What City Leaders Say Is Helping Drive Down Gun Violence in Their Communities

Homicide rates have plummeted to record lows: Data from the Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI) and the Council on Criminal Justice predict that, based on an estimated homicide rate as low as 4 homicides per 100,000 residents, 2025 may have been the safest year in the United States in recorded history.¹ And based on preliminary estimates of more than a 20 percent decline in the nation’s homicide rate from 2024 to 2025, last year would account for the largest single-year drop in the national homicide rate.² Researchers and policymakers are now asking what lessons can be learned to make communities even safer.³

Yet this historic public safety achievement cannot be understood by looking at 2025 data alone. Reporting on year-over-year comparisons of crime data fails to account for the broader trend of a decline in crime that much of the country has been experiencing since 2023.⁴ Following a peak in gun violence and the nation’s homicide rate in 2021,⁵ the country experienced large single-year drops in the national murder and gun homicide rates in both 2023 and 2024.⁶ Despite this historic success, public safety officials understand that these trends cannot be taken for granted. To build on the progress already made, officials at all levels of government are asking what has driven it and, more importantly, which solutions they must continue to invest in to ensure these public safety gains are here to stay.

That nearly every region of the country is sharing in these historic public safety gains⁷ strongly suggests that much of the decline in gun violence over the past four years can be explained by factors playing out nationally, more so than any one intervention or tactic being employed in a particular city. Undoubtedly, the historic recent success of American cities and communities in driving down gun violence was driven in part by a three-level governmental approach to gun violence prevention. In addition to the interventions cities were implementing at the local level, Congress and many state governments improved gun laws and made historic investments in community programs. At the same time, federal agencies under the Biden administration took more action to crack down on crime guns, gun trafficking, and firearm dealers who break the law.⁸

Even so, national trends can only explain part of the declines experienced over the past four years, especially for the cities that have seen the steepest declines in gun victimizations since 2021. Center for American Progress analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archives (GVA) finds that from 2021 to 2025, 17 of the 50 most populous cities have seen their gun victimization rate decline by more than 50 percent. These cities are:

1. San Jose, California
2. Bakersfield, California
3. Fresno, California
4. San Diego, California
5. Columbus, Ohio
6. Detroit, Michigan
7. Oakland, California
8. Denver, Colorado
9. Chicago, Illinois
10. District of Columbia
11. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
12. Aurora, Colorado
13. Portland, Oregon
14. New York, New York
15. Austin, Texas
16. Baltimore, Maryland
17. Houston, Texas

Seeing how these cities have outpaced an already historic national decline in gun violence over the previous four years is remarkable and can provide lessons as to which interventions—or combination of interventions—have the greatest potential to drive down, and keep down, gun violence in U.S. cities. The fact that many of the cities topping the list of largest declines have used common tactics and invested in similar initiatives should give policymakers additional confidence that strategies such as investing in community violence intervention (CVI) programs, implementing focused deterrence strategies, improving clearance rates by investing in better investigative tools, and standing up coordinated multi-agency responses to gun violence are making American cities safer.

While it is difficult to disentangle which policies and programs contributed the most to historic crime declines amid broader national trends, the lessons local leaders are learning provide invaluable insights into how to successfully put theory into practice. With the release of CAP’s report “Delivering Accountability: A Plan To Stop Crime in Our Communities,” which highlights many of these same evidence-based approaches to public safety, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D) explained, “… when we need national voices on reducing violence and reforming police … it should be the folks that actually know—mayors, police chiefs, [and] the people on the front line.”_⁹

This report provides more information on the declines in gun violence and violent crime across the nation and highlights the different strategies city officials say have driven down gun violence in their communities.

Almost universally, communities across America are safer from gun violence and violent crime today than they were in 2021. By December 2025, the nationwide 12-month rolling murder sum was 40.5 percent lower than its peak in September 2021, according to RTCI data.¹⁰ While cities often get the most attention when it comes to crime trends, rural American counties also experienced a spike in gun violence during the COVID-19 pandemic and have since seen gun violence come down—though at a slower rate than in large metropolitan counties.¹¹

If the surge in gun violence during the pandemic was driven by factors such as disrupted social services, increased substance and alcohol abuse, and social and economic instability,¹² then it stands to reason that this trend should reverse as the worst of the pandemic’s effects continue to fade. Additionally, at the height of the pandemic, the federal government stepped in to provide relief to as many communities as possible to deal with the many interconnected crises. Investments made possible through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA)¹³—not just in crime prevention programs but also in civil services, youth programs, and community infrastructure—likely helped make communities safer and revitalize them when help was needed most.¹⁴ At the same time, federal policy changes empowered federal agencies to crack down on serious gun crimes and illegal gun trafficking.

The fact that almost every American community, regardless of size, is now seeing its firearm homicide rate decline suggests these factors playing out across the nation can explain much of the trend—but not all of it.

CAP’s analysis of GVA data shows that 17 of the 50 most populous American cities have seen a more than 50 percent decline in their gun victimization rate from 2021 to 2025. When these cities are removed from the data, the rest of the nation saw a decrease of just less than 30 percent in the annual gun victimization rate from 2021 to 2025. Of these 17 cities, San Jose has seen the largest percentage decline in gun violence victimizations—inclusive of both gun homicides and gun injuries—down 71 percent from the 2021 rate.²² Similarly, these cities, on average, experienced larger declines in their homicide rates compared with the rest of the nation from 2021 to 2025,²³ according to CAP analysis of RTCI data.

What makes these cities such a success compared with the rest of the nation is that these declines are more than the product of crime trends regressing to a pre-pandemic level. Fourteen of the 17 cities had lower gun victimizations rates in 2025 than in 2019—before the pandemic-era surge. Meanwhile, of the remaining 33 cities among the 50 most populous which did not experience a gun victimization rate decline of more than 50 percent since 2021, only 16 had lower gun victimization rates in 2025 than in 2019.

Moreover, cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, and Philadelphia are experiencing historically low murder rates.²⁴ While the overall crime trends in America suggest that a combination of many factors are making cities and communities safer, the historic progress being achieved in these cities can provide insights into how to deliver lasting public safety benefits above and beyond reversing the trend of 2020 and 2021.

When implemented successfully, CVI programs have been found to deliver significant reductions in homicides and nonfatal shootings.²⁵ These programs, which take an individual approach to stopping future crime and gun violence through intensive case management, counseling, transitional employment, and other services, have been associated with reductions in shooting injuries by more than 60 percent.²⁶ Every city that has seen at least a 50 percent decline in gun victimizations since 2021 has directly invested in, collaborated with, or leveraged state and federal funding to establish or scale up local CVI programs. At least eleven cities—Bakersfield, Fresno, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Aurora, Portland, New York City, Baltimore, and Houston—have programs that received grants from the Community Violence Intervention Program Initiative, a federal grant program administered by the Office of Justice Programs under the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since 2022, designed specifically to support the expansion of CVI programs and similar models to reduce gun violence.²⁷ San Jose, San Diego, and Oakland all have community-based gun violence reduction programs that have received grant funding from the California Violence Intervention and Prevention Program.²⁸ Austin, Columbus, and Washington, D.C., each collaborate and partner directly with CVI programs operating in high violence neighborhoods, and in 2025, Denver committed $3.1 million of its city budget to specifically support community violence intervention programs.²⁹

What city leaders are saying about how CVI programs are making their cities safer

• In Chicago, CVI programs such as the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative, Becoming a Man, and Choose 2 Change have all been evaluated to show significant reductions in either shootings, homicides, or arrests for violent crime among participants.³⁰ New research finds that the Chicago areas that received the highest average quarterly investment in CVI and street outreach programs from 2022 to 2024 experienced the largest public safety gains by the end of 2024,³¹ earning the trust of city leaders. As evidence of how important CVI programs have become in the city’s public safety strategy, in January 2026, Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) hosted a community safety roundtable bringing Chicago Police Department and CVI leaders together.³² At the convening, Deputy Mayor of Community Safety Garien Gatewood spoke to the importance of their collaboration with CVI groups, saying it has been “incredibly effective [at] addressing local hot spots and community needs while preventing potential violent incidents before they happen.”³³
• Researchers estimate that the five longest operating sites of Baltimore’s Safe Streets program reduced homicides by an average of 32 percent during their first four years.³⁴ In February 2026, Mayor Scott commented on the incredible achievements of one site, saying, “When I was growing up in Park Heights, it was unimaginable that this area could go more than a year without a homicide. Now the site has gone over 365 days without a homicide twice since I took office. This is not a coincidence, and neither are the historic reductions in shootings and homicides we are seeing across Baltimore. They are a testament to what is possible when we invest in community members, partners, and frontline violence interrupters all working together to prevent violence in their own communities.”³⁵
• In Fresno, the Advance Peace Program was found to decrease the rate of all gun-related crimes by 46 percent two years post-intervention,³⁶ confirming what Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer (R) was seeing on the ground: “Advance Peace intervention specialists have done some great work out there. I know for a fact they’ve stopped shootings. I know that for a fact.”³⁷

Despite their success and the support they are receiving from local officials, CVI programs are facing a budgetary crisis. In April 2025, the Trump administration terminated approximately $500 million in federal grants supporting more than 550 organizations across 48 states,³⁸ putting the sustainability of these programs in jeopardy. Though the administration has signaled its plans to regrant that money, the funds most likely will not go back to the same organizations who were originally obligated them. For example, the DOJ published new rules³⁹ for the Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative (CVIPI) grant program, a Biden-era program which has directed more than $300 million to community-based organizations, local governments, and researchers to support CVI work.⁴⁰ Under the new DOJ rules, community-based organizations are disqualified from applying for grants directly.⁴¹ Additionally, the program’s purpose has been rephrased under the new DOJ rules to explicitly support law enforcement, and grantees are now mandated to comply with immigration enforcement.⁴²

Moreover, the annual $50 million in additional funding appropriated for the CVIPI program by the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act will sunset at the end of this fiscal year.⁴³ Further exacerbating the budgetary crisis facing CVI programs, funding from the ARPA also must be spent by the end of 2026.⁴⁴ When ARPA passed in 2021, cities with elevated levels of gun violence were encouraged to use the federal funding it provided to invest in community-based prevention programs, making these funds critical to standing up many CVI programs.⁴⁵ Facing a lack of reliable federal funding to support CVI initiatives that have been successful, cities are already bracing for the impacts and the possibility of scaling down indispensable programs⁴⁶—which could jeopardize their hard-fought progress.

Since 2020, police agencies of all sizes have been experiencing increasing staff shortages, with large agencies—those with 250 or more sworn officers—facing the most pronounced challenges.⁴⁷ Despite this, many cities have seen violent crime, murder, and gun violence drop precipitously. In part, this is because city leaders, responding to the twin crises of having elevated violence and fewer officers to deploy, have followed the evidence to maximize the crime prevention capabilities of police while mitigating harms. Examples from the cities that have seen the largest declines show how city and law enforcement leaders have embraced evidence-based policing strategies, including focused deterrence, hot spot policing, and community-oriented policing.

Under Mayor Scott, Baltimore launched in 2022 its Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS), which leverages police and community partners to identify the small number of individuals who are driving the majority of violent incidents in the city and flood them with resources and opportunities to divert them from high-risk behaviors.⁴⁸ In the 18 months following the launch of the GVRS pilot, the initiative was estimated to have reduced homicides and shootings by approximately 25 percent in the focus neighborhood of West Baltimore.⁴⁹ In 2025, the expanded GVRS strategy helped Baltimore see its fewest number of homicides in nearly 50 years.⁵⁰ Importantly, by focusing policing efforts on the few individuals responsible for a disproportionate amount of violence and giving them opportunities to desist from those behaviors, this strategy has not led to an overall increase in arrests.⁵¹

Similarly, with fewer uniformed officers available to deploy, many cities have responded with new and revitalized strategies to maximize the efforts of their police force. Focusing their attention on areas of concentrated violence—otherwise known as “hot spots”—for example, is associated with the largest effects on violent crime.⁵² However, leaders behind these renewed strategies are mindful that aggressive and indiscriminate enforcement efforts can bring harm to a community if they are not implemented with precision and a commitment to transparency and improving police legitimacy.⁵³ Accordingly, city leaders are championing a community-oriented approach to policing that promotes positive interactions with residents and aims to build trust with community members.⁵⁴ In Oakland, for example, every uniformed officer is now required to complete procedural justice training, a curriculum designed to promote fairness, respect, and unbiased decision-making during interactions with citizens.⁵⁵ Similarly, cities are taking innovative approaches to public safety by hiring and dispatching community responders to low-risk service calls so police are able to focus their attention where most needed.⁵⁶

What city leaders are saying about how community-focused policing can prevent future gun crimes

• In partnership with the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform and the California Partnership for Safe Communities, Portland launched the Portland Ceasefire program in June 2023 as part of its enhanced focused deterrence strategy.⁵⁷ Speaking on the role of the Ceasefire program in driving down gun violence in Portland, the mayor’s director of community safety, Stephanie Howard, said, “I like to think of the ceasefire program as the connective tissue between our police and our police bureau investigations, and how we match people with resources that the city offers, or that the city even is aware of.”⁵⁸
• Leaders from San Jose, which reported a 100 percent clearance rate for murders every year from 2022 through September 2025, attribute part of their success in solving crimes to the trust they have earned from the community.⁵⁹ In an interview with the publication Governing, Lt. John Barg, commented on their police department’s high clearance rates, saying, “I think it’s a reflection of the support we have from our community.”⁶⁰ Additionally, Amanda Estantino, a member of San Jose’s homicide division, shared this sentiment and spoke on why she believes the department has earned that trust: “I think because we’re very open to them too. We want to provide an answer to the [victim’s] family, to the public, and to ourselves as to what happened so we can prevent this from occurring again, and to provide justice.”⁶¹
• In 2025, New York City recorded its fewest shooting incidents and shooting victims in history.⁶² Using the principles of hot spot policing to make the subway system safer, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) used a data-driven approach to shift officers onto “trains and platforms where the vast majority of transit crime” occurs.⁶³ As a result, metro riders are reporting feeling safer, NYPD was able to recover an all-time high of 77 firearms, and 2025 was the safest year on the subway since 2009 (excluding 2020).⁶⁴ NYPD Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch said of the achievement, “The NYPD drove shooting incidents and shooting victims to the lowest levels in recorded history and delivered the safest year on our subway system …These numbers describe an agency that’s firing on all cylinders: taking down violent gangs, removing thousands of guns off the street, and shattering record-low violent crime numbers.”⁶⁵

An extensive body of research⁶⁶ on crime suggests that the certainty of being caught and receiving swift consequences for offenses can have a large effect on deterring future crime. CAP’s “Delivering Accountability: A Plan To Stop Crime in Our Communities” emphasizes the importance of swift and certain consequences by calling on Congress to provide additional federal funding to make crime solving resources and tools more available to local law enforcement.

Modern law enforcement requires modern tools and solutions. Leveraging technology that can be used to solve crimes, such as video cameras, ballistics evidence, and license plate readers, can help detectives and investigators make connections between gun crimes and solve cases more quickly. While nationally the clearance rate for murders, violent crime, and property crime remains woefully low, there were improved clearance rates for all types of crime in 2024 compared with the previous four years.⁶⁷ Investing in crime gun intelligence tools and crime-solving technology will help deliver justice to victims and prevent future crimes.

Leaders from many of the cities seeing the largest declines in gun victimizations point to improving clearance rates—through better use of technology and new investigative approaches—as a factor in preventing future victimizations.

What city leaders are saying about how improving investigative tools and clearance rates can prevent future gun crimes

• In 2025, the Fresno Police Department reported a 97 percent clearance rate for murders that occurred in 2023 and 2024.⁶⁸ In addition to the police department improving community engagement while hiring and retaining more officers, Mayor Dyer credited technologies, including ShotSpotter, license plate readers, and ballistic analysis, as being essential to reducing and solving crimes.⁶⁹
• Tampa saw its homicide rate drop 52.8 percent from 2024 to 2025.⁷⁰ Speaking at CAP, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor (D) spoke about how the city is using leads from the NIBIN⁷¹ to connect multiple crimes to a single firearm, saying, “We’ve solved a number of crimes through the NIBIN program. … We really are leaning heavily on technology, doesn’t replace officers, but it is a force multiplier in our community.”⁷²
• In a November 2025 interview on the “Jeff-alytics” podcast, when asked what he attributed Philadelphia’s decline in homicides and shootings to, District Attorney Larry Krasner included the city’s improved use of video surveillance and ballistics forensics as a major factor: “We have been doing a much better job at using forensics to make sure that we solve crimes. … That has included a whole litany of forensics tools that were really not available before, and also some methodology to try and create catalogs and databases of things that will help us to link ballistic evidence to other ballistic evidence. … It just gives such a nice toolbox to detectives who are trying to solve crimes.”⁷³
• Detroit has been steadily improving its homicide clearance rate since former Mayor Mike Duggan took office in 2014. According to Mayor Duggan, the homicide clearance rate was less than 30 percent in 2014.⁷⁴ According to data reported to the FBI, Detroit’s homicide clearance rate was 79 percent in 2025.⁷⁵ Over that span, Detroit has employed numerous tactics to improve its clearance rate, such as operationalizing a citywide crime gun intelligence center in 2019.⁷⁶ In 2025, Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison described how Detroit was using community-based prosecution⁷⁷ to improve case closures: “Having prosecutors embedded in precincts helps them become much more familiar with the patterns and the individuals involved in criminal activity. It also helps to make sure that our officers are developing cases that will withstand prosecutorial review, which has resulted in a rise in the closure rate of nonfatal shooting cases, in particular.”⁷⁸

Although these individual approaches to reducing gun violence can be effective, another emerging trend the most successful cities share is that they have stood up a centralized, coordinated response to bring these various efforts together. Whether through the creation of an office of violence prevention (OVP) or by building multi-agency task forces focused on addressing the impacts and root causes of gun violence, the 17 cities seeing the greatest declines over the past four years all have shown what is possible when law enforcement, public health officials, social service providers, and community-based organizations are all working from the same playbook.

As of March 2026, 15 of the 17 cities that have seen the largest declines have opened an OVP.⁷⁹ The other two cities—Fresno and Aurora—have both launched multi-agency strategic plans or task forces since January 2023 that promote interagency collaboration to identify high-risk individuals connected with gun violence.⁸⁰ This “whole-of-government” approach to reducing gun violence often includes convening leaders across law enforcement, community-based organizations, and local public health and human services to promote real-time information sharing and interagency planning to leverage the resources and assets of each coalition partner for violence prevention and intervention.⁸¹ 

What city leaders are saying about why OVPs and strategic plans are making their cities safer 

• In August 2025, Portland Police Bureau Chief Bob Day dedicated the city homicide reduction to “… [the] Portland Police Bureau members, as well as the strong partnerships we’ve built with community violence prevention programs, local organizations, and outreach workers across the city. While challenges remain, this milestone demonstrates the power of collaboration in making Portland safer for all.”⁸² Interim Public Safety Deputy City Administrator Bob Cozzie added, “The numbers are encouraging and show our coordinated efforts are saving lives, but too many in our community are still impacted by violence.”⁸³
• In September 2024, the Center for American Progress interviewed Juan Avila, chief operating officer at Garden Pathways in Bakersfield, who spoke about the success of Bakersfield’s Gun Violence Reduction Strategy and credited its success to being the first time in the city’s history it had a central office “championing” violence intervention work and ensuring collaboration across governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders.⁸⁴
• Since 2023, when the Columbus Office of Violence Prevention was established, CAP analysis of GVA data finds that the annual gun victimization rate has gone down by 56.5 percent.⁸⁵ Speaking on the importance of creating the city’s first OVP and promoting collaboration to improve public safety, Franklin County Prosecutor Shayla Favor told the Columbus Dispatch, “I remain unwavering in my commitment to real, lasting solutions. This crisis can’t be solved in silos.”⁸⁶
• In February 2026, Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield (D) signed an executive order creating the city’s first Office of Neighborhood and Community Safety to “coordinate and strengthen Detroit’s violence prevention, intervention, community transformation and re-entry efforts.”⁸⁷ Speaking to the newly created office’s promise, Mayor Sheffield said, “Detroit has shown that when we work together, real progress is possible. Our comprehensive approach to public safety is working but sustaining that progress requires continued partnership and further strengthening the bridge between government and neighborhood leaders. This office is ensuring that every neighborhood has the tools and support it needs to be safe and thrive.”⁸⁸

Unfortunately, many city leaders do not have control over the gun laws governing their cities. At the behest of the gun lobby, 45 states have passed explicit state firearm preemption laws that prohibit local jurisdictions from passing their own gun safety laws.⁸⁹ Though not in the control of city leaders, the evidence that strong state gun laws reduce gun deaths and victimizations is overwhelming. Restrictive state gun laws reduce overall gun deaths, gun homicides, and suicides committed with a gun, and states with the strongest gun laws consistently report the lowest rates of gun deaths.⁹⁰ Furthermore, CAP analysis found that states with the strongest gun laws saw the smallest increases in firearm-related homicide rates during the COVID-19 pandemic.⁹¹ Seeing how strong state gun laws can help limit gun deaths and protect against surges in gun violence, it is not surprising that of the 17 cities which saw the largest declines in gun victimizations from 2021 to 2025, all but three cities in states receiving grades—Columbus, Houston, and Austin—are located in states with at least a B- gun law grade in 2025, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.⁹²

Likewise, 11 of the 17 cities which saw the largest declines are located in a state with a grade of A or A-, and 10 of those cities are in states in the top 10 of the Giffords Law Center’s rankings for 2025.⁹³ Noticeably, California, which has five cities on this list, has been ranked number one overall in gun law strength for every year Giffords has evaluated, going back to 2012.⁹⁴

As researchers have found, stronger gun laws mean more lives saved from gun violence.⁹⁵ Understanding this, state officials have responded to the public health crisis fueled by guns by passing even stronger gun laws to tackle the growing threats of ghost guns, lax gun industry accountability, and the sale of assault weapons. From 2021 to 2025, six states with cities among the 17 with the largest declines—New York, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—improved their grade by strengthening their existing gun laws.⁹⁶

For example, Colorado, which improved its grade the most from 2021 to 2025, passed a package of six gun safety bills in 2024.⁹⁷ The package included laws to expand training requirements for permits to carry concealed handguns in Colorado, to expand the definition of sensitive places where guns cannot be carried, and to improve data collection on firearm sales by requiring financial institutions to code for payments related to firearm purchases. Additionally, with the passage of H.B. 24-1353, Colorado made firearm dealers more accountable by enhancing requirements for permitting, employee training, and improving security.⁹⁸ As research has shown, passing laws regulating firearm dealers, in combination with Colorado’s existing point of sale background check law, is associated with significant reductions in firearm homicides.⁹⁹ By passing this suite of laws, in addition to banning rapid-fire conversion devices, regulating ghost guns, and other gun safety bills, legislators in Colorado are making their communities safer.¹⁰⁰ Since 2024, Denver’s gun victimization rate has dropped by 33.5 percent and Aurora’s gun victimization rate has dropped by 36.9 percent, according to CAP analysis of GVA data.

It is likely that 2025 will be recorded as one of the safest—if not the safest—year on record in terms of the national homicide rate. In the summer of 2021, this feat would have seemed unthinkable given that the homicide rate was trending higher even before the pandemic-era surge.¹⁰¹ The nation has made transformative progress in the years since 2021, as evidenced by the way Americans are now feeling safer in their neighborhoods and public streets.¹⁰² The intervention or set of interventions that deserve the majority of the credit will be hard to fully discern given the complex and interconnected nature of the crisis. However, the fact that the cities that saw the greatest declines in gun violence shared many of the same evidence-based strategies and approaches should still be instructive on how to achieve significant and lasting reductions in gun violence. Given the success of the programs enacted by these states, the only mistake that policymakers could make now would be to stop investing in the very solutions that are working. City leaders are bracing for the impact of expiring ARPA dollars and federal support made possible by the Biden administration, and the Trump administration’s attack on many of these crime prevention programs could spell disaster for cities that have worked tirelessly over the past four years to make their residents safer from gun violence. As CAP calls for in its report on delivering accountability, it is time for Congress and state governments to step up and make the necessary commitments to support the work of local officials. If Americans want to continue to see fewer incidents of gun violence in their communities, Congress must act now to ensure funding is available so these shared strategies can be in the playbook of every city leader.