Dr. Buggs explains what factors may have contributed to the rise in gun violence in 2020.

What public policies have the potential to reduce community gun violence?

Dr. Shani Buggs: Policies to address violence have to address disinvestment, economic instability, and exclusion from opportunity, both socially, financially and economically.

It is not enough to have individuals intervene in violence. It is also necessary to have multiple avenues of support, from life coaching and restorative justice, to job training, effective quality youth programs, safe spaces, places to spend time and general opportunity. And those policies must be instituted at the government level rather than expecting foundations or non-profit organizations to carry that weight.

In the same ways that government at all levels has colluded and participated in the disinvestment in these communities, government needs to be responsible for undoing those harms. In cities like Los Angeles, Oakland and New York City, violence intervention and prevention are line items in the budget. They're supported through tax revenue.

These cities have recognized that you need a cadre of options and there needs to be integration. There also needs to be community voice and real representation in the strategy development from the communities that are most impacted by violence. There have been a number of policies at different levels that illustrate that when you invest in people, when you invest in families, when you invest in the environmental conditions that are associated with firearm violence, you reduce violence. Unsurprisingly, the policies that are most effective are those that actually invest in people in their communities.

In the below clip, Dr. Buggs explains that to address violence we need to first address financial and economic insecurity and basic need fulfillment in the impacted communities.

You are saying that to address community gun violence, we must first address poverty. Is that right?

Dr. Shani Buggs: There are critics or naysayers who will say, "Well, if you're saying we need to fix poverty in order to address violence, we're never going to get there.” Because fixing poverty is such a big deal, it's such a large concept.

But, if you think about it, we are spending billions of dollars by not addressing poverty. We're spending billions of dollars on policing and incarceration and we're not getting the results that we want.

We are also spending billions of dollars on healthcare—disability and financial bills associated with nonfatal firearm violence are incredibly high. Plus, there’s incredible societal and mental health cost associated with gun violence. A recent estimate is that gun violence costs us over $500 billion a year when you factor in healthcare costs, criminal legal system costs, police costs, as well as the intangible costs like decreased quality of life, increased fear, spending on security, all of those things. We really can't continue to afford not to address all of these things.

But, when you invest in people, the return on investment is multiplicative. If you address housing and food insecurity and instability, the return on investments can be exponential, because you're improving the health and wellbeing of families and communities and reducing the likelihood of negative outcomes like violence.

What projects are you currently working on?

Dr. Shani Buggs: I’m working on several different projects. What they have in common is that they're trying to elevate the voices, experiences and wisdom of those who are most impacted by various forms of violence, including state violence and structural violence.

In the below clip, Dr. Buggs describes the research projects she's currently working on. She also talks about the organization she's in the process of starting.