Profile: Violence Interrupter Advocates to Stop Gun Deaths before They Happen

I reported on a D.C. violence interrupter working to prevent youth gun violence through mentorship, mediation, and lived experience.

Leta Lattin

Washington, D.C.

When Boye Sofidiya heard that two high schoolers — ages 15 and 16 — were shooting at each other because of a conflict between their friends, he and his business partner, Cotey Wynn, rushed to step in.

According to Sofidiya, the students, who were not named for privacy concerns, did not think they would ever be on the same terms. However, after two weeks of mediation by Sofidiya and others, they finally agreed to put aside their guns and their differences and stop fighting.

“At the end, they’re not friends, they’re not kumbaya, but guess what they can do?” Sofidiya said. “They can go back to school. They don’t got a beef.”

Sofidiya is a violence interrupter, a community member who connects with individuals at risk for committing gun violence. So far in 2023, there have been 61 homicides in Washington, including gun-related murders, compared with 48 during the same time period in 2022, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.

Violence interrupters strive to prevent such actions from taking place and to help people after the fact in order to stop further harm from being done, according to Peace for DC, a Washington-based violence intervention organization.

Sofidiya, 40, is a co-founder of the local D.C. organization Growing Up, which he said was created to provide young people in Washington with mentorship and opportunities. Growing Up also has a “safe passage” program in which community members make sure that children and teenagers make it to and from school safely.

Sofidiya, who has a degree in financial economics from the University of Maryland, works extensively in the violence interruption community. He described this method of addressing violence, especially among young people, as a way to get ahead of the harm and stop it early on “before anything spills out from the school into the community.”

“Overall just try to get the students to understand that there’s always a better option around communication instead of fighting and maybe losing someone’s life,” Sofidiya said.

According to Sofidiya, he was once part of the problem. He said he spent three and a half years in prison for charges related to drug conspiracy when he was in his 30s. While in prison, he decided he never wanted to go back.

After Sofidiya came home in 2019, he did a lot of volunteer work, especially with youth mentoring. He soon connected with his friend Cotey Wynn, who encouraged him to work in the violence interruption community.

Sofidiya began working at Cure the Streets, a local public safety program, and was director within two months.

“When I came home, I started to make it my mission to want to meet other individuals … who really wanted to impact the community,” Sofidiya said.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Sofidiya and his colleagues “helped broker agreements between feuding neighborhoods” and made sure that teenagers were not getting into fights during school closures, according to The Washington Post.

Between the fiscal years of 2019 to 2020, Cure the Streets saw a 21% decrease in the number of gun-related homicides in the areas of Washington where the organization was active, according to its website.

However, the number of gun-related homicides increased by 37% in 2021 and stayed at that level, with 37 deaths in 2022.

Studies and audits have reported mixed results on the success of such violence intervention programs, according to reporting by Axios D.C. and DCist.

The impact of violence interruption programs is difficult to quantify because most statistics do not take into account the work that goes into preventing violence before it happens, Sofidiya explained.

“A lot of times, a lot of people see how many murders are happening in the city, or how many homicides, or how many shootings, but they don’t see how the violence interrupters and the conflict resolutionists and the mediators, they don’t see how much they’ve stopped,” Sofidiya said.

A lot of the work violence interrupters do is to help people heal from trauma and gun violence so that the harm does not continue and so that perpetrators do not repeat their actions in the future.

Sofidiya has partnered with other local organizations, both when he directed Cure the Streets and now with Growing Up. One of those groups is Peace for DC, which provides violence interruption training, as well as trauma-centered therapy and other programs.

As director of partnerships at Peace for DC, Nneka Grimes has worked with Sofidiya extensively. She spoke to his dedication in the community and ability to connect with people.

“He’s very charismatic,” Grimes said.

Relationships are crucial in violence interruption work, Sofidiya said, as they allow community members to get through to those who may be considering or carrying out violence against others.

Growing Up was created primarily to help youth — to prevent them from being involved in gun violence in the first place and to provide mental and emotional support for those dealing with trauma.

The prevalence of gun violence harms young people most of all, Sofidiya said, because of the trauma of losing those close to them.

“I want every kid to not have to experience what it is to lose a loved one,” Sofidiya said.