Nooze Hounds: Leondra Garrett and Juan Hall with Alternatives to Violence
Episode 63
On the latest episode of Nooze Hounds, we talked to Leonda Garrett and Juan Hall with the city’s Alternatives to Violence program, a pilot violence-interruption program that was launched on the Beatties Ford Road corridor in 2021.
The two talked about what their day-to-day work looks like, breaking down the narrative set in place by media, how gentrification and displacement play a role in their work and other topics.
In last week’s issue, Ryan spoke with Leondra and site supervisor Earl Owens about the violence-interruption work they’re doing in the corridor.
“I always ask, ‘What else is it that you would like to be doing other than this? So if I can take this away, what else is it that I can give you that you’re really going to stick to and it’s going to be a thing?’,” Leondra told Ryan in that interview. “And that’s been the biggest help for this work.”
The new Alternatives to Violence team started in December 2021. According to Federico Rios with the city’s SAFE Communities Committee, the Beatties Ford Road corridor has seen a drop in violent crime since implementing the violence interruption pilot program, though a full analysis will not be released until the current team has been on the ground for a full year.
According to Rios, as of Sept. 12, ATV violence interrupters had mediated 45 potentially violent situations and seen 19 participants pass through the program, referring to troubled youth whom interrupters had helped to find jobs, graduate school, or accomplish some other thing.
Remember you can catch Nooze Hounds on Spotify and other places where you find podcasts, and be sure to check out Queen City Podcast Network for a slew of other great Charlotte podcasts that aren’t quite as good as ours but pretty damn close. Find past Nooze Hounds episodes here.
This work by Queen City Nerve is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
