All About the BRAVE Project
East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar C. Moore III is a driving force behind Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination Project (BRAVE) in East Baton Rouge Parish. Through the BRAVE project he has began trying to eliminate “street gang” violence which ultimately is the cause of the high murder rate throughout this area
One problem in the parish is homicides. On average this area has 100 homicides a year and 160 people with 2nd degree murder charges. This caused a lot of work between lawyers and other law enforcement officers.
When Moore set out to discover the true reason why the killings were taking place he immediately thought drug dealing and miss usage but with further research found that it was street gang violence.
Moore went out on a mission to find the street gangs in the East Baton Rouge areas, and started by conducting an audit of murders in 2013 to see every murder from the past two and a half years.
These murder took place in predominantly black communities and 52 percent were caused by cliques or street gangs, most who had a criminal history. Who were somewhat violent people in neighborhoods throughout East Baton Rouge. Moore also found that it was at it’s highest during the summer when high-school kids were out of school.
BRAVE began to find focus group members and secret defendants in the various areas to find where these people were, to rate their violences and to find ways to fix the problem. One solution found was to call in theses members and to have community and faith based leaders with other law enforcement officers talk to them.
At these call-in’s Moore asked members to stop participating in the violent activity and accept services provided by them, stop the violence with no services provided by them, or refuse services provided by the program or continue to participate in illegal activity and suffer the legal consequences for your actions
During the first year, 2012 , a 25 percent reduction in homicides and also decreased in 2013. Though in 2014 there was 7 double murders and 7 triple murder raising the rate to 70 percent yet never reaching back to the original 80%.
Moore says "Successful programs saves lives", and BRAVE is doing just that.
