Fatimah Loren Dreier is executive director of the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention. David Muhammad is executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.
On a warm June evening in New York, 20-year-old Nyric was hanging out on a friend’s stoop when, without warning, the crack of nearby gunfire punctured the night air. Nyric heard his friend scream for help; then everything went black. In a similar neighborhood in Oakland, Calif., 22-year-old Anthony had just gotten word that his best friend was shot. Enraged, he took to social media, furiously firing off threats of revenge against his friend’s killer. (Their names have been changed to protect their privacy.)