What's at stake?
Advance Peace Fresno has been widely credited with helping Fresno police to cut retaliatory gang violence to new lows.
Exactly how much money the Fresno City Council can find for the region’s most effective anti-violence program wasn’t immediately clear during budget hearings at City Hall on Tuesday, but city leaders ordered staff to crunch the numbers to “fully staff” Advance Peace Fresno for next two fiscal years.
City Hall staff is expected to return with updated estimates in the coming days before the current budget cycle concludes at the end of June.
Advance Peace Program Manager Aaron Foster asked the council to fund the program at $1 million for one fiscal year.
Councilmember Mike Karbassi praised the work of Foster and his team, which has been widely credited with helping Fresno police cut retaliatory street-gang violence to new lows.
“You’re part of our public safety apparatus,” Karbassi told Foster on Tuesday from the council dais, later adding that Advance Peace Fresno “reduces violent crime.”
The council has been working to find the money to make Advance Peace whole since the Trump administration abruptly abandoned several grant programs, including the one that funded the program last year.
Mayor Jerry Dyer, another longtime Advance Peace advocate, also joined Karbassi in calling on the Fresno County Board of Supervisors to “step up” and “do their part as well.”
Councilmember Miguel Arias also suggested that the Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission, the longstanding nonprofit charged with overseeing Advance Peace, contribute some funding towards the program’s operations.
Everything comes down to whether Dyer will include funding for Advance Peace in his revised budget proposal. After budget hearings wrapped up Tuesday, he’ll be negotiating the budget in private over the next week or so, before bringing back a revised proposal on Tuesday, June 23.
A joint study last year by UC Berkeley and UC Merced credited the program with helping reduce all city gun violence — both homicides and assaults — by as much as 46% two years after the program got off the ground.
The report, quietly released last fall, concluded that “Advance Peace may be an effective strategy to reduce gun violence.”
Other studies support that conclusion. Studies of particular note to supporters of the program include “cost of violence” estimates calculating the total cost of a single homicide at anywhere from $2.4 million to $3 million. The research strongly suggests that if Advance Peace Fresno prevents even one homicide per year, the program more than pays for itself.
City Hall has been working to fund the program since last year when the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led DOGE cut billions of federal funding from programs it said were either ineffective, corrupt or “too woke.” Advance Peace Fresno lost about $2 million in funding in the process.
During Tuesday’s budget hearing, Foster thanked the council and the city for its continued support while saying his office would need $1 million per fiscal year to get back to the top of its proactive intervention strategies.
Foster has long talked about the need for his organization and the City of Fresno to “be more proactive and less reactive” to street-gang violence. Whether Advance Peace is kept afloat comes down to Dyer’s administration making that happen in the next week.
