Durham to host gun violence summit with national experts Wednesday. How you can watch.
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- Durham will host a Summit on Saving Lives Wednesday at the convention center.
- Organizers spent six months on outreach, research and data analysis.
- Leaders will enter phase two to begin next steps and review strategies.
Durham community members and national violence-prevention experts will come together Wednesday to try to save lives from gun violence.
Organizers say the Summit on Saving Lives will seek to pinpoint who is most at risk of gun violence and draw on local data and national research to reduce it.
It comes after six months of outreach and research that included listening sessions across Durham and learning about efforts in other cities. Officials also analyzed recent homicide and nonfatal shooting data to better understand where and why violence is happening.
Durham continues to face gun violence daily. As of June 13, the city had recorded 242 shooting incidents this year, resulting in 92 people shot, 13 of them fatally.
The summit builds on a three-phase approach and marks phase two, where leaders will bring together what they’ve learned to move toward implementation, said Krystal Harris, the director of Durham County’s Community Intervention and Support Services.
“The summit is not the end of things; it’s actually the beginning of more work to be done,” she said.
The summit is open to all and will run from 9 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Wednesday at the Durham Convention Center. In-person attendance is full, but the event will be livestreamed on the city’s YouTube channel.
A ‘problem and opportunity’ analysis
Reygan Cunningham, director of the Crime & Justice Policy Lab (CJP) West at the University of Pennsylvania, has worked in violence reduction for more than 20 years in Oakland, California, and has helped implement gun violence strategies across the U.S. and abroad.
She and a colleague will present a “problem and opportunity analysis” that focuses on who is driving gun violence in Durham and where it is most concentrated to help meet the city’s specific challenges.
Community residents play an important role in sustaining successful strategies, Cunningham said.
“Real power comes from the people, and at the end of the day, you’re going to have different city administrators, different mayors, different council people,” she said. "People will move on, but it’s a community that will be here, and it’s a community that’s going to continue to make this a viable issue.”
Durham has tried different violence reduction strategies, including the ShotSpotter gunshot surveillance program and Bull City United, which employed former gang members to mediate conflict and prevent shootings in certain neighborhoods.
Both programs have been discontinued, amid concerns about potential overpolicing in Black and brown neighborhoods and the arrests of several Bull City United employees, respectively, The News & Observer has previously reported,
‘Bleeding Out’ author to speak
Other violence reduction experts participating in the summit include Thomas Abt, founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction and an associate research professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, who focuses on evidence-based strategies to reduce violence. He is also the author of “Bleeding Out,” a book that looks into the causes of urban gun violence.
Following Wednesday’s summit, a violence reduction working group of about 30 leaders — including residents from communities most impacted by gun violence and public safety officials — will meet through Friday to make recommendations to be reviewed by elected officials before implementation planning begins.
Ryan Smith, director of the city’s Community Safety Department, said the goal is to move from “listening toward aligning around a set of actions” that the city, county and community partners can advance over the next year.
He said the focus is not just on choosing strategies, but on finding out what it takes to fully execute them.
“It’s not just enough to say, for example, that we want to reinvest in community violence intervention or some group violence strategy. … It’s figuring out how we’re going to do them well in Durham,” he said.
This story was originally published June 23, 2026 at 8:18 AM with the headline "Durham to host gun violence summit with national experts Wednesday. How you can watch.."